- April 18, 2024
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How do you coach students with distance learning in place?
That's a question Father Lopez High School PE teacher Larissa Maloney asked herself as soon as schools closed due to the pandemic. At first, she thought she could set a weekday curriculum where students ran a mile one day, worked on abs and arms the next, and so forth.
But how boring, Maloney thought. That wasn't the way she held classes at school.
"I do everything with them," Maloney said. "They’re used to me motivating them, and I just thought having them do a couple things a day isn’t me, and I know my students, and they wouldn’t enjoy that and they wouldn’t expect that from me either.”
The solution? The Father Lopez coach decided to livestream 30-minute workouts at 9 a.m. on Mondays-Fridays.
Maloney grew up in Ormond Beach. She's a Seabreeze High School alumna, and while in school, she played basketball, volleyball and ran track. After graduating, she attended Lynn University on a full volleyball scholarship before going on to play professionally.
She never thought her 15-year athletic journey would lead her to YouTube. What started out as a workout for her students has since snowballed. Her first live workout was streamed on March 30, and since then, has accumulated over 7,000 views. Maloney only has about 70 students.
“I was like, ‘this is wild,'" Maloney said.
Back in March, she had a fellow PE coach from a local high school reach out and ask what Maloney was going to do for her distance learning classes. When Maloney told her about the livestreams, the teacher asked if she could use them too.
That got Maloney wondering if there were other coaches that were struggling to figure out how to structure their online classes. She posted her new classroom model — which included having students create a reflection entry after the workout — on a PE teacher's forum and the response was immediate.
Maloney has now gotten messages from people all over the world, including people in Africa, England, Australia and other parts of the U.S. Some of the messages detail that they're a fan of her workouts, and that she has helped them create an at-home routine that has brought their families closer.
“They’re the most amazing messages that I’ve received," Maloney said.
As a mom of two children, Maloney knows that online work can be draining. Some of her students have said that exercising in the morning helps them to focus on their work for the rest of the day. Others, Maloney said, use her workouts as an activity to do while on break.
Despite having grown her YouTube channel to 1,540 subscribers, she hasn't lost sight of why she started streaming the workouts. It's in her channel's name: Active Kids 2.0.
“I’m extremely proud of my students in how they’ve responded to such challenging circumstances," Maloney said. "Everything that I’ve thrown at them and everything the other teachers have thrown at them, they’ve kind of taken it onboard and they really ran with it.”
