In partnership with eSchool News, Illuminate Education is spotlighting teachers in a series recognizing educators, the way they have moved instruction online during COVID-19, and how they have prioritized the needs of their students.
Marisabel Soliman
8th Grade Science Teacher
Pembroke Pines Charter Schools
Broward County School District
“We never cease learning, and as educators, this is a great time for us to add more skills to our bag of tricks.”
What has made you passionate about teaching?
When I was younger, I moved around a lot. I didn’t have a lot of stability at home in terms of growing up in one place, and I probably attended 13 to 14 different schools. The one thing that always stayed constant was there would always be a teacher who was very kind and patient. They would bring me into the class and take me in and make me feel comfortable. As I grew up, I just knew that I wanted to provide that same sense of security to others if possible.
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How have you moved your classes to a remote learning model?
We were very blessed to have the foresight to start using Canvas, which is a learning management system, ahead of time. We started using it back in August of this school year, but this kind of forced us to really dig in and learn how to use the program. We use it to push out lessons and the students can submit their work back. What would’ve been fully implemented in a year and a half, got crunched into three months.
It also worked out to our benefit that we were about to be on spring break when the closures were announced. Right before the break, we had a short week where we only had three days of school anyway. We used those days to pack up the class and plan our lessons, while the students came by to pick up their issued laptops. Then we went into spring break, so the students had about 10 weekdays off before they had to start online classes.
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