What’s Important for Future Interruptions to Learning?
The pandemic won’t be the last interruption to learning. What lessons did it teach us?
While the pandemic caused an interruption to learning on an unprecedented scale, it certainly wasn’t the first time that students and teachers were pulled from the classroom due to circumstances beyond their control. When COVID shutdowns began, researchers looked closely at past large-scale interruptions to understand what challenges we could expect moving forward.
Researchers identified that hurricane Katrina deeply affected students’ social, emotional, and behavioral well-being: Two years after the storm, serious emotional issues, such as anxiety and depression, were almost three times as prevalent among students as before the storm (1). Researchers also found that it took two years for impacted students to make up for learning loss after Katrina, and sixteen years to recover from the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s (2).
Large-scale disasters like storms and violence, as well as smaller scale weather irregularities and even singular experiences among individual students and families, have always impacted students’ and teachers’ access to regular learning environments, resources, and routines.
Halfway through this school year, we’re well into the period of working to recover lost learning from COVID. We’re also in a good position to do some additional reflection — Our experiences with COVID can help us navigate the inevitable interruptions to learning moving forward, from combating learning loss to maintaining student engagement.
During the pandemic, our blog hosted reflections from teachers, school counselors, parents, social workers, and industry leaders, as we all learned and adapted together. Here are a few of the most important themes that have appeared on our blog over the last two years that can help us reflect on the lessons we learned about interruptions to learning:
Resilience and Adaptability
The importance of fostering resilience and adaptability in students was clear early on in our journey with school closures, and only became more apparent as shutdowns continued or repeated. Jenna Moniz, an educator who taught at a trauma-informed school during the pandemic, carried the work she had started before the pandemic into remote learning by focusing on resilience through relationship-building exercises and routines. In her post, Building Resilience in a Trauma-Informed School, Jenna explained how daily online well-being check-ins empowered her students to thrive during lockdown, and even created a family-like atmosphere in their learning community. The initial return to the classroom presented challenges for Jenna, because the atmosphere she had worked so hard to create online shifted with in-person interactions — but her work to foster resilience in her students enabled those relationships to continue to flourish, no matter the environment.
For more insights specific to resilience and adaptability, read this article by the social and emotional learning experts at Character Lab.
Strong Relationships
Interruptions to learning, pandemic-related and otherwise, often go hand in hand with interruptions to relationships — between students, between students and teachers, and across learning communities. It’s exceedingly clear that building strong relationships with students and around students is vital to ensuring their social, emotional, and academic success in the face of an interruption to learning (and, truly, even in normal times). Maintaining strong relationships with students and families enables teachers to reach and empower students when routines are disrupted and learning environments are shifted.
Kerrie LaRosa, a social worker and parent coach, wrote for Inspired Ideas earlier this year on the importance of collaboration between home and school, emphasizing that learning has never been isolated to the classroom, and that we can never understand students as fully independent from their home environments. Kerrie explains that partnerships between teachers and parents can enable both parties to take a more holistic approach to understanding, caring for, and educating students.
“Schools and parents have a shared vested interest in the continuity of learning. The way to achieve that goal may vary, but working together increases the opportunity of coming up with a solution that works for everyone.” — Kerrie LaRosa, Social Worker
Student Agency and Autonomy
An emphasis on student agency had begun among educators before the pandemic — but interruptions to learning brought the need for agency and autonomy into clear focus. When students have the opportunity to make decisions about their learning, they can take ownership of their learning journey. In or out of the classroom, empowering students to drive their own growth and discovery is a powerful tool. Rocky Bragg, a high school English teacher from California, wrote during the height of the pandemic about promoting student agency in distance learning. Rocky explains that for him, student agency is critical to avoid a culture of learned helplessness and stifled creativity — which is all the more important when students are learning at home, vulnerable to disengagement and isolation.
In person or online, Rocky fosters agency in his students by involving them closely in the lesson planning process. His students helped determine learning goals, activities, and accountability standards. He used weekly check-ins and assigned roles to manage the project, and leveraged online platforms designed for collaboration in blended or remote environments, to continue his work during lockdown. Read more about his approach to agency during the pandemic here:
School Counselors & Psychologists
School counselors are a crucial element of any school community during and after a major interruption to learning. We know that large- or small-scale interruptions to learning can have a negative impact on students’ social and emotional well-being, and that in many cases, these interruptions can coincide with difficulties at home. Teachers can’t be expected to support students and work to recover learning loss all on their own — school counselors are vital partners in providing students with the tools they need to recover from trauma and be comfortable at school.
Adam Parker, a School Psychologist, wrote this post about his experience supporting students during lockdown and the importance of school counselors and psychologists to provide social and emotional supports after interruptions to learning.
Adaptive & Personalized Technology
The need for technology during an interruption to learning is obvious — remote and blended environments aren’t possible without an infrastructure and powerful tools to support them. But beyond the basic need for connectivity, online content, and collaboration tools, the pandemic illustrated the need for adaptive, personalized tools. Disruptions to learning cause varying levels of learning loss for every student, and result in a class of learners with even more widely varying needs than in normal times. In order to recover learning loss, teachers need to be able to differentiate and individualize instruction at scale. Adaptive technology, which responds to student knowledge gaps and learning needs in real time, enables teachers to do just that. In the following article, policy expert Divya Sridhar explains how adaptive and personalized technology can combat learning loss for the most vulnerable students:
Realistic Expectations for Teachers
Finally — and, perhaps most importantly — the pandemic taught us that interruptions to learning take an incredible toll on educators. Even the most experienced educators can’t be expected to work at the scale and pace of the past two years. Many of our teacher guest bloggers found inspiration and purpose from their work during the pandemic, and every teacher had an impact on their students and communities for which we all can all be grateful. But ultimately, the systems and structures in place to support teachers must continue to adapt in order to prepare schools for the inevitable interruptions to learning that will come.
To all teachers: thank you for the work you have done, and continue to do, to empower your students through such unprecedented times. We learn from you every day!
To explore a few core curriculum options that can help you prepare for future learning interruptions, visit www.mheonline.com/samplenow.
