What do we call it when a student re-engages in learning after taking a substantial amount of time off from school? Or after a child has been ill or home bound for a lengthy period and returns to school? How do we describe the challenge when a student takes a test or tries to demonstrate what would have been learned during the hiatus? We have named the outcome of decreased academic performance a “slide”, as in higher test results in June and lower results in September after summer vacation. Summer slide. We don’t have a word for the stagnant condition of learners not being tested over time. We need one, especially post-COVID.
Professional athletes have words to describe a player returning to the game after periods of non-play. When a PGA golfer returns to the tour after rehabilitating an injury or taking a vacation from play, reporters describe the player as “being rusty” or is “working to get the rust out of a swing”. NFL quarterbacks work to regain their “timing”. MLB players work to regain their “feel for the game” and they “loosen up”, “find their eye”, and “regroove their swing”. Boxers “get their legs back”. These metaphors work because they describe a difference in a state of being. At one point the athlete was performing well. Then, due to unforeseen circumstances, performance either stopped or significantly fell off its usual standard. Now, the athlete is working to return to old form.
Our grandparents had words for children getting busy with their schoolwork. “You need to put on your thinking cap”. Or, “it’s time to clear out the cob webs”. No thanks.
During our COVID school closure, teaching and learning continues. Teachers and children adapt to new daily strategies for remote education. No one really takes off their thinking cap or gets cob webby. Almost everyone is engaged in continuous K-12 schooling to some degree. Remote education recognizably is not the same as regular education. At best, remote teaching and learning allow children to “stay in play”.
Perhaps one of the universal observations of schooling in the time of COVID is that this is an “assessment-free time.” Most vendors of large-scale assessments are closed as non-essential businesses and schools can not access their tests. At the same time, most schools understand that the irregular delivery of instruction does not allow children to demonstrate expected academic performances, so school are not enacting school wide assessments. March, April, May and June are “assessment-free.”
Learning and the assessment of learning have been “covroded”. Corrosion is a synonym for rust, hence covroded. We need to get the covrosion out of our educational work.
Let’s talk about covrosion on the assessment needle. From September through early March, children were engaged in continuous, regular instruction. Regular school means regular assessments on the school’s fall and winter testing schedule were well underway. Then, nothing. We knew the progression of a child’s learning through six months of school, but we know nothing since. The assessment needle is covroded and stuck in March.
Is this the end of the world? No. Teaching and learning morphed into remote applications and pushed student learning through March, April and into May. But, to what effect? Schooling today is highly data driven. The data of assessments informs teachers about what comes next in teaching and learning. For our youngest children learning to read and understand arithmetic, these assessments are necessary an frequent prescriptions for teaching. For children in ELA and Spanish classes, assessments verify how well a child is mastering language mechanics and vocabulary and fluency. For children in the pre-Algebra through Trig sequence, assessments verify that a child is ready for more complex and complicated learning. For children in music and art, performance assessments document the learning of skills. Although many critics decry the amount of testing in schools, testing drives the progression of teaching and learning. Today, in mid-May, we do not have have data about student learning. The getting of data is covroded.
We must recognize that many teachers are using quizzes and tests to understand how children are progressing with remote lessons. We understand that the credibility of remote education for many children is supported by quizzes, tests, graded assignments, and projects. Tests and grades help to validate the doing of schoolwork. If there are no tests and grades, many children say “…then why do the daily assignments?”.
As a side note, interesting stories abound regarding children who struggled with spelling and arithmetic during the winter and now are very good spellers and do well on remote arithmetic lessons and on-screen tests. When a child yells out “How do you spell elephant?” in a home bound lesson, the child probably gets several in-house answers. And, writing assignments e-mailed in are very nicely “proofed”.
All of this is expected. Why not! But, just what have children learned and how do we know what they learned? Are they still on track to achieve their annual grade level and subject course outcomes? If not on track, what is the difference between the status of their learning and the annual expectation? While we want to know the extent of learning at the close of the 2019-20 school year, we really need to know the status of learning at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year.
The assessment needle not only tells us the points of student learning at the end of a school year, it tells us the points at which student learning must begin at the start of the next school year.
Schools must get the covrosion off their daily instruction and off their assessment tools for teaching and learning to return to their normally high levels of performance in 2020-21. Education is data-driven and educators, students and parents need the data so that a school’s academic, activities, arts and athletics programs can prosper once again. Prescriptive teaching and learning will return when the covrosion has been removed.