Panic sets in easily in the Time of COVID. Or, the denial of panic. They almost are interchangeable when pandemic causes extreme anxieties. In the schoolhouse, a rising panic concerns the availability of enough direct instructional time and opportunity for all children to make the academic growth in the 2020-21 school they need to make for their educational future. We acknowledge that a solid academic education requires direct instruction, professional monitoring and adjustment of instruction, strategic assessment leading to corrected learning, and enough time for guided and independent practice for learning to be mastered and ingrained. Panic can be separated into mini-panics. A first panic is a belief that school closures last spring prevented children from completing that full academic year. They begin 2020-21 behind in their learning. The second panic, with children either learning at-home or in hybrids of in-person and at-home learning, is a belief that all children will not or cannot achieve a full academic year this year. The mix of in-person and at-home is the prohibitive factor. Finally, the third panic is an aggregated panic that this generation of children in school will not be adequately prepared over time for their futures in a higher education and careers. The pandemic has robbed them of their time to learn. Hence, what will we, what can we do about it!
As an aside, it is about time that people in and out of education are panicked regarding children who do not achieve a full year of academic growth. For too long, our culture accepted a sub-class of studenthood, those who gradually and steadily underachieve. Perhaps, COVID will shake this antipathy loose.
Are there work arounds that can improve academic achievement when instruction for children is disrupted by something as significant as the pandemic? You bet there are.
Take Away
The science of teaching gives us many tools that are not time- or condition-bound. They are time- and condition-tested. They work effectively in the best and worst of times, in- school and out-of-school. As often is the case, panic causes people to lose a grip on what they know and seemingly re-invent or re-tool what they think they need in the moments of panic. The key here is – don’t panic. The science of teaching will cause children to learn, even now.
Teaching is teaching whether it is in-person with children in the classroom or remote from the classroom to children learning at-home. Best teaching practices don’t change because a teacher is in front of a camera instead of in front of a classroom of child faces. And, teacher-child relationships do not change because of distance. A caring and nurturing teacher can be just as effective without proximity.
Our task is to provide each child with a full academic year of instruction and apply all that we know about good teaching to that instruction. Children will learn.
Worry scatters thoughts and thinking. Don’t let that happen. Focus on essential learning and get after it.
What do we know?
Teach less well. Take that apart. Our curricular shelves are heavy with stuff. We do not need to teach every thing in the collection. Publishers and vendors provide more and more each year. Teach less. Teach what have been labeled “enduring” or “mastery” content, concepts, skills, and disposition. Then, teach what you teach so that every child learns what you teach.
Teach less. Time is not on our side this year. 180 days of 7 hours per day exist on a paper calendar but they do not exist in real time. Real time is contact time when a teacher and children are actively engaged. Today, real time is three to four hours per day and often less. Real time is when the Internet connections are working. Real time is when no one, teacher or child, is ill or no one in the home where the child is learning is ill. Real time is when children at home have adult assistance. Real time forces us to teach less this year than we usually would teach if everyone was in the classroom. We need to teach less stuff because we have less real time to teach.
Teach well. Best teaching practices always, please. Take enough time in every lesson to assure student mastery of the content, skills and dispositions. Set a clear lesson objective. Attach the new learning to what children already know. Provide impactful initial instruction. Model and clarify the new learning with strong examples. Check EACH child’s understanding of what is being learned. Give enough time for guided and independent practice of the new learning. Assess. If necessary, unteach what is wrong in what children learned and research so that all children get it right. There always is enough time for best teaching practices.
The basics of teaching well sound and feel like Education 101, because they are. They focus on effectiveness and efficiency. Good and compact units of instruction. Good and compact daily instruction. Good and precise assessment. Good and necessary reteaching to ensure all children learn. Good to go to next.
Teach less well. Huh? Read it again but read it like this. If you are going to teach children, teach then what they need to know, teach them so that they learn it and remember it, and teach it so they can use it for further learning. The Time of COVID is not a time to worry about quantity of learning and covering every topic a child might learn in the best of times. The Time is a time to assure that everything a child learns is purposeful and is taught so well that what is taught is solidly learned.
Why is this thus?
There is truth in what we fear. Teaching and learning take time and we did not have adequate real time in the spring of 2020 to complete that academic year. Remote education was an emergency process and less than adequate. Now, unless we teach differently in 2020-21, we will not have enough real time to completely teach this academic year’s curricula. If we don’t work differently, children will fall significantly in their academic learning.
We will not get a “do over”. Children will not repeat last year’s incomplete curricula this year and they will not repeat this year’s incomplete curricular next year. Children will not be held back in their grade levels or be prevented from graduating. There are no “school do overs” in education. (Hypocrisy – we retain children for not performing, but we do not retain promotions when schools do not perform.)
We will not do an industrial recall. If education was a manufacturing industry, we would issue a recall of 2019-20 and 2020-21 learning, retool it, make it better, and then release it as an improved model. There are no recalls in education.
We are called to make all children complete in their 2020-21 academic year of learning. To do this, we need to teach less well.
To do
Modify assessments of learning to match modified curricular instruction. Administrators and teachers must be on the same page regarding what will will be taught and what will be measured. Everyone in school must be telling the same story. It does make sense to maintain full curricular assessments when children will not receive full curricular instruction. Align teaching less with measuring less.
Pace lessons by teaching them well. Don’t pile on lessons. Don’t hammer children with so much work that they become panicked or angry. When we teach less, we have enough time to teach it well and well takes the time we have. This reinforces our need to cull out the non-essential stuff of our curricula. Learning takes time. We have enough time for children to learn by pacing what we teach well.
Differentiate who delivers instruction and who supports learning. Now, more than ever, the delivery of initial instruction is essential for teaching well. If a grade level or departmental team recognizes that one teacher has more expertise in teaching a unit or lesson, let that teacher become the “face” of that instruction and other teachers the supporters of that learning. This applies well to in-person as well as at-home learning. Take the pressure from some teacher of daily presentations in front of the camera and replace it with chat groups for precise modeling, checking for understanding, guided practice and formative assessments.
Synchronous and asynchronous on-line teaching allows us to capture an “expert” delivery and provide it to all children. A child who misses the beginning of the lesson can view it when ready. A child who does not understand the initial teaching can see it again and again. With one teacher only giving the initial instruction, a grade level or subject team assures that every on-line segment is highest quality instruction.
Constantly monitor student engagement – all of the time. Understand that engagement for at-home learners looks different than engagement for in-school learners. Know the differences. Monitoring is not browbeating; it just means knowing. Monitoring will show some children who are engaged in-person or at-home all the time and doing well. It will show children who look to as if they are engaged all the time but not doing well. Likewise, some children may not look engaged but will do very well in demonstrating their learning. And, monitoring will highlight children who are not engaged when they should be. Use the monitoring information to shape a child’s attention and attention span. Each child can find an effective and efficient use of in-person and at-home time.
Manipulate the logistics of immediate and precise feedback. Instead of kneeling next to a child’s desk, make a telephone call. Most at-home learners will have a cell phone near their screen. A private phone call treats the child with respect yet is directly to the point.
Constant contact. Every child every day. Sadly, we know that some children in-school in normal times pass through a school day without a single personalized contact with a teacher. In the Time of COVID, every child needs a personal contact – called in a zoom lesson, talked with in a zoom chat, shared e-mail, or a phone call – everyday.
If parents are able to create earning pods of supervised children, make the most of these small groups. Regardless of the parents’ reason for forming a pod, grouped children give a teacher renewed opportunities for small group work, collaborative projects, peer editing, and socializing for children. Done safely, pods are a great way for groups of families to provide supervised learning when individual families cannot.
The big duh!
Don’t panic even though there are many reasons for panicking. The science of teaching, best practices, culling the curricula and teaching less well will cause children to complete a full academic year in 2020-21.