Interview: CEHD America Reads' Virtual Volunteer Program

Jennifer Kohler, the CEHD America Reads Associate Director of Operations, met with me to discuss their masterful transition to virtual learning and plans for the future.

-Rose Maney, Youth Virtual Tutoring Initiative Literacy Leader

How have you transitioned your group of literacy mentors to virtual tutoring?

I'm the Associate Director of Operations for CEHD America Reads, which is in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. We have been providing literacy tutoring and mentoring and academic support for community organizations and schools in Minneapolis and Saint Paul for about 20 years. This year we shifted all our tutoring and mentoring support to virtual programming.

How did you determine what was going to be prioritized as you shifted to virtual learning?

We spent the summer really thinking about, "Which of our community partners are going to be doing virtual tutoring and how can we support them in that work?" Also, "What do they need from us? What will they be looking for, and what skills will the literacy mentors be bringing to that experience?"

As we prepared for virtual tutoring, we were doing two things at once. We were creating an online platform to house professional development trainings for our literacy mentors that could all happen virtually, and then we were also working with our community partners to figure out what this virtual tutoring would look like.

Our program in the fall started small, and we only hired back our returning literacy mentors who had prior experience. Everything went so well that we hired additional literacy mentors to join our team for spring semester.

How many community partners do you have? How many of them have made the shift to virtual versus pausing youth education during Covid?

Before Covid we had 16 community partnerships and now we have eight. We were only able to partner with sites who were doing virtual tutoring for the 2020-2021 school year.  We do have some community partners that paused their programming this year. We're hoping when all is said and done, we go back to partnering with them.

What sites is CEHD America Reads working with?

We are working with CommonBond Communities at Skyline Tower, Saint Paul Public Library’s Reading Together online program, Saint Paul Public Schools' Flipside afterschool program (two locations), East Side Learning Center (three locations) and Beyond Walls, which is located on the U of M campus.

Do you do background checks on all of your literacy mentors?

That’s always been a requirement for all literacy mentors in our program. One of our obligations to our community partners is when a literacy mentor shows up, either virtually or in-person, they have already passed a background check.

Can you tell me about what online resources you’ve used for training?

All of the University of Minnesota uses a platform called Canvas, this is where they house everything for online classes. We started a Canvas page where every week we have a different professional development training module that our literacy mentors can go through. A few modules are required for mentors, but there are also optional modules. We're looking at a lot of current-event issues. This week we're talking about homelessness and high mobility among students in Minneapolis and Saint Paul Public Schools. Another topic we had a few weeks ago was on implicit bias.

We're also talking a lot about how to tutor virtually and how to keep students engaged in creative ways. We're training them in how to use Jamboard creatively and effectively, and how to use the virtual whiteboard during their sessions. We're going through different online resources for books and read-alouds that they can use, like Epic books.

What kinds of resources do you have available?

We have been using Epic books for reading aloud. We also use the Saint Paul Public Library online resources. The mentor can just log into an account and have access to all these children's books to use during their sessions.

Jamboard has been a virtual tool that our mentors have been having a lot of fun with, where they are able to create these really awesome, interactive slides and learning activities.

Has the number of college students doing work study through your program changed due to the pandemic?

At the beginning of the school year, I was worried about recruitment. We weren't able to do any in-person recruitment fairs, I couldn't visit classes and talk about the job, but we found that students are really interested in still being engaged in community work in any way possible.

Our program is just a lot smaller right now. During the 2019-2020 school year we were supporting 120 literacy mentors. This year it's about 50 mentors. Honestly, that has been the perfect number for us as far as meeting the needs of our partnerships. Our sites feel like they're getting the support needed, with everyone being utilized.

How many kids has your program served?

It varies so much because some of our sites are small group tutoring, like a drop-in, so there could be a group of 30 middle school kids that are signed up, but maybe they don't all attend every single day. Then other sites are matching up mentors with just one or two students so that they can really focus on building that relationship.

Do you think that you're going to continue distance learning options after the pandemic is over?

I think that just in talking with our sites and our literacy mentors, the resounding feedback is still that virtual learning will never replace in-person! There's really something for our literacy mentors that comes together when they're next to their “mentee” and they're reading and feeling that excitement, and I think that they're missing that.

We want to be really mindful about offering our programming in the safest way possible, so I think we're hoping again to be as supportive as possible to our community partners and as safe as possible for our literacy mentors, so it’s a fine line.

I'm hoping that maybe it'll be like some sort of a hybrid situation where our mentors can choose the situation that they would feel best going forward in. I'm guessing next year it might look like that in a lot of situations: hybrid school, hybrid office, hybrid life. The same will probably be true for our program.

Do you feel that having hybrid or distance learning increases accessibility at all for the students or for the literacy mentors in programs in terms of who can volunteer and who they're reaching?

For K-12 students, there are a lot of challenges with accessibility. I just listened to some reflections on Flipgrid where our literacy mentors can record responses, and they are talking a lot about different technology issues. Those things are hard for all of us; even in Zoom we're experiencing those delays and people not getting links.

There are also challenges when the tutoring sessions take place in the home, for both the kids and the literacy mentors.

I do think it has been somewhat more accessible for literacy mentors because we do have some student-mentors working in our program even though they're at home in Illinois or Wisconsin, or maybe they stayed in their hometown after Thanksgiving break.  They have appreciated the flexibility of that.

Do you have any reflections you’d like to share about your experiences over this last year?

We're really proud of this year's professional development, community building and seeing our literacy mentors really reflect on their experiences and connect the day-to-day work that they do with bigger picture topics and issues.