The front line of school workers will be among the quiet and unheralded heroes of 2020-21, a year of extra-ordinary schoolwork. Their ranks include teachers who connected with at-home learners using everything from high tech virtual classrooms to low tech US mail exchange of school work, food service personnel who assured each child at home of a daily school meal(s), and school secretaries who were the “first face” in every school, parent, and child interaction. The pictures of bus drivers cloaked in plastic drove home the point that if a bus driver is ill the entire bus route may be left at home. Extra-ordinary work done by extra-ordinary school staff.
The need for extra-ordinary schoolwork continues. While we feared ill health in 20-21, we indeed suffered ill learning that school year in the learning that prepares all children for their next years of learning. Call it lost learning or missed learning, there are curricular content and skill gaps that must be remedied while at the same time assuring completion of the 21-2 curricula of content and skills. This requires extra-ordinary teaching skills and strategies.
Why? Is there an urgency that compels us to make all children whole in their K-12 learning? You bet there is. To generalize the urgency, the compassionate memory of the world at large will not give children in school today a pass or a “that’s okay” on their lack of educational proficiency just because these children lost out on their usual instruction and learning in 2019-20 and 2020-21 and perhaps 2021-22. The world of post-high school education and work expects children to be ready and if not, the world will penalize them. If our children are not prepared, they will lose out.
The extra-ordinary skills and strategies we need in 21-22 are:
- evaluation,
- diagnosis of needs,
- prescriptive instruction, and
- specific assessment of implicit learning on a student-by-student basis.
Evaluation is our collective understanding of each child’s current education proficiency levels in each of their grade level curricular studies. This is both objective and subjective evaluation. Not only is this an evaluation of how well a second grader reads, writes, and solves math problems, but an analysis of the content they learned at grade level – social studies, literature, science. It includes their skills and understandings in art, music, and technology. Without this evaluation, there will be substantive holes in student learning. A child who did not receive direct and implicit instruction in fractions in fourth grade in the second semester of 2020 had trouble with remote math instruction in 20-21 and will have continuing trouble in 21-22. Algebra will be a complete mystery. The lost or inadequate instruction of those time periods must be made whole. We need to know what was lost or inadequate in each child’s education.
The diagnosis of needs is our school-wide strategy for how to make all children whole. The diagnosis must be school-wide and encompass the totality of a child’s curriculum. Part of the diagnosis is identifying when and how in 21-22 or 22-23 a child receives missed or inadequate teaching in the scaffolding of curricular instruction. Diagnosis strengthens time and effort in the “next” instruction. Or, diagnosis determines that certain skills and content must be learned now, right now, because next learning requires a level of student proficiency. School-wide diagnosis assures that core academics did not crowd out special subjects, like art, music, second language, and technology. Diagnosis also generates a plan to be shared with parents so that school and home have a collaborative understanding of how a child’s education will survive the pandemic.
Prescription is a teacher’s function. Only a classroom teacher can determine the instruction needed by each child to make them whole in their grade level proficiencies and the instruction that can be grouped or that must be individualized. And most importantly, only a teacher provides the implicit instructional needs of our most challenged learners. In 21-22 most school children, not just those with special education requirements, need a personalized education plan. For some, their personalized plan may be very brief, for example, language mechanics, the reciprocal nature of ratios, and applying proper pressure to a mound of clay on a pottery wheel. A plan must address all the child’s curricula. Another child’s personalized plan may be more extensive, including proper pronunciation of specific phonemes, increasing sight word vocabulary, subject-predicate agreement, long division, chronology of major events in US history, sight reading music notes, and proportionality in an art drawing. Every child requires a plan for us to make their pandemic education whole.
Instruction cannot be the same old-same old. Whole group instruction will be less effective in meeting the myriad of student plans and individualized or small group instruction will be more effective. Instructional aides and assistants helping in classrooms can give children the personal comment, correction, and reinforcement needed to fulfill their personal plans. The prescriptive work required is more than a teacher alone can or should handle. Strategies for co-teaching and sharing aides and assistants across classrooms will bring the most effective hands-on instruction to more children. Strategies for grouping and regrouping children according to the needs of their personal plans are required. The curricular calendar will not linear; it will be multi-layered and reflexive.
Only through re-assessments will we know when a child has filled in missing or lost learning of content and skills. Check testing and spot-testing will be a common event each week. Usual formative and summative assessments will be used to assure learning of the planned 21-22 curricula, but those will not include the elements of instruction from the 19-20 and 20-21 school years. The calendar will be dotted with specific assessment of the implicit instruction in every student’s personal learning plan.
Extra-ordinary is by definition unusual. “Extra” connotes more or something uniquely different in quantity and quality. During the 21-22 school year, children require uniquely different amounts and kinds of instruction to bring the education of all children to the achievement levels the future will require of them. Extra is what it will take to prevent these children from being known for their lifetime as pandemic school children.