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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.

Highjacking School Board Governance

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When I became a classroom teacher in 1970 my principal and I came to three essential understandings.  The school district would provide me with an approved curriculum of subject content and academic skills for my grade levels of students.  I would provide the teaching and learning strategies to cause the children in my classes to learn their grade level curricula.  The principal would evaluate my teaching performance through an objective and subjective assessment of student engagement and achievement in learning the assigned curriculum.  For five decades these three understandings guided my work as a teacher, principal, superintendent, and school board member.  I believe these three understandings are critical for the educational success of teaching and learning:  the school board decides the curricula, the teacher decides the teaching, the administration supervises teaching and learning.

School Boards Decide Curricula

I cherish the pedagogic freedom of a teacher to use the best teaching strategies to cause students to learn.  This is not a license to teach whatever and however.   According to Wisconsin Statute 118.01(1), school boards will decide the curriculum, course requirements, and instruction consistent with the statutory goals and expectations for educating children in the school district.  Teachers in public education do not have total academic freedom.  That’s okay.  Using the language of our state statutes, my school district in consultation with district faculty, content area specialists, and administrators, selected the best curricula for our children to learn.

The role of public educators is not to teach one standardized and sanitized version of anything but to teach children how to think critically, objectively, and dynamically.  Educators teach children to go beyond who, what, when and where and to ask deeper questions of why and so what and how did this affect people.  Children are taught to base their conclusions upon a foundation of facts, as best as they are able to develop these at their state of learning.  Educators scaffold student learning over years so that children create more complete and complex understandings of what they learn.

To direct and support scaffolded learning, school boards are required to annually review and adopt the curricular standards that guide student learning.   Adoption is posted on a board agenda and  made in a regular meeting of the school board.  Critical thinking skills are embedded in all adopted curricula.  

Pedagogical Specialists Decide Instruction

A teacher’s academic freedoms lay in how the teacher meets the group and individual learning needs of the children in their classes by designing teaching that causes all children to learn.  Classroom teachers, as pedagogical specialists, decide how the curricula will be taught.  Teachers are trained professionally to consider the nature of what is to be learned and the best teaching/learning strategies.  Different content and skills and dispositions about learning require different teaching and this teaching may differ within a content or skill lesson depending upon the needs and abilities of learners.  A teacher chops the curriculum into bites that can  be taught and learned successfully and uses the art and science of teaching to teach each bite.  The “how to teach” decision is the teachers.

These two decisions – what curriculum will be taught and how the curriculum will be taught – are tied together by administrative evaluation of teaching and learning.  Administrators exercise quality control decisions.  These decisions are based on statute and proven practice over time.

New Demands on Decision Makers

Bob Dylan sang “… the times, they are a-changing…”.  His words presage a challenge in public education today regarding who decides what is taught and how it will be taught.  The issue of these challenges is monumental, because these decisions affect not only the education of children today but how education shapes the future thinking and behavior of the adults these children will become.  Who decides these things is important.  Will the decisions be based upon statutory authority or upon the challenges of the moment?

Many school districts around the country are embattled in a public argument by non-educators wanting to determine curricula, the teaching of curricula, and the ways in which schools treat different categories of children.  A polarization of people based upon a laundry list of issues – a person’s success in realizing or not realizing the American Dream, identification with partisan leaders, cultural identity, empowerment as a member of the traditional majority, a preferred version of history, support of pac-funding, and fear of others unlike oneself – is causing an historical challenge to teaching and learning.  A focal point of the confrontation is the determination of what stories of events, facts, and interpretations of the human experience will be taught in school classrooms and how will children of differing characteristics be treated in school.

I observe in the news that school board meetings are disrupted by local residents demanding the teaching of preferred and selective curriculum.  Board meetings are unraveling in chaotic bouts of audience yelling and disorder.  By the challengers’ design, the business of the school district is stopped because boards cannot conduct their posted agenda.  If the Board wants to conduct its business, the Board must acquiesce to the demands of the disrupters.  Board members are physically confronted at board meetings and in the community.  

Demands are made of school boards that only preferred versions of history are taught, that literature reflects only mainstream writing, white authors and their points of view, and that the diverse and rich heritage of our nation be narrowed to exclude the stories of and by anyone who is not like these curriculum challengers.  I read of school boards abandoning their approved policies of diversity, equality, and equity in the face of these demands.  

Statutory Processes for Disagreements

In our republican form of representative government, we elect members from the constituency to serve as decision-makers.  Our constitutional design is to create a control of government at the closest local level – state, legislative district, county and town, and school district.  Lay, not professional, officials are elected and serve terms of office that are regularly open for re-election.  The ballot is intended as the electorates’ opportunity to choose leaders based upon their pre-election statements and history.  A qualified person in disagreement with local decisions can run for office in the next calendared election.  The loss of an election is an intended consequence when the electorate does not agree with an official’s decisions.

A second intended process for change is for those in disagreement to participate in the agendized discussions of government.  For example, attend a school board meeting, volunteer to serve on district committees, and engage with the school board and administration.  Regular meetings of the school board are not public meetings where those in attendance vote on matters.  Regular meetings are open to the public with agendized opportunities for persons to speak directly to the board.  Committee participation requires more “roll up your sleeves and get involved in the details” work.  In most districts with board members, faculty and staff, and parents involved in committee work, committees are where different ideas are freely discussed and reasoned recommendations are formulated for Board consideration. 

Thirdly, the ballot provides the electorate an opportunity to remove an elected official.  Article 13, Section 12 of the WI Constitution describes the process for recalling an official one year after being elected.  No reasons for a recall are required to be given, according to the Constitution.  Members of the community in disagreement with the decisions of elected officials have a clear pathway to change their elected decision makers through recall.  Wisconsin is 2nd in the nation in filing petitions for recalling local school board members (CA is 1st).  Recall is an intended consequence when the electorate does not agree with an official’s decisions.  This is a clear statement of who decides and how decisions are made.

The recall process, though distracting, does not disrupt the proper and regular business of a school board.  It is intended to cause a change in who decides and potentially what is decided.  In the mean time, timely decisions of the school board, such as approving budgets, procuring school supplies and approving payment of bills, hiring and employing school personnel, legislating policy, and approving school calendars, go on.

Contrary to statutory change, disruption and chaos are intended to make the confrontation of loud voices the new “who decides” what is taught and how it is taught for school district decisions.  Already I observe school board presidents ending board meetings without completing a posted agenda because of a hostile take over the board room.  I read of agendas being changed to avoid items of controversy.  I read that boards are limiting or eliminating opportunities for their community to speak at board business meetings.  Board members report being threatened at their meetings, their places of business, and at home by those in disagreement with them.  Each of these reactions is counter to the statutory duties of a school board but deemed necessary at the time.

Although Thomas Jefferson wrote, “A little rebellion now and then can be a good thing”, he did not advocate an abandonment of majority rule, representative government, or approval of mob rule.  Making a clear and cogent argument is one thing; closing down the meeting where arguments are to be presented is quite different.

Is This The New Normal of School Governance: Children Pay Attention To This

The consequence of disrupting the business of a school board is not just a change of decisions.  The unintended/intended outcomes assure that the next crucial and controversial decision of the district will not be decided by the board but by the presence of loud and disruptive voices  It is probable that any group adopting these strategies will be able to force the elected representatives of school government to accommodate their demands if the board is to conduct its required business.  

At the end of the day, adults in the community must remember that our children are watching.  What and how we teach them in the school house matters a great deal to their continuing education.  What and how adults behave in the business of the school house matters a great deal to how these children will behave as citizens of the future.  An unintended consequence of disruptive and chaotic behavior is to teach that our children that disruptive behavior is an accepted norm.

“Soft” Proficiency of a Pandemic Graduate

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A graduate of the Class of 21 sporting a 3.7 gpa, including As and Bs in four AP courses, was told by his university advisor that his placement test scores were so low that he is required to complete high school geometry and writing courses before he can enroll in a university math or English course.  His high school counselor had spoken of college credit being awarded for his AP course completions – no credit was awarded.  Is this an anomaly or an academic injury of the pandemic?  What was the balance of academic rigor, grading, and proficiency when students were bouncing between remote and in-person instruction?  Is a pandemic graduate “softly” prepared for life after high school?

There are no immediate, incontrovertible answers.  Several may apply.  An answer is that this high school graduate did not achieve enduring content knowledge or skills resulting from his curricular instruction during his K-12 education.  His gpa may reflect the aggregate of his formative test scores and not the level of his summative learning.  A lower level of resilient knowledge and skill can accrue from surface-level learning.

An answer is that this graduate is not a good test taker and/or did not understand the importance of college placement tests.  Some students perform better on daily schoolwork and formative assessments than they perform on “on demand” test dates.  ACT and college placement tests are not like usual in-course tests or even semester exams in high school.  They are high stakes tests resulting in scores that affect a student’s post-test options.  For this reason alone, many take and re-take ACT exams.

An answer is that the learning in the recent junior and senior years has produced a “softer”, less rigorous graduate than in years past.  Three semesters of remote teaching and learning allowed juniors and seniors to “skate” through courses.  In some instances, online course testing was open book because there was no way for the instructor to do otherwise.  Homework was collected but because many students lacked consistent tech connections leading to missing submissions, daily accountability for learning was hit and miss.  My conversation with the 3.7 gpa grad confirmed that accountability, even in AP courses, was diminished.  He did the minimum and it was minimal.

A “soft”proficiency provides a student with credit for accomplishment without the requisite evidence of content or skill achievement. 

We are seeing a parallel softness in grade advancement in elementary and middle school.  Predictably, academic assessments in September showed more children below the 50th percentile and more below the 25th than in past years.  Pandemic teaching and learning did not produce pre-pandemic results.  However, these children advanced a grade level in the PK-12 ladder just as seniors graduated in June 2021.  Credit for accomplishment of the school year was granted.

Not all was lost for a graduating senior.  My 3.7 gpa friend is much more prepared for college than friends in prior graduating classes.  His junior and senior courses gave him real experience with schooling in a college-like time frame.  He did not rise and go to school every day.  He was online and connected only when scheduled.  He was responsible for submitting assignments on his own – perhaps a downfall in his case.  He was personally accountable for his learning.  Other friends told me stories of their junior and senior years being college-like in the absence of daily class period structure, face-to-face contact with teachers, and being personally responsible for submitting assignments.  Almost every conversation contained the double-edged realization: “Freedom from class periods is great!  My schoolwork is not a rigorous and my work on my assignments is not as complete as it used to be”.  In essence, a pandemic education gave them strong insight into college education, for better or worse.

My advice to my 3.7 gpa friend is in a golfer’s analogy.  “Play the ball where it lies.  There are no mulligans.”  Your end game is a degree in engineering.  The “lie” you find yourself in is very playable, just longer and slightly off course from your goal.  Your goal is very achievable.  You learned many of the challenges of a college education in high school.  Use all your skills and experiences now to achieve your college goals.  Be a post-pandemic college graduate and engineer.

Shifting from Extra-ordinary Connecting with Children to Extra-ordinary Instruction of Children

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The front line of school workers will be among the quiet and unheralded heroes of 2020-21, a year of extra-ordinary schoolwork.  Their ranks include teachers who connected with at-home learners using everything from high tech virtual classrooms to low tech US mail exchange of school work, food service personnel who assured each child at home of a daily school meal(s), and school secretaries who were  the “first face” in every school, parent, and child interaction.  The pictures of bus drivers cloaked in plastic drove home the point that if a bus driver is ill the entire bus route may be left at home.  Extra-ordinary work done by extra-ordinary school staff.

The need for extra-ordinary schoolwork continues.   While we feared ill health in 20-21, we indeed suffered ill learning that school year in the learning that prepares all children for their next years of learning.  Call it lost learning or missed learning, there are curricular content and skill gaps that must be remedied while at the same time assuring completion of the 21-2 curricula of content and skills.  This requires extra-ordinary teaching skills and strategies.

Why?  Is there an urgency that compels us to make all children whole in their K-12 learning?  You bet there is.  To generalize the urgency, the compassionate memory of the world at large will not give children in school today a pass or a “that’s okay” on their lack of educational proficiency just because these children lost out on their usual instruction and learning in 2019-20 and 2020-21 and perhaps 2021-22.  The world of post-high school education and work expects children to be ready and if not, the world will penalize them.  If our children are not prepared, they will lose out.

The extra-ordinary skills and strategies we need in 21-22 are:

  • evaluation,
  • diagnosis of needs,
  • prescriptive instruction, and
  • specific assessment of implicit learning on a student-by-student basis. 

Evaluation is our collective understanding of each child’s current education proficiency levels in each of their grade level curricular studies.  This is both objective and subjective evaluation.  Not only is this an evaluation of how well a second grader reads, writes, and solves math problems, but an analysis of the content they learned at grade level – social studies, literature, science.  It includes their skills and understandings in art, music, and technology.  Without this evaluation, there will be substantive holes in student learning.  A child who did not receive direct and implicit instruction in fractions in fourth grade in the second semester of 2020 had trouble with remote math instruction in 20-21 and will have continuing trouble in 21-22.  Algebra will be a complete mystery.  The lost or inadequate instruction of those time periods must be made whole.  We need to know what was lost or inadequate in each child’s education.

The diagnosis of needs is our school-wide strategy for how to make all children whole.  The diagnosis must be school-wide and encompass the totality of a child’s curriculum.  Part of the diagnosis is identifying when and how in 21-22 or 22-23 a child receives missed or inadequate teaching in the scaffolding of curricular instruction.  Diagnosis strengthens time and effort in the “next” instruction.  Or, diagnosis determines that certain skills and content must be learned now, right now, because next learning requires a level of student proficiency.  School-wide diagnosis assures that core academics did not crowd out special subjects, like art, music, second language, and technology.  Diagnosis also generates a plan to be shared with parents so that school and home have a collaborative understanding of how a child’s education will survive the pandemic.

Prescription is a teacher’s function.  Only a classroom teacher can determine the instruction needed by each child to make them whole in their grade level proficiencies and the instruction that can be grouped or that must be individualized.  And most importantly, only a teacher provides the implicit instructional needs of our most challenged learners.  In 21-22 most school children, not just those with special education requirements, need a personalized education plan.  For some, their personalized plan may be very brief, for example, language mechanics, the reciprocal nature of ratios, and applying proper pressure to a mound of clay on a pottery wheel.  A plan must address all the child’s curricula.  Another child’s personalized plan may be more extensive, including proper pronunciation of specific phonemes, increasing sight word vocabulary, subject-predicate agreement, long division, chronology of major events in US history, sight reading music notes, and proportionality in an art drawing.  Every child requires a plan for us to make their pandemic education whole.

Instruction cannot be the same old-same old.  Whole group instruction will be less effective in meeting the myriad of student plans and individualized or small group instruction will be more effective.  Instructional aides and assistants helping in classrooms can give children the personal comment, correction, and reinforcement needed to fulfill their personal plans.  The prescriptive work required is more than a teacher alone can or should handle.  Strategies for co-teaching and sharing aides and assistants across classrooms will bring the most effective hands-on instruction to more children.  Strategies for grouping and regrouping children according to the needs of their personal plans are required.  The curricular calendar will not linear; it will be multi-layered and reflexive.

Only through re-assessments will we know when a child has filled in missing or lost learning of content and skills.  Check testing and spot-testing will be a common event each week.  Usual formative and summative assessments will be used to assure learning of the planned 21-22 curricula, but those will not include the elements of instruction from the 19-20 and 20-21 school years.  The calendar will be dotted with specific assessment of the implicit instruction in every student’s personal learning plan.

Extra-ordinary is by definition unusual.  “Extra” connotes more or something uniquely different in quantity and quality.  During the 21-22 school year, children require uniquely different amounts and kinds of instruction to bring the education of all children to the achievement levels the future will require of them.  Extra is what it will take to prevent these children from being known for their lifetime as pandemic school children.