Watauga County GEAR UP Coordinator Laura Turner contributes to our blog today and shares her experience of transitioning an integral GEAR UP programming component into a valuable, virtual experience for her students.
For the past few years, Watauga High School and Innovation Academy have partnered with the University of North Carolina at Asheville to ensure that our 11th grade students are ready for their senior year and postsecondary success. We collaborated to create a “Model Year” program that allows students to walk through the timeline of their senior year as juniors.
In a pre-pandemic world, this took place live and in person during English and math classes. Each student was given a copy of the UNC-Asheville Embark workbook to use throughout the presentations. The presentations during English III focused on overall preparation for senior year, postsecondary path options, college match and fit, and the admissions process. While the content shared during Pre-Calculus and Math 3 focused on types of financial aid, FAFSA completion, and understanding the loan process.
Since October 2020, our high school has been operating under a two by three - FLEX schedule. Our students are in person two days a week and virtual the other three days. The new schedule and limited face-to-face interaction with students required us to be creative in order to still share the “Model Year” information with all 11th grade students. In order to facilitate this program in a virtual environment, the admissions counselor from UNC-Asheville provided pre-recorded videos discussing each element of the program as she walked through the digital PDF of the Embark book. We then utilized the Watauga Nearpod account to embed the videos into an interactive presentation that required students to answer questions about each video that they would normally have written in their books or discussed in-person. This allowed our students to get as close to an in-person experience as possible.
As a follow-up, students were given contact information for the UNCA admissions counselor, our 11th grade school counselor, and myself (GEAR UP Coordinator) to provide further guidance and/or personalized assistance.
GEAR UP Model Junior Year slideshow
