There is a lot of talk about learning loss and the challenges of returning to campus this spring and summer. Not to live life with rose-colored glasses, but I just know that things are not as bad as people make them out to be. There are some amazing resilient educators and students in the trenches, and it is time we highlight that. These past 14 months have taught us all the power of relationships, in our personal and professional lives. There have been some really dark days, and I will not deny that this has been the most challenging time in my thirty-three years of teaching. So now we get to decide, to we go back to the status-quo, or do we take what we have learned and come back better?
Neema Avashia is an award-winning public school teacher in the Boston area. Larry Ferlazzo highlighted her blog in his column on edweek.org. This really summarizes my thinking over the past month as we slowly return to our high school campus.
“If our educational response to the pandemic is more of the same tired approaches that we were already trying before the pandemic—pages of standards, longer school days, more and more and more assessment—it will fail, just as it was failing prior to the pandemic. We have an opportunity to think and plan differently in this moment—to build a system that is responsive to the needs of the students it purports to serve. Doing so requires that we begin by listening to those young people and amplifying what they say they need, as opposed to what we as adults think they need.” https://www.edweek.org/leadership/opinion-students-respond-to-adults-fixation-on-learning-loss/2021/02
As I have shared previously, I am back working on campus. I have a small group of students who took advantage of the invitation to return to in-person learning. We aren’t focusing on loss, but instead focusing on what we gain being together. When I ask my students what they need right now, it comes down to two basic things, to see their peers, and to gain a structure to their learning. They know that trying to learn on their own has been challenging. Most of them have outside responsibilities and have been pulled into jobs, childcare, and helping in their homes. There are very real distractions that exist while trying to learn from a distance. We have spent this first month getting to know each other, and I have a learned a lot analyzing the work they are doing right now, and creating action plans to complete work they have missed.
With so much focus on learning loss, I am afraid we are going to view our students with deficit thinking. There are definitely challenges in helping students make up some missed coursework. But the focus is not on what we lost, but what we have to do to move forward. We are using a variety of assessments to determine the missing skills, and instead of focusing on missing assignments, we are looking at creating new opportunities for students to revisit those missed skills in new instructional situations. It means working together as a team to analyze the standards we are teaching in class, and making sure as we plan for summer and into fall, that we integrate these missed or challenging standards into future instruction. It is as Fisher and Frey talk about, “learning leaps, not learning loss”.
Now more than ever we need to take the opportunity over these last few weeks of school to garner some real time data on student academic progress and social emotional needs. We have no time to waste, not now and not in the future. I think the pandemic has taught many lessons, and one of the most important things I have learned as a teacher is to hone in on the most essential skills students need, and to integrate these skills in meaningful cross-curricular ways. When thinking about how best to support our students, we need to take the time to talk with them. They are able to tell us what worked, what didn’t. What excites them, what discourages them. It really will take a team together to come. back strong, and student voice needs to be a focal point of that comeback.