I hear Robert Duvall’s voice as Augustus McCrae in Lonesome Dove say, “Yesterday is gone and there’s no getting it back”. There is no false fact in his words. We can do things differently going forward, starting right now if we choose, but we cannot redo what was or what was not done in our rear view mirror. To the point: the education of children during the Time of COVID beginning last March and to this date is part of our history. Whatever children as students have learned or not learned across these five months of two school years is their yesterday and there’s no getting it back. The issue is what we will do for their future.
Take Away
The physics of time remain irrefutable – we move forward not backward. We can attempt to re-interpret our understanding of our past, we can attempt to change the inferred value of what we experienced, and we can attempt to re-knit experiences into a different story, but the realities remain the same. Learning experiences that did not happen did not happen.
Educators at their best are teachers and often reteachers and correcting teachers It is a fact in our work that 100% of our students do not learn 100% of what they are taught 100% of the time. As educators, we constantly are working to teach again, reteach, clean up what was mislearned. We strive to create a quality of learned knowledge and skill sets when initial teaching and learning are not successful. RtI programs are designed to improve the percentage of successful students by scaffolding this continuing teaching and learning.
Compensation is a different beast. We compensate when we accept the fact that something did not occur, was not achieved, or missed the mark by creating strategies to counteract that reality. We counteract the reality with a new, parallel status quo. Or, we apply equal or greater effort in opposition of what occurred in order to rebalance things. Applied to schooling in the Time of COVID, many children did not learn and are not learning the curriculum they typically would learn if there were no COVID. In the next months, we will assess and understand the differences between what was expected and what is. And, as these yesterdays are gone and there is no getting them back, we will compensate.
What do we know?
The COVID Effect to the education of children to date is that a percentage of the learning we expected to accomplish in the close of the 2019-20 and the current 2020-21 school years did not happen and is not happening as intended. To see the total landscape, some children are exceeding our school-based expectations and some are not. Our assessment may show that some children flourished either as at-home learners of school instruction or as learners of virtual curricula from non-school providers. We observe highly motivated AP students digging into their school-based assignments and online AP resources who will score the 5’s on their AP exams this spring. High personal motivation at any time, COVID or not, is an ingredient for personal success.
We observe Kindergarten children who walk into a K-classroom mid-year where in-school learning have been delayed since September and demonstrate mid-year or better reading skills. Parental support of school-based K instruction or parent substitution for school-based teaching has been highly successful. We observe children at all grades and in all subjects who have enjoyed strong parental support for school-based learning, good Internet connection, and exercised personal commitment to their school work and are where they would expect them to be at this point in a school year in terms of their academic learning.
At the same time, we observe children who are the opposite of flourishing. Causes abound and reasons can be understood. The reality is that too many children at all grade levels and in all subjects have not learned their intended curricula. Or, any curricula. The reality is that some children have separated from our school entirely and will not return. Some children were clearly idled by lack of school connections – Internet, personal, social – they were idled and stranded. Their parents may not have sought other options because options were not available or due to time and/or money not obtainable. The COVID Effect for manny of our continuing children is that across the yesterdays of their schooling, we/they were not successful in causing them to learn. Yesterday is gone and there’s no getting it back. Today we begin compensating.
Why is this thus?
We shall not generalize a compensatory strategy. This is not a philosophical statement, but a descriptor of our reality. If a school has 500 children enrolled, today we have 500 different educational stories. Parse this among the 13 grades of a K-12 education and every grade and subject hold children spread across the field of expected learning, including motivated, diligent and supported students and students who were largely disconnected from school. We cannot generalize a solution or remedy or compensatory strategy to rebalance all children in their school-based learning. There are and will be groupings of children who demonstrate common needs for whom we can apply a common compensatory strategy. We need multiple, well-designed compensatory strategies.
We shall not generalize educational outcomes. There is no time like a crisis to evaluate what is essential for your well-being and future prosperity. Annual curricula is a daisy chain of scaffolded learnings. Each link in the daisy chain is essential for next learning. Some single links blossom into multiple strands of curriculum. Consider multiplication and division, then fractions, then Algebra. Every school child knows this daisy chain first hand and many experience the challenges of manipulating fractions on their way to Algebra. No fractions – no Algebra. These are essential learning.
But, is everything in an annual curricula essential. As we cull 180 days of instruction, the scope of required compensatory education can be reduced. If we could get yesterday back, we would not need every yesterday to prepare for our future. Our compensatory strategies must be essential learning. We will fill in the rest as we can when we can.
Compensatory teaching and learning will be woven into ongoing teaching and learning. A child in fifth grade needs her compensatory instruction as well as her ongoing fifth grade instruction. If not, we only trade lost yesterdays for lost todays and she will still behind where she needs to be tomorrow. Weaving is a good verb for this teaching and learning. Educators can do this.
Education is roundth not length. Our yesterdays are not just academic, but contain all the elements of child and student development. Again, we cannot generalize gain or loss because the COVID Effect treats different children differently. That said, we need to explore our expectations for child experiences in creativity, artistry, musicianship, craftsmanship, intellectual development, exploration and inquisition, tradesmanship, entrepreneurship, physical and athletic development, collaborative and collegial capacities, and social-emotional development. We need to know how children have grown in every aspect of a school-based education, not just academics. A compensatory strategy just became much more difficult.
To do
Understand the learning status and needs of each individual child. COVID is a universal pandemic but education is a personal endeavor and experience. While our pandemic strategy moves children en masse from in-school to at-home and back, from in-class to quarantined based upon health data, and does these on a daily basis, we need to treat each child’s compensatory as an individualized and personal story. The education of each child needs to be brought forward.
Chew what you can bite off. The work will be in bite-sized chunks. These are child-sized bites. If compensation were a vaccine, what was lost could be regained in a moment. As there is no quick fix, educators must create child-sized mini-curricula that in the aggregate create a child’s up-to-date education.
Get it right. What a sin it would be if we compound what has been lost with less than our best work now. Checking for understanding is required at every intersection of old and new learning and new learning upon new learning. If a child is not solid in their compensatory learning, the entire design fails.
Think effect not time and effort. A COVID Effect strategy will not be completed in what remains of the 2020-21 school year. If we work on personalized educational needs, in bites, and ensure quality learning, our work will stretch well into the 2021-22 school year. If we really are interested in compensating all children for the downside of their COVID Effect, this will be time well spent.
Don’t do what you can’t do. A non-educator might tell us, “In the future, all children must be able to speak Mandarin”. Whereas, we might agree with that futuristic educational outcome, it does not fit into the scope of necessary work in the Time of COVID. Curriculum is always in a state of change, but now is not the time for large scale overhauls. Tweak what would normally be tweaked and create child competence in the taught curricula.
The big duh!
Educating children remains our culture’s most noble enterprise. In the Peanuts cartoon, a character asks, “I wonder what teachers make?”. The other character says, “Teachers make a difference”.
The Time of COVID has clearly laid out the parameters of the magnificent difference teaching needs to make in the lives of children today.