January’s featured teachers find fulfillment in their teach from home jobs while balancing their personal lives. Without a commute and extra after-school activities, live virtual teachers have more time to spend with their families, volunteering, and even planning their weddings.
Online teachers connect with students over livestream and create innovative lessons to engage their classes. Project-based learning gives students the opportunity to demonstrate their learning and get to know one another – which helps build their learning communities and personalize their learning experience with developing social skills.
Amy Montgomery
Live virtual instructor Amy Montgomery teaches Math with Proximity Learning. She lives in California and holds a Masters in Education. She enjoys “volunteering at church in the Hope For Mental Health Community.” She is planning her wedding in June while she teaches online.
Megan Kraft
Synchronous online teacher Megan Kraft received an email from a student from a previous school year thanking her for teaching him. She explains, “He was a student who was very quiet and very shy in class. I tried so hard to connect with him and get him to participate and answer questions.”
The student felt the effort Ms. Kraft put into their relationship, so he emailed her over a year later to tell her how much that meant to him. She says, “It was so wonderful to see that I did make that connection, and I was able to reach him. […] It’s so nice to know that this shy, quiet student was really there, was really listening, and I was able to make that connection with him. Hopefully, that gave him some confidence in math, and it will propel him forward.” Ms. Kraft believes that no matter what kind of classroom environment she teaches in, whether it’s in the brick-and-mortar classroom or synchronously online, creating opportunities for social-emotional learning support is important.
Dr. Michelle Sorrells
Proximity Learning certified virtual educator Dr. Michelle Sorrells finds her students’ work ethic remarkable. She says, “It is encouraging to find students who truly want to learn and value having a teacher who pushes them to do their best and make an effort to do more.”
Dr. Sorrells uses project-based learning to connect real-world experience with the concepts she’s teaching. For example, she creates escape rooms to gamify lessons and encourage class participation. As a teacher with disabilities, she works hard to ensure her lessons are inclusive of all students. She loves teaching the classes she is passionate about and connecting with students through the chat box.
