Gains Over Losses: Change the Narrative on Pandemic Education
It’s been a year…
In March 2020 our nation entered lockdown and schools across the country sent students home with packets, Chromebooks, supplies, and no idea that this was “goodbye” for the year. As the reality of the situation set in, it was clear that teachers upended not just their lessons for the next few weeks, but their entire lived-career of delivering instruction to students.
By the end of March, the Herculean task of moving all learning to remote learning led to a societal glorification of the heroism of the teaching profession. We stood among the first responders and healthcare workers in that rarefied air of essential and valued. The viral videos of teachers and school administrators visiting their students’ homes were beacons of hope and joy, celebrated moments that were just a new version of the immeasurable dedication teachers have always given to their students. What a feeling to be celebrated. To be valued. To finally receive the glory to match the immense power that our profession holds.
Five months later, the glory was gone. The vilification and disrespect of teachers were on full display as school reopening was the next hurdle to overcome. This narrative of teacher blame and school deficits has been ongoing since the fall.
On March 4, 2021, a Fox and Friends segment titled “Failing our Children” featured a group of parents from Montclair, New Jersey, suing their local school district for refusing to fully re-open schools. After describing their litigation, the segment closed with Fox and Friends anchor Brian Kilmeade stating, “it’s got to be kids first, not teachers first”.
There it was. Denigrated, dispensed, and disrespected once again. The tone and content of this segment exemplify the teacher blame that has dominated the past 6 months of debate over reopening our schools. Not the local and state governments that inadequately and inequitably fund schools year after year. Not the federal government for delayed or disjointed policy and financial support to make reopening happen. The blame lay at the feet of teachers — the perennial scapegoat of all that ails education.
In this segment and truly everywhere we turn these days we are hit in the face with the message of “learning loss” — that our kids have fallen far behind expectations this year. As educators, this obvious point is being beaten over our heads, and for those of us who are in the classrooms, on the virtual meetings, designing lessons that cater to both our students social/emotional and academic needs, exploring new tools to engage our students, and opening door after door for these kids…this constant beating of the “learning loss” drum can be deafening and defeating.
In the trenches of this work, many teachers are seeing the impact of less time in the classroom and its implications on our traditional assessments that are used in order to understand students’ academic levels. Most of these pieces of data relate to student proficiency when compared to a “grade-level” standard of performance or norm-referenced data point such as the NWEA MAP assessment. The question we are constantly asking is, “at this point in the year, at what level should we expect to see Student A?” — a question answered by a dizzying array of numbers, letters, levels depending on the subject area and assessment tool being used. Too often this year, the answer to that question doesn’t line up with our traditional projections.
Teachers aren’t naive and apathetic — they are acutely aware of and greatly concerned about the needs of their students. They expend mountains of mental and physical energy analyzing and evaluating the data they have in front of them and planning for how they will move their students forward, while at the same time keeping them safe.
The fixation on deficits and loss is a view that negates the grit and perseverance of our students and teachers while ignoring the fact that non-traditional and unmeasured learning has indeed happened.
Let’s focus on the gains.
At our school this year we’ve explored the work of Todd Rose and The End of Average. In his book, Rose outlines the “pathways principle”, which holds that there is not a single, normal pathway for any type of human development. In line with this thinking, we have chosen to focus on the learning gains that have happened this year, and the idea that our pandemic-impacted students will be taking a different path towards the levels of proficiency that we hope for them to achieve. In doing this, they will be leveraging skills, knowledge, and mindsets they have gained during this pandemic to chart a new path to mastery. The largest mindset shift we need to make as educators, community members, and policy-makers is that this shift in time and path to mastery is okay, and honestly more realistic for our students. The linear nature of student growth determined by our traditional assessment tools will need to be tempered, modified, or re-examined in the face of what the last 12 months have wrought.
As educators, we must leverage the gains our students have made in the past year as we plan to address their learning needs. There are a tremendous number of new skills gained this year that are equally as important to the future prospects of our children as traditional expectations for student learning.
When planning for ways to address the mathematical needs of our students, we can leverage the exponential leap they have taken this year in their technological skills. When helping our students make connections to the texts they are reading to aid their comprehension — our students can lean on their experiences during the pandemic and the challenges they all have overcome.
Students who receive special education services often struggle to adapt to new situations and generalize their skills to new settings — they’ve been forced into developing their adaptability this year in ways we never could have presented in the past. In the future months and years, our kids will be served by the partnerships that have formed between parents and teachers to develop strategies for high-quality learning experiences that happen at home. Most importantly, students have benefited and grown from a long-overdue focus on their social/emotional health.
Our students have lost a great deal over the past 12 months, but the things that they have gained have added value, skill, and knowledge to their lives that we won’t truly know until long down the road. Their pathways have changed, but the fact that they are learning has not. Despite what the learning loss narrative might argue, their journey has never stopped being guided and nurtured by their teachers.
As we recognize the one-year mark since this colossal shift in the world, and particularly the world of education, let’s rise above the blame games and get back to giving our teachers the glory they deserve.
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