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What Do I Need To Know To Feel Normal About School?

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Newton taught us for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.  Our science teachers demonstrated this by applying a force to a pendulum at rest.  The pendulum swung in the direction of the applied force, reached the apex of its arc and then swung back in the opposite direction of the applied force past its normal resting point on an opposite and equally long arc.  Inertia eventually caused the pendulum to return to rest in its normal, perpendicular resting position.

The pandemic defied Newton.  The new normal of the post-pandemic at rest will not be in the same position we observed as pre-pandemic normal.  To put it bluntly, schools of the future cannot be what schools were in the past.  The forces unleashed by the pandemic not only moved the pendulum of the school in a multitude of wildly swinging arcs but relocated the center point of where the post-pandemic pendulum of the school will come to rest.  Reactionary forces have not equaled initial forces of change.   The descriptors of school normalcy are being rewritten and we must understand the location and realities of our new normal.

We must find our ability to be normal with the following descriptors

Facts and evidence are propositional.  When the national leadership repeatedly declared facts to be false and falsities to be true, people questioned the truths they could trust.  Questioning is never wrong, but unquestioning acceptance of untruth is.  Fact bashing went beyond political banter when the rewriters of facts and truth carried this strategy from partisanship into declaring the pandemic a hoax.  Almost 900,000 dead Americans later, we are still arguing whether covid is a health crisis or a conspiracy.  New normalcy will not rely upon universally held and evidence-based facts.  In the new normal, more than ever before people will align self-selected facts with what they want to be truth.  Evidence will not matter to those who will not believe it; all facts are propositional to the purpose of the speaker.

The concept of leadership is frayed.  From President to principal, a first response to what leaders say is growing to be either distrust or rejection.  The first face of this growing public response is “Who is he/she to tell me?”.  The second response is to look to others for different ideas.  In both responses, the key issue is “what has the leader done to improve my condition in life, including school life?”.  Leaders, because they are central figures, are blamed for every lessening of daily conditions.  Whether measured in popularity polls or in voiced support and action aligned with a leader, most measures today disfavor our elected and appointed leaders.  Instead, anti-leaders with oppositional messages and proposals garner the support of adults and students who feel disconnected from daily decisions.  In the new normal, representative leadership will be more and more difficult.    

Distancing will be more than physical space and remoting will continue.  The air-born spread of a respiratory virus caused social distancing to be our protocol for keeping space between us and potential covid carriers.  Mentally we moved through the first two years of the pandemic within six-foot bubbles to diminish the possibility of catching covid from the breath of others.  Bubbling affected more than where we stood.  It put distance between family members and friendships, collaboration and collegiality at work, and children and their best friends.  It became a psychological and emotional distance as much as a physical distance.  When schools returned to in-person teaching and learning we enforced the protocol of social distancing.  We now observe a new normal that lacks the proximity and close sharing of the pre-pandemic.  In our new normal we are not close to one another in any facet of our interactions – we remain at arms length and will not achieve the same levels of personal connection we once held.  No touch.  No hugging.  No one in our personal space.  No closeness.

Children in remote education and adults in remote working learned that aspects of working independently of place and others are okay and preferable to being in-person.  In fact, some will never return to the school or office or workplace because they can work remotely and they enjoy being remote.  Coincidentally, Sunday church attendance increases when parishioners can attend remotely.  Go figure.  Educationally, introverted children prospered in remote education without worrying about the eyes and words of their peers.  In the new normal, we will remain distanced from one another.  It is more comfortable.  Demands for remote and independent teaching and learning will increase.  We will mange a hybrid of remote and in-person living.

Personal demands rise above social responsibility.  Greek philosophers discussed the relationship between freedom and responsibility and perhaps every generation must find its own balance of these two values.  We observe that the pandemic has deepened and widened the chasm between what many Americans accept as their role in the commonwealth of their community, state, and nation.  It may be that the threat of pandemic death only made the tear in our social fabric greater.  Or, it may be that the pandemic gave us excuses for a further erosion of community in favor of personal demands.  Or, it may be that pandemic fatigue wore down a sense of community and people are expressing personal wants that have been repressed for two years.  Whatever the reason, pandemic protocols for the good of the many are coming down.  Masks are off.  Travel is on. Large groups are gathering.  It is not because we think the danger of covid is past.  We no longer want to follow protocols that intrude into the life we want.  In the new normal, individuals will satisfy themselves more than they will honor behaviors recommended for the common good.  They will attack sponsors of community responsibility.

Anger is weaponized.  Peter Finch’s character in “Network” (1976) yelled “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”.  He weaponized anger against his employer in seeking personal revenge and resolution.  Government at all levels today is confronted with angry constituents in the pandemic, some like Finch’s Howard Beale.  Board meetings have been disrupted and threats made.  By no means is this universal across the 430+ school districts of our state.  Yet, even civil board meetings experience seething anger in those who disagree with a school’s pandemic protocols.  Whether real or perceived, anger affects the people who are elected to govern when district residents are covert in their demands.  If Newtonian law holds, there will be equal angers rising to confront the force of voiced angers.  Our new normal will be measured and tested by how it responds to anger; angry people about something will seem an everyday experience.

Once waived, it is difficult to reinstate a rule or requirement.  An unenforced rule is not considered a rule.  In our state the length of a school year, hours of required instruction, truancy laws, definitions of school attendance, parameters for home schooling, requirement of homework, use of college admissions testing are among many long-standing school rules and standards that were were waived in the early pandemic.  Just turning on a computer at home qualified a student to be counted as present on a school day.  Does it matter?  In September and October 2021 regular student absenteeism and tardiness are real challenges.  Three days of school attendance out of five is as much as some students will commit.  Soft accountability told many parents that strict attendance and completion of assignments may not matter and in 2021-22 families extend weekends into three- and four-day weekends.  In the pandemic, school day and school year were determined by resistance factors not educational goals.  In the new normal, we will continue to struggle with apathy toward rules and standards, many of which were waived in the pandemic. 

Lowered bars of expectation set new levels of acceptance.  Remote education will haunt school expectations for some time.  At the start of remoting, we credited logging in, seeing a student’s face, some level of participation, and submission of some work on an assignment.  “Some” counted. Remoting led us to make assumptions about what children were learning and some were not learning.  Being remote, we did not really know.

The return to in-person teaching and learning displayed many children whose grade level and subject knowledge and skills were below to well below where they could have been if there were no pandemic.  No duh, eh!  Children in art, music, second language, technology ed, business and marketing, and computer science, to name a few, experienced remote learning on an individualized basis divorced from studio, rehearsal hall, laboratory, and community-based experiences.  They learned but not what they could have or what their next grade level or sequenced course or graduation diploma required.

Academic testing profiles slipped.  Some children in above the 75th percentile slipped to above the 50th.  More worrisome, the number of children below the 25th percentile increased.

Schools everywhere face the compensatory challenge of raising the level of each child’s education to non-pandemic levels.  “Thelma And Louise” (movie characters) taught us “you get what you settle for”.  In the new normal, we cannot settle for the level of educational achievement our students have gotten thus far in the pandemic.  In our normalizing, we must reinstate high expectations for each child’s education, and we must work diligently to raise the current level of each child’s learning achievements toward pre-pandemic standards.  This goes for reading levels, skill in playing the saxophone, throwing ceramics on a potter’s wheel, solving quadratics, and milling a tool on a lathe.

Decline of teaching as a career.  Nightly news tells us weekly that the unrelenting pandemic demand on medical responders, nurses, and hospital workers is causing a personnel shortage in their profession.  More are leaving and fewer are entering.  This also is true of schoolteachers.  The trend line of new teachers entering the profession has been in decline for more than two decades.  Pandemic demands topped off teacher struggles with increasing demands for educational accountability, partisan-divided support for public schools, increasing class sizes, and flattened salary compensation.  The result today is even more administrators and teachers leaving school and the classroom and even fewer entering.  State legislators try to increase teacher numbers by diminishing the educational preparation for a teaching license and approving alternative and easier ways to be licensed.  Districts posting for school administrator and classroom teacher positions for the 2021-22 will be pressed to find new applicants let alone highly qualified applicants.  Normal in the post-pandemic will be schools and classrooms with younger and less experienced administrators and teachers and a constantly revolving door of these.

The transition of the pandemic to endemic provides other challenges.  Each of these will also contribute to defining a new normal, that place where things will seem to come to rest and be less volatile.  That place will be nowhere close to the pre-pandemic normal.  It will, however, be our new reality.  Buckle up.  We have work to do.

We Are Known By What We Prioritize

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Not one.  As a school board member, I have not received one letter asking what can be done regarding depressed student proficiency scores displayed in the fall 2021 assessments.  Not one letter or phone call asking what actions our school will take to teach children the content and skills they missed while in remote education or reteach what children forgot while disconnected from instruction.  Not one person pointing at the increase of students whose assessment results fall into the significantly below proficient category this fall.

Beyond reading, ELA and math, not one communication regarding a child’s loss of learning in art, music, or foreign language.  Not a word about a child’s stagnant growth in business education, marketing, and computer science.  Learning in every school curriculum has been stymied by the pandemic, yet there is scant discussion regarding lost learning experiences.

Not one inquiry about how diminished proficiencies affect our junior and senior students’ preparation for post-secondary education, work, and military endeavors.  Without doubt, a graduate’s transcript and activity resume’ will be different in 2022 than a pre-pandemic resume’.

I grant that many children profited from their instruction in remote education.  They benefited from an optional return to in-person instruction in 2020-21 and a more complete return to in-person instruction in 2021-22.  We owe much to our teachers who labored through virtual and hybrid venues to teach their students.  Yet, every curriculum no matter how it was instructed remains behind its times in the winter of 2021.

Instead, letters, phone calls, texts and parent attendance at school board meetings demonstrating anger about masking protocols.  The demand for parental rights to choose whether a child will wear a mask overwhelms discussion of a child’s educational progress.  Am I dismayed?  No but yes. 

This observation informs us about the evolution of our culture and what we value.  We should not generalize any conclusions to the population of all parents but only to the sub-set of vocal parents.  We should not diminish our educator’s work on closing instructional and learning chasms but understand that this work is done because we, educators, know that it is the most important work before us.  It would be better if parents and school boards and teachers were all on the same page about how to repair student learning at this time of the pandemic, but we are not.

The issue of masks will resolve itself either when all school-age children have had access to the protection of vaccination or when school leaders acquiesce to the loudest voices in their community.  At that time, viral mitigation protocols will not be generalized across school districts, schools, and grade levels but will be responsive to breakouts as we ordinarily treat influenza and measles in schools.  These events will happen, and the response will be very local to those in contact with the outbreak.

The purpose of this writing is not to encourage parents to become enflamed about the status of their child’s educational progress, but to independently review what really matters and consider if their attention aligns with those matters.  For this writer, causing all children to learn with special regard for our most challenged learners is what matters.  Their challenges are not only intellectual but include all concerns that affect their total education and wellbeing.  Children today demonstrate varieties of gaps in their 4K-12 education, gaps we can close if we are able to give this teaching and learning our focused attention. We will be known by what we prioritize and how we meet our priorities.

School Culture and Return-to-School Students: Another Pandemic Challenge

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Experience changes us and, like the bell once rung, we cannot return unchanged to who we were prior to the life we have experienced.  After months of remote, homeschooled education, or being unconnected from daily schooling, children returning to in-person school are not of the same student character they were pre-pandemic.  Teachers and administrators who worked tirelessly to assure a continuing education for children, sometimes teaching for home, are not of the same educator character they were pre-pandemic.  We all are changed by our experiences and are now required to understand our changed characteristics. 

During the pandemic, school was not quite a Humpty Dumpty fallen from the wall and laying in pieces, yet as we reassemble ourselves as a school, some of the pieces are not fitting back into the places we remember them being.  More to the point, they won’t fit.

What fiction tells us. 

After we read Lord of the Flies as students, I wondered what the survivors were like following their rescue and return to whatever remained of their homes.  Golding does not tell us.  A year of adapting to a non-adult, unstructured world caused changes in the boys’ character that were foreign to who they were and how they acted prior to their isolation on the island.  Different behaviors and social codes emerged.  After they are found, Golding returns them toward age-appropriate behaviors and attitudes and he wrote that they wept about their life on the island.

What real life is telling us. 

Children returning to school from up to 18 months of remote education are not school socialized.  Their out-of-school experiences are causing in-school problems.

“Schools across the country say they’re seeing an uptick in disruptive behaviors.  Some are obvious and visible, like students trashing bathrooms, fighting over social media posts, or running out of classrooms.  Others are quieter calls for help, like students putting their heads down and refusing to talk.”

Schools struggling with behavior issues as students return – Chalkbeat

“Among teachers of younger students, it’s not common to hear that students seem two grade levels behind socially.  Educators have noticed that elementary schoolers who spent much of the last two years learning online are – to no one’s surprise – struggling to share and walk slowly in the hallway.”

How school discipline — and student misbehavior — has changed during the pandemic | EdSource

“Schools are making changes meant to help…. Missoula County schools in Montana, for example, hired a dozen additional staffers to focus on student behavior and mental health.  Now they have staff at every elementary and middle school to teach coping strategies to kids who are getting frustrated quickly.”

Some Schools Seeing More Behavior Issues With Students In Classrooms After Return From Remote Learning – CBS Boston (cbslocal.com)

“A Connecticut high school that recently resumed full in-person learning for the first time since the onset of the pandemic sent students home temporarily for remote learning – not because of the virus, but rather issues with misbehavior.  New Britain High School, in suburban Hartford, is ‘hitting the refresh ‘button’ and will restart the school…”

High school goes remote again, blames student misbehavior | WTNH.com

“The upside down has turned right side up.  That virtual reality environment you taught in, along with the two-dimensional relationship you had with your students, is gone.  The mute button is gone.  The extreme social buffer gone.  Sure, there may be a vestige of goodwill at the start, but after the initial honeymoon it means very little…”

How To Handle Return-To-School Misbehavior – Smart Classroom Management

Either Address It or Accept it

Reinforcement theory tells us that repetition of the same behaviors makes those behaviors more permanent and more accepted as a behavioral norm.  Bad or unacceptable behavior is reinforced just as efficiently and effectively as good and acceptable behavior.

We are observing children whose return to school behavior fits directly back into the mold of accepted, positive, and traditional studenthood.  These children are present everyday, on time to class, do their assignments to the best of their ability and are prepared for class, and try to get along and cooperate with their peers.  We are observing children whose behaviors are not fitting into our traditional mold, in fact their behaviors are not acceptable.  These behaviors, reinforced by their out-of-school isolation, are disruptive and would have led quickly to pre-pandemic school failure.  These children are absent several days each week, wander into class late, demonstrate no urgency in getting assignments done or completed, and isolate themselves from their peers if not constantly challenging them.  And, we observe children who resemble both molds depending upon the class and time of day.  This is not our pre-pandemic school.  But, it is the school we found in September and October and now November. 

Teaching children to learn school social skills is as required as teaching grade level and subject curricula.  This fall teachers are finding who children demonstrate lost and missed curricular learning.  Some children lost touch with some of the knowledge and skills they learned before campus closures.  They need tier 2 instruction to recover those losses.  Some children missed instruction during the recent three semesters – they simply were not connected or present.  They need tier 1 curricular instruction to learn what they missed. 

The same is true of social, collaborative, and collegial skills that also suffered lost and missed development when children were isolated from each other.  Teachers speak of children being “two to three grade levels behind in their school-social development”. 

Consider a child who was starting middle school in 2019-20.  This child’s social education suffered a complete middle school gap.  Usually, middle school is a child’s transition from elementary school culture to high school culture.  Middle school’s structures buffer an adolescent child’s developing awareness and sense of self and peers, social problem solving, accountability to two or three teachers each day to a high school schedule of seven to eight teachers, and ability to handle increasingly rigorous instruction.  In 2021-22 we have children in high school classes with little more than elementary social preparations.

Consider the freshman who was learning to be a high school student in 2019-20 and overnight became more like a college student independent of daily physical attendance and contact with teachers and classmates.  Depending on the level of parent/guardian supervision of remote education, a high schooler returning to school is now required to transition from self-direction to teacher-directed and from “my day is all about me” to “my day is about how I work with others”. 

The issue school leaders face is how to recover lost social and behavioral learning, provide missed social and behavioral learning, resocialize children to their school setting, AND, sustain ongoing instruction and learning of the 2021-22 curricula.  This requires quintessential school leadership, faculty and staff focus, immaculate calendar coordination, and parent/home support.  Success requires a plan.

To Do

  • Reinstate school norms that are non-negotiable.  Schools rightfully have non-negotiable requirements for student behavior.  We populate our non-negotiables quickly with safety and health rules.  No weapons, drugs, alcohol, or tobacco.  No fighting, stealing, or vandalizing.  These norms are traditional, universal, and community-expected in a re-opened school.  Be crystal clear about what behaviors are non-negotiable and enforce what you say.  These traditional non-negotiables are an easy start.

Virtual studenthood bred strains of asocial and negative behaviors that came back to school with returning students.  The lack of face-to-face interactions and accountability bred online bullying and harassing through social networks, e-mails, and texts.  Students who said and wrote unacceptable and harmful things about other students from home continue with these behaviors in school.  Reteaching acceptable social norms requires every adult in the school to be aware of and to call out harassment, bullying, and asocial behaviors.  Schools have required policies that make bullying and harassing behaviors rightfully non-negotiable.

In the return to school, the norms of non-negotiable discipline will not be fully realized until bullying and harassment are controlled.

  • Reteach daily school norms that are softer than the non-negotiables.  Students returning from multi-semesters of remote education are challenging three groups of norms: attendance and timeliness, completing class assignments and completing them on time, and peer respect and personal accountability. 

Principals report students don’t think daily attendance and being on time are important now.  Students cite their school success at home when they attended to school on “their” schedule and not every day.  In reteaching the importance of attendance and timeliness ensure that teachers start class on time with meaningful activities.  This does not mean a “spot quiz” in the first minute of class, but an activity that ties this day’s learning to yesterday’s and ongoing learning.  Soft starts to class may have worked in the pre-pandemic but only reinforce meaninglessness in the return to school.  Make tasks and time on task meaningful.

Students tell their teachers that they “need to take care of personal things” as a reason for tardiness – there is no urgency to be on time.  Students were able to “join” Zoom classes when they were ready to do so and check out when they wanted.  Don’t lock classroom doors but make late arrival consequential with “I will talk with you after class”.  If that doesn’t work, inform parents and the principal.  Use progressive discipline procedures to regain student respect for and compliance with timeliness.

Students earned A and B grades in remote classes with less than 50% attendance or full-class engagement and doing less than half the required assignments.  Re-norm what is graded.  Grade performance, achievement, and meeting proficiency standards for your curriculum.  Remove soft grading practices from remote ed and rebuild grades and credit based upon the demonstration of learning.

Reteaching norms about attendance, timeliness, and grading require a full-faculty approach and consistency over time.  Students love to find the exception and quickly point out that “Mr. Jones doesn’t mind me coming to class late”.  Principals need to work with any Mr. Jones to ensure uniformity of all faculty.

Personal and group counseling are necessary to re-establish social-emotional wellbeing for some students and sensitivity for what they say and do to others.  Some schools are adding to their counseling staff or employing community resources to meet the enlarged scope of these needs. 

Disciplinary accountability also is required.  School discipline was largely vacated while children were at-home learners.  The return to school returns children to the supervision of the school, especially to the rules of no bullying and no harassing of other children.  A re-instatement of accountability begins with classroom teachers and aides restating school wide rules and taking first levels of response when rules are broken.  Teacher to home communication is an essential second level response.  Principals are the third level and their action unites the school faculty’s consistency with school-parent work to correct aberrant behaviors.

Bottom Lines

Schooling in 2021-22 is not like schooling in 2019-20 and we are fools for thinking it is.  We need to understand how the the out-of-school experiences shaped our children’s return-to-school behaviors.  We need to teach and reteach children to understand and respond to our school norms.  We cannot expect children to simply be what we want them to be.  We need to assure that faculties and staffs are united in their re-establishment of an end-of-pandemic school culture.

During remote education school spending increased for required technologies and health-related protocols.  In the return to school, school spending will increase for required resources to help all children become successful school students.  We cannot be shy in demanding what we require for school success in the end-of-pandemic time.

And,

We need to be sure that the return to school culture we impose on returning children is the culture schools need to assure student success in the future.  What have we as educators learned about students and learning in the pandemic that should shape our work with children in the post-pandemic?  We are responsible and accountable for an informed school culture.

Regaining Proficiency Thru Needs-based Instruction

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Words matter.  Assessments of student proficiency attainment after three semesters or more of pandemic instruction indicate significant drops in performance in math, reading, and ELA.  These data indicate both lost learning and missed learning.  Lost and missed learning extends far beyond these  three academic subjects.  Every curriculum taught displays the same lost and missed problem – art to zoology.  Math, reading and ELA are highlighted only because we have hard data.  These two concepts – lost and missed learning – drive our end-of-pandemic efforts to cause all children to return to levels of pre-pandemic proficiencies.  Lost learning is a tier 2 instructional challenge and missed learning is a tier 1 challenge.  We can recover and reconstruct what was lost and teach anew what was missed.

What We Know?

Learning loss is associated with a child’s capacity to access prior learning.  Retention theory tells us that repetition, opportunity for new applications, and adding greater meaning to learned content and skills build a child’s capacity to access and use what has been learned.  In a nutshell, we practice newly learned knowledge and skills not to make what is learned perfect but to make it more permanent and stronger for our access.  Without retentive practices easy and facile access to memory declines and we begin to lose immediate knowledge recall and sharp skill performance.  This is lost learning.

Missed learning is not a retention issue, because what was missed was never taught.  It is not lost, because it was not learned.  Consider the body of a child’s learning to be Swiss cheese.  Most of the learning is solidly learned.  The holes prevalent in Swiss cheese are not lost learning but learning that did not take occur and could not form a firm and solid basis for future referencing.

The largest cause of missed learning is the child’s absence from teaching and learning.  It is the Cartesian statement of education.  “If teaching takes place without students being engaged, learning never happened.”

Examples of Lost Learning

Picture these situations.  A child in the intermediate grades was learning to multiply fractions in February 2019 when learning was disrupted by the move to remote education.  The teacher relying on a series of concept and skill building lessons to develop a child’s understanding of the mathematical manipulations required to multiply fractions saw time on task between teacher, student, and instruction stop as the school doors closed.  Add the stories of every child engaged in new learning – a kindergarten child learning to decode letters into sounds, a child learning rules of capitalization or use of commas, or to avoid run-on sentences – to our understanding of learning loss.  Consider a high schooler in Algebra who was learning to use quadratic equations and to balance covalence in chemistry.   Opportunities for constructive retention, application, and expanded meaning of new learning were unavailable resulting in dissipation of memory-knowledge and skill work.

Lost learning is not like dropping a valuable necklace over the railing of the Titanic so that it may never be recovered from the abyss of ocean.  Learning is not gone forever.  Learning loss is more like a paragraph written that is inadvertently deleted.  The writer still has some memory of the words, sentences, and idea being expressed and rewriting can reconstruct what is lost.  With some technical help, what was lost may be recovered.  Lost learning can be relearned and strengthened.  If learned successful the first time, there is no need to correct errors or bad habits.  Recovering lost learning can be efficiently achieved in short order with diagnostic and prescriptive teaching.

So it is with children returning to daily in-person instruction with their classmates and teacher.  Where they left off in their interrupted learning can be recovered and reconstructed and they can make forward progress with new learning.

Some children regained access to continuous learning through strong virtual connections to their classroom teacher.  Children who returned to in-person teaching and learning regained connection to continuous instruction.  However, children who did not have strong Internet connectivity or whose school substituted vendor-provided curriculum for the school’s curricula lost touch.

Consider the 90 academic school days in the 2019-20 spring semester.  Campuses closed.  It took time to move from in-person teaching and learning to virtual teaching and learning.  It took time for schools to provide teachers with the technology of remote education and for teachers to gain proficiency in teaching through cameras.  It took time for families to stabilize their supervision of children as at-home learners.  It took time for children to connect their devices or school-provided devices via the Internet and to engage with remote teaching.  Some children made speedy connections and did not miss significant teaching.  Other children were spotty in their connection and support of remote learning and suffered recurring misses of teaching.  And, some children were so disconnected and unsupported that they missed most of the significant teaching of that semester.

Examples of Missed Learning

Missed learning also occurred in the 2020-21 school year.  Inconsistent Internet plagued without reliable connectivity.  Quarantining protocols closed classrooms and schools and the movement between in-person to remote and remote back to in-person caused missed learning.  Teachers with positive tests or close contact were quarantined and regardless of the substitute teacher on-going learning created misses.

Missed learning also arises when children move from the school’s curriculum to an alternative yet are accountable through assessments to the school curriculum.  Any child whose parent chose home schooling or enrollment in an alternative site and then returned to her home school this fall probably displayed holes in her proficiency on the school’s annual fall screening assessments.

The Fix Is Needs-based Differentiation

Remedying lost and missed learning is differentiated instruction 101.  The differentiation is keyed to each child’s learning needs.  End-of-pandemic classrooms will have children at different proficiency points in the annual curriculum.  Or, in all the curriculum they must learn in the pandemic years.  It is impossible to treat lost and missed learning as a whole group or whole class or whole grade level issue.  The problem is individualized and this necessitates teacher use of diagnosed and prescribed differentiated instruction. 

https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/what-differentiated-instruction-really-means

Lost and missed learning are tier 1 and tier 2 instructional issues.  Why?  Neither lost nor missed learning are functions of incomplete, unsuccessful, or mistakes in learning or learning that is challenged by a disability that require tier 3 intervention.

Fixing lost and missed and learning requires the teacher to be very diagnostic in analyzing each child’s fall screening assessments and matching the results with her knowledge of the child’s educational experiences in 2019-20 and 2020-21.  If the child received initial in-person teaching and learning of assessed content or skills and demonstrates underachievement this fall, the first consideration should be lost learning.  There was not adequate retentive practice to reinforce the initial instruction. 

Focused tier 1 teaching to all children will refresh the initial learning they had in the past.  For some, the refresh will be enough to re-engage lost knowledge and skills.  Generalized and focused tier 1 teaching may also be used strengthen initial learning for all.  Refreshing involves rehearing, rereading, renewing hands-on work and re-experiencing what was once learned.  It is the proverbial person who once learned to ride a bicycle getting back on the bike.  Some pedaling and balancing is necessary to regain bike riding skills.

Identifying individual children who need more than generalized tier 1 instruction creates groups within the class needed more drill and practice and extending instruction on the lost content and skills.  These children had just a “brush” with initial learning and not sufficient interaction to build quickly recoverable access.  Re-experiencing is combined with drill and practice in tier 2 to build strength of knowledge recall and skill usage.  Tier 2 group work can be fit into the normal and daily activities of the class.  Children not needing to recover the lost learning can be grouped for or directed to personal enrichment of ongoing learning.

Missed learning requires tier 1 initial instruction.  The teacher must treat this as new teaching and learning even though other children may have learned this teaching semesters ago.  The teacher uses all the good practices of lesson design for initial learning to assure children have adequate background preparation, can identify purpose and immediate goals, and are ready for chunks of instruction.  Missed learning requires opportunity for practice, formative assessment, feedback between teacher and child, strengthening practice and summative assessments over time. 

One critical issue with lost and missed learning arises in the teacher’s scaffolding of current and future instruction.  Due to the pandemic, a teacher cannot assume each child is ready to ascend the scaffolded curriculum.  The teacher must assure readiness by backfilling lost and missed learning prior to advancing the class as a group on the scaffold.

When Will It Be Soup?

Good question.  Being soup is the colloquial for telling us that children have been made complete in their pandemic education.  Whatever was lost or missed was recovered or reconstructed or taught anew.  Soup is when each child and all children can achieve the school’s grade level and subject curricular proficiency standards.  Locally, we will not soup soon.  The first order of business is determined what is lost and missed.  The second order is prescriptive tier 1 and tier 2 teaching to recover and teach what was lost and missed.  The third order is to use retention theory practices to reinforce and make permanent these pandemic teachings.  The fourth and largest order is to do all this while moving each and all children forward with their ongoing 2021-22 annual curricula.  The same statements hold for 21-22 as they held for 19-20 and 20-21:  children get only one academic year to learn these annual curricula.  In 2021-22, we have a lot of teaching and learning to accomplish.

Resuming Pre-pandemic Academic Proficiency Achievement

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How did the pandemic affect K-12 student achievement?  This question should be consistently on the lips of school leaders.  The answer to the question, however, may be a long time coming?  Consider – is your local school district publishing current academic proficiency achievement data and talking about pandemic effect?  If not, they need to start now.  The pandemic’s impacts on student learning will challenge educators for years to come.

What Do We Know?

Data informs and drives educational decisions.  Teaching and learning without valid data points is groping for handholds on a hillside wearing a blindfold.  Because of the pandemic, we don’t have valid, recent, or relevant educational data today.

Fact – Available student academic data from the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years and first semester of 2021-22 display trends of achievement that differ significantly from pre-pandemic data.  To put it bluntly, current pandemic data trends are significantly below pre-pandemic trends. 

A tertiary problem with our educational data is curricular fidelity and continuity.  Some schools provided remote instruction of curriculum provided by virtual vendors not the district’s curriculum.  In-person and remote children in the same grade level and subject classes received instruction in varied and different curricula.  We cannot assume that each curriculum was equivalent in content, skills, and dispositions to another.  Curricular alignment with assessment is essential.  If there is no known alignment, the resulting data are not relevant.

Many data points for individual children and disaggregated groups of children are absent for multiple assessments as children were not available for testing in the pandemic semesters.  Parents withdrew children in favor of home schooling.  No data.  Children in homes without any or consistent Internet connection were unable to participate in daily instruction.  No data or no valid data.  Some children just hit the off button for remote education.  No data.  Some children completed the assessments as unsupervised take-home tests or on-line tests.  Data is suspect.  When school campuses re-opened for in-person attendance in 2020-21, some parents and children preferred to remain in remote mode.  No data.  For too many children we cannot credibly draw any conclusions regarding their educational status or progress because their data is not recent, valid, or relevant.

That said, we do have data for some children.  We have annual assessment data and continuous teacher-based assessment data for children who were in-person school attenders and received the district’s approved curricula during the pandemic.  In the fall of 2020-21 schools were either open for in-person teaching and learning or closed and in remote education mode.  Children whose parents chose the in-person option or returned to in-person as campuses re-opened in 2020-21 remained, for the most part, within the school’s traditional curriculum.  Excepting school days when children may have been quarantined or the school was temporarily closed, in-person children received a continuous provision of the school’s instruction of approved curricula.  In-person children completed supervised assessments and these children are the most likely to give educators a sense of the pandemic’s impact upon children whose education approximated normal teaching and learning.  Their data is recent, valid, and relevant.

We also have data for children who received daily remote instruction from their regular classroom teachers using their school’s adopted curricula albeit virtually.  Some schools were able to provide their children with digital devices and hotspots, as needed, and using classroom cameras and screens sustained a viable teacher/student and student/student instructional interaction remotely.  Teachers taught their regular curricula to children at home.  Barring days of Internet or viral interruption, these children also received an instruction that approximated normal teaching and learning.  Assessments for these children are informative.  Their data is recent, valid, and relevant.

What Do We See?

Local data from pre-pandemic years placed most of our children above the 50th percentile on annual academic assessments with a growing distribution above the 85th percentile and diminishing distribution below the 25th percentile.  Pandemic academic achievement data displays significant achievement slippage.   The pandemic data shows majorities of children by grade level and by subject now below the 50th percentile.

The decline in local data trends is reflected in statewide trends.  In Illinois, “Preliminary spring testing data from most schools statewide shows steep declines in students attaining proficiency in math and English language arts across grade levels – 17.8% and 16.6% respectively.”

https://www.dailyherald.com/news/20211029/lower-scores-high-absenteeism-more-teachers-a-first-look-at-how-pandemic-affected-states-students

Locally, most high achieving pre-pandemic children remained high achieving in their pandemic assessments.  The numbers of pandemic children above the 85th percentile resembles the numbers from pre-pandemic assessments.  Children who scored in the 50th to 85th percentiles slumped to lower scores on pandemic assessments and large numbers of children in the 50th to 60th percentile ranges slipped just below the 50th percentile.

Children who were in the pre-pandemic 25th to 50th percentile range slipped below the 25th percentile.

Children whose pre-pandemic data was below the 25th remained below the 25th and their numbers increased, especially in math.

Local data does not disaggregate the pandemic results as the numbers of children in each disaggregation are so low as to identify children by name.

What Should We Think About This?

We have work to do. 

Children are provided one school year per grade level, meaning that a child in kindergarten has one school year to successfully learn kindergarten’s annual curriculum.  Few schools are talking about suspending grade level promotions due to the pandemic.  Hence, a child in kindergarten in 2021-22 will have only this year for a kindergarten education.  While usual practice in the fall of the subsequent school year includes some review of the prior year’s learning, the pace and intensity of schooling picks up in September and this year’s kindergarten child needs to be prepared for 1st grade next September.  We have work to do.

Additionally, the graduating Class of 2022 will not have a sticker on their diplomas indicating “Pandemic Education”.  They will not enter post-high school education or their employment with a “High School Education Incomplete” notation.  For high schoolers whose remote education was less than usual in 2020-21, we have six school months remaining in this school year to bring them up to graduation speed.  “Up to speed” will not include coverage of all topics that would normally taught in a school year.  There is not sufficient time for coverage.  “Up to speed” means the provision of essential senior year learning.  We have work to do.

We do have the option of spreading curriculum over time for K-11 students.  Unlike seniors who will graduate, K-11 children have access to the 2022-23 school year. 

At the same time, each cohort of children in our school will be promoted in June 2022 to the next grade K-12 grade level.  A child in the 6th grade this year will be expected to be prepared for 7th grade next fall. 

There is no reason a school cannot do these things.  Our children are relying on us to fulfill their educational needs.  It is our work to do.

To Do.

We need to personalize the pre-pandemic and pandemic academic achievement data into a profile for each child.  The goal is two-fold:  to cause children to regain pre-pandemic achievement status and to cause each child to meet the school’s continuing academic proficiency goals.  The latter goal may take more time and effort than the first goal.

A personalized plan provides initial instruction of missed curricula and corrective intervention of poorly learned or mislearned curricula.  This is important – we need to discern between missed learning and poorly learned or mislearned content and skills, because there is a real instructional difference.  We teach differently if content and/or skills were missed, that is not taught and learned, or if content/skills were poorly learned or contain errors in content and skills.  Missed learning will be taught as initial instruction.  Poorly learned content/skills need to be corrected or unlearned and then taught and learned correctly – this takes more teacher time and attention.

A personalized plan rebuilds the school/home relationship.  For the past three semesters, schooling for many children has been at home under parent supervision and decision making.  Decisions at home relative to place and time for learning were often more important and difficult than the lessons to be learned.  Parents provided initial instruction when children did not have daily or consistent connection with their teachers.  The presentation of a personalized post-pandemic learning plan reconnects the classroom teacher as the person providing instruction.

The aggregate of personalized plans creates the school’s focus for an academic year.  At the end of the 2021-22 school year, school success will be determined by the successful completion of personalized plans instead of the completion of annual curricula or the school calendar.  The school at large, as well as individual classroom teachers, use the plans to drive school calendar decisions prioritizing uninterrupted instructional time for teachers and students.  Children will participate in school activities, arts, and athletics, but these may be rethought in the face of needed personalized learning.

Finally, how we repair from the pandemic will define the community’s future trust in our schools.  Personalizing each child’s education is the high ground of this trust.  Fulfilling each child’s personalized plan is delivering on the trust we enjoy as the community’s educators.

The Big Duh!

Public education survived the Spanish Flu pandemic, two world wars, depressions and recessions, and political turmoils.  The historic measure of survival was the capacity of a school to adapt to new conditions and requirements for the education of children.  In each measure, schools were required to understand the stresses of the times, modify the how, where and when of teaching and learning, and fulfill the mission of child education.   Our schools, our teachers, and our children and their families will survive COVID by always focusing on the essential outcomes of a public education.