Silent Dismissal offers a mechanism to allow for tutoring to occur during regular dismissal with regular classroom teachers. For many schools this can provide up to 30 minutes of daily tutoring with negligible impact on staff.
This is best illustrated via the use of an example. Let's presume the following:
There are four teachers designated as T1, T2, T3, T4
T1 is the math tutor
T2 is the Language Arts tutor
Math tutoring occurs on Monday and Wednesday
Language Arts tutoring occurs on Tuesday and Thursday
The are the steps for initial set up:
Identify the students that will be in math tutoring
Teacher T1 will need to go to Students / Daily
Set the selection on Monday and Wednesday to Specific Students
Place a check mark adjacent to all of the students that will attend tutoring. It is better to err on the side of including students who may not always participate than to leave someone off of the list
Save the changes
Identify where the students in class T1 who are not attending tutoring will wait until their normal dismissal
Teachers T2, T3, and T4 will need to go to Students / Daily
Set the select on Monday and Wednesday to Specific Students
Select all of the regular students in the classroom who are not going to tutoring AND any of the students from classroom T1 who will waiting in this teacher's classroom.
Optionally all of the regular classroom students may be added to list of specific students. This will provide a method for viewing overrides in the original classroom that may affect a student who would normally participate in tutoring
Save the changes
Perform the same operations for Tuesday and Thursday, swapping the references above for T1 and T2
Inform the parents of those students that are participating in tutoring to arrive for pick up at the end of normal dismissal, somewhere between 30 and 45 minutes following regular dismissal time
Daily
Post a message instructing staff to transfer students from their regular classrooms to tutoring. This generally occurs approximately 5 minutes prior to normal name display
The teacher performing tutoring will sign in to Silent Dismissal, close the classroom door, then begin tutoring. If Silent Dismissal is being used properly there should be no additional noise during dismissal including no audible announcements
When the first student in tutoring is called for dismissal the tutor's screen will generate an audible alert. At this time that student should be released for pick up and the remaining students may begin gathering their belongings
Once set up, this method does not require additional work for the staff and allows tutoring to be performed concurrent with regular dismissal