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.

It’s the bang of an education that matters and educators control the bangs.

Schooling is all about the bang, not the buck.  Bucks matter and never doubt the truth that bucks drive the school bus.  But, more important than counting the dollars being spent by a school, count the bangs.  Count the essential knowledge, skills, and life values children learn through schooling.  When we count the benefits and then reconcile the cost we can make schooling achieve its noble purpose — educate all children for their future lives.  Budgeting should be outcome specific not dollar certain.

It is spring in public education and school boards and administrators are constructing budgets for the 2021-22 school year.  Historically, this annual ritual begins with understanding the revenues available for next year’s school programs and parsing out the dollars.  Budgeting aligns available funds with existing and continuing programs and perhaps new programs.  Budgeting assures continuity.  The greatest planned spending is payroll.  Education is a human-rich enterprise supporting teaching and learning in classrooms, gyms, rehearsal halls, studios, labs, and on a variety of fields.  An inferred objective of budgeting is to assure continuing employment of staff.  At the end of the budgeting process, we roll 95%-plus of this year’s programs and program costs into next year.

Consider these three events and then rethink the budgeting process.

• We write and rationalize the 2021-22 budget in the spring of 2021.  Approval of the 21-22 budget allows the school to prepare for teaching and learning that starts in September 2021.  Spending for 21-22 starts during 20-21.  We know the bucks we will spend.

• We summarize the learning achievements of the 20-21 school year in the summer and fall of 2021.  These are the bangs.  We budget bucks for future bangs without knowing the bangs of the previous bucks.

• Annual budgets spend 100% of available bucks to achieve 80% or less of the needed bangs.  Typically, we learn that 3-4 out 5 children successfully achieved success in their annual curricula and 1-2 out of 5 children did not. 

Budgeting bucks before bangs means we budget for a lot of unsuccessful education.  Every annual budget includes bucks allocated to last year’s unsuccessful bangs.  By the time a 4K class graduates, the district will budget more than a million bucks to reconcile unsuccessful annual bangs.

Get out a clean piece of paper and start over.  Start with a graph not a spreadsheet. 

Map the needed benefits, the learning outcomes you need to achieve by June 2022.  Create a clean and clear cause-effect graph of teaching that begets essential learning in one school year.  Plot the units of knowledge, skills, and values to be taught.  Show how they build upon past learning and lead to the next annum of teaching and learning.  Include corrections for unsuccessful learning in this school year.  That is, teaching time to assure that all children learn successfully at the point of instruction.  Put the remediation and interventions here at the time of initial instruction.

Do this for every curriculum, not just reading and math.  Plot the learning trajectory for Art….through Woodworking.  Each teacher plans for 100% teaching and learning success resulting from their 21-22 curriculum.  A teacher’s plan includes extra tutorial time, paraprofessional time to work side-by-side with children to ensure on-time learning, differentiated materials to ensure learning that appeals and attends to each child’s learning challenges, and extra time for constant assessment of each child’s learning throughout, not after, the school year.

Calculate the bucks needed to accomplish these teaching and learning plans.  The total per teacher and for all teachers will be greater than a usual annual budget.  It should be, because this is the cost of ensuring that every child achieves the bangs of their school year.

Compare this bang first budget with a prior year’s actual spending and the bang first budget will be smaller.  How is this possible?  We ghost costs from one year’s budget to the next for the remediation of unsuccessful teaching and learning.  These ghost costs are in special education, summer school, tier three RtI, children retaking failed courses, and all the instructional time/cost of correcting what should/could have been successful initially.  Add up all the costs of subsequent year remediation for a graduating class of seniors to find the millions of bucks spent for unsuccessful education.

The greatest loss though is human.  Every time a child is unsuccessful in learning and we do not make an immediate repair, we reinforce the idea that their successful learning is not important to us.  Children drop off until they drop out.  The price of a child’s dropping off is a cost  the child pays for the rest of her life.

We used to label bang first planning as backward design or outcome based education.  In backward design and outcome based education, we began with an understanding of successful learning and designed our instructional delivery to achieve that picture of success.  For a variety of reasons, outcome based conversations became uncomfortable because budgeting per usual got in the way.  We planned for outcomes but budgeted for dollar limited delivery system.  We were bucks first.  Now, we know better.

Plan for the bangs and you will get bangs.

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.