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Theory into Practice: Blooming the Curriculum with One Word – “So…”

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Tested practices created from research-based theories give teachers the best instructional opportunities to cause all children to learn.

It is easy to think of teaching and learning as linear. We teach and children learn one thing then another and another. Learning is an additive like train cars on a railroad line running through a classroom. Each car arrives with facts and skills to be taught and learned before it leaves the classroom/station, and the next train car of facts and skills arrives. There is more truth in this analogy that teachers want to admit. We change this perception with one word – “so.” All a teacher needs to do to move teaching and learning from a linear to a geometric design is to ask “So, what can/will/should you …” and teaching and learning launch vertically from children waiting for the next lesson to children doing higher orders of cognition with what they have already learned. It is blooming wonderfully!

What do we know?

The names of historic education and psychology theoreticians are fixed in our teacher preparation programs. Their names appear in texts and as footnote references. Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, Montessori, Skinner, Bruner, et al. Teacher licensing candidates learn to pair a name with a concept the historic person developed, take a test or write a paper acknowledging that person’s name and concept, and then allow the forgetting curve to move the name and theory into their memory fog. Who was that? What theory?

Stop doing this! Teaching and learning theories matter because theories give us road maps for how to transform schooling from linear – learn to test- to geometric – learn to think and do.

Benjamin Bloom, psychologist and pedagogue, gave us a systematic template to describe, assess, and classify educational goals. Bloom published his Taxonomy in 1956 and for decades teacher preparation schools taught Bloom’s cognitive domain, and six levels of cognition often called higher order thinking skills. Seventy years later, Bloom is still the go-to resource for describing and detailing levels of cognitive goals.

“So,” elevates your teaching and student learning.

The baseline of Bloom’s Taxonomy is the teaching and learning of background knowledge and a basic understanding of that knowledge. All children need to learn words that name and describe things in their world. So, we teach them to read and listen and build working vocabularies. Bloom categorizes the first goals of learning as level 1 – remembering and level 2 – understanding. A great deal of PreK-, 4K, and kindergarten involves experientially exposing children to words and facts and remembering and understanding.

In his research for his studies, Bloom saw that most classroom instruction at many grade levels was at level 1 and level 2 goals. Teachers used direct instruction to teach information for children to remember and describe. Teachers tested children, recorded learning scores, and began teaching the next lesson of information to be learned. Teaching and learning bobbled back and forth between remembering and understanding.

Bloom changed the goals of learning by interjecting “so what” into teaching. “So, what can you do with this information?” “So, how is this information like or unlike other information?” “So, which is a better choice in the use of this information?” And “So, what could you create from this information that is new and different?” Each of these questions is indicative of a higher level of cognition requiring children to think differently to answer the question. Bloom labeled these questions and placed them in a roster of unique learning goals.

Bloom’s Taxonomy: Each is a different category of learning goals needing distinct kinds of cognitive thinking. The goal is to –

  • Remember
  • Understand
  • Apply
  • Analyze
  • Evaluate
  • Create.

These goals are not sequential as in a continuum. The first two goals – remembering and understanding are goals for creating background knowledge – necessary for all learning to follow. Later learning builds upon the breadth and depth of a child’s foundational background knowledge. This tells us why children in the primary grades receive extensive direct instruction in reading, ELA, math, science, and social studies. And why direct instruction of required information fills the first chapters and units of middle school and high school instruction. Knowing things is necessary for the later goals of thinking about and working with that knowledge.

To build the goal of remembering, teachers use questions like –

  • Identification – What is the capital of Wisconsin? Of France?
  • Definition – What is the meaning of the word precipitation?
  • Listing – List the three branches of the US federal government?
  • Recall – When did the Civil War take place? When did the first man walk on the moon?
  • Recognition – Which of these formulas is correct for the area of a square?

The work of identifying, defining, listing, recalling, and recognizing words expands a child’s working vocabulary in their seeing, hearing, writing, speaking, and imaging more new words. Each question requires a child to write or speak a word in a different way that builds memory. Five to seven uses of the word reinforce short-term memory, and 15 to 17 different uses reinforce long-term memory.

Parallel to remembering words is understanding – the ways that people talk about and use words. The traditional model for remembering and then understanding is to “Say the word, spell the word, and use the word in a sentence.”

To build the goal of understanding, teachers use questions like –

  • Classify – Tell me the kinds of animals eat meat? … eat plants?
  • Describe – Describe what a Green Bay Packer would see standing in the middle of Lambeau Field just before the start of an NFL game.
  • Discuss – Tell me why World War Two is labeled a world war.
  • Translate – Rewrite this word problem into a mathematical equation.

Understanding requires definition of a word and opens a child to word families of synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms. Typical five-year olds have a vocabulary of 10,000 words. Once in school, their vocabulary grows by 3,000 to 5,000 words each year. The rate of vocabulary growth continues until typical high school students know about 50,000 words. The next learning goals give power the words a child knows and understands.

It is important to remember that, although application, analysis, evaluation, and synthesis goals are not sequential, a child’s experience in one will have tangential benefit to the others.

After securing children in meeting the goals of remembering and understanding, a teacher can instruct them in exploring what a person can do with the information learned. This goal is application. True application happens when children use the information or skill or rule to answer a question or solve problem they have not seen before – application requires new contexts.

To build the goal of application, teachers use questions like –

  • Solving – If the hypotenuse is three, what are the lengths of the sides of the triangle.
  • Stimulating – If you were an actor on stage, how would you react to applause after you deliver your lines? Or after the end of the play?
  • Demonstrating – What are examples that show this rule works in the real world?
  • Implementing – If you only had two tools – a scissors and a stapler – and a sheet of cardboard, show us how you would construct a box.

The goal of application is to produce something – a performance, an explanation, a diagram, or a product. A teacher can present children with a “messy” problem or a mystery that includes the words “what if.” These words invite the child to use all they know to solve, react, prove, or implement what they know and to produce something in a new situation. Often the product is an answer on a test requiring a child to consider what they know in an unanticipated word problem. In a real-world context, the ability to apply is the goal of most adult work life problems.

A different goal for learning is analysis. As the goal of application is to produce something in a new context, the goal of analysis is to dissect information looking for patterns, the relationships between parts, and hidden meanings.

To build the goal of analysis, teachers ask questions like –

  • Relationships – What is the connection between global warming and the strength and patterns of hurricanes?
  • Evidence – Which parts of this answer are based upon facts, and which parts are based upon opinion?
  • Categorizing – How would you classify these statements as causes or outcomes from the American Revolution?
  • Deconstructing – Separate this poem into its elements.

Analysis teaches children to be critical thinkers and to question and inquire into the nature of information. Teachers show children how to use charts, diagrams, and tables to show, organize, and rationalize similarities and differences. Children think and reason like historians and scientists. They study an event for its underlying causes and later effects. They guess how the absence of an underlying cause or sparking event may have changed history. Children chart and map chemical reactions to understand how elements relate and react to each other. They chart and map climatic events to understand forecasting. As application creates products, analysis dissects information into its critical attributes.

Educators gave an acronym to Bloom’s categorization of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis goals. They ar labeled as HOTS – higher order thinking skills. Ironically, HOTS should be the dominant goals of secondary education, but the curricular calendar relegates them to specific upper-level courses and a fraction of the school year. Best practice is for children at all grade levels, even 4K-primary, to be given goals in evaluative thinking. Teachers give children a rule or a “yardstick” and ask them to make a evaluation of information. For example, “Our rules say that you will quietly form a single file line when it’s time to come into the building after outdoor recess. What kind of behaviors would not be appropriate for your being “quiet” and in a “single file line?” Young children can do analysis.

Evaluation is making a critical judgment based upon evidence. The key to teaching children to evaluate is giving them a rule or a measurement against which they can make a judgment and provide evidence to support their decision.

To build the goal of evaluation, teachers ask questions like –

  • Judging – Based on First Amendments Rights, should this writer be banned from publishing opinions in the local newspaper?
  • Defending – Do you agree with the historical proposition that a “man’s home is his castle” and justifies the use of deadly force?
  • Prioritizing – Given that your school has limited finances, which of these curricular programs should be exempted from budget reductions?
  • Critiquing – Looking at the past list of Booker Award winners, which of these books has the best likelihood of winning the next award?

Evaluation requires understanding and analysis. Evaluation is not asking for opinions. “Do you like this abstract drawing of a barnyard?” asks for an opinion. Saying “This is an abstract painting of a barnyard. How and how well has the painter used elements of abstraction to tell you the subject of the painting is a barnyard?” asks for judgment with supporting evidence. To make this judgment, children must first understand the vocabulary of art. They must understand the definition of abstract art, and they must understand the critical attributes of abstraction. Then, they must be able to examine and dissect a piece of art by identifying the specific attributes of abstraction exhibited in the art. Finally, they must put their judgment and evidence in a coherent explanation. This is HOTS.

An evaluative assignment takes more time to prepare, more time and consideration for children to complete, and significant time for a teacher to assess and respond to a child’s supported judgment. In addition, every child may make a valid judgment with differing evidence resulting in all children succeeding in an assignment that took a lot of time. And this explains why children have limited lessons pursuing the goal of evaluation. HOTS take time and the curricular calendar has limited time.

The goal of creating also requires assimilation of other learning goals. Creation requires children to examine their knowledge of information, their analysis of critical attributes, and their evaluation of the qualities of what needs to be created to engage in creation. Creating is not just applying in a new situation but the making of something new from what is known to fit a given situation. Creating also is using evaluation to determine the “best” elements for the new creation.

To build the goal of creating, teachers ask questions like –

  • Design – Design a family home for five persons that would survive fire, hurricane, and criminal intrusion. The home will be in California or South Carolina near the ocean and surrounded by woods. You are not limited by cost or material selection.
  • Construct – Given toothpicks and a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, build a bridge that will support a five-pound weight.
  • Reorganize – How would you reorganize the baseball, softball, football, and soccer fields on our campus to require 20% less square feet of area?
  • Develop – Create a story board depicting how five children stranded on an island would create rules for their survival until they could be rescued one week later.

Lessons requiring the goal of creation attach easily to STEM curriculum, technology education, and career development. They also are precursors to real world applications of school-based education.

The Big Duh!

Benjamin Bloom gave us a structure for teaching children to develop different kinds of thinking, of cognition. His taxonomy is a scaffold we can use to ensure that all children learn more than just a recall of information. Using his scaffold of goals, we can cause children to “think and do”. Bloom is worth remembering and his theory of learning goals is a tool for optimizing every child’s education.

I encourage and challenge every teacher to analyze and evaluate their annual curriculum to ensure the teaching of HOTS at all grade levels and in all subjects.

Nurture the talent and unload the untalented

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A most heartbreaking moment for a principal rises when a parent asks “Is Mr. Jones a good teacher?  I want to know because my Susie needs a very good teacher”.  With no place to run or hide, a principal knows Mr. Jones is not among the best teachers in the school.  I’ve been there and I plead guilty to prevarication.  Prevarication is a long and uncommon word to describe how we answer such a question and it hurts to use it.  The angst deepens because we know Susie and she really does need our most talented teachers.  So, the principal prevaricates and speaks to Mr. Smith’s middling strengths with enough enthusiasm that Susie’s mom nods her thanks. 

But we know the truth.  Not all teachers are created equally.  A school faculty has all-star, backbone, and assignment filler teachers.  Schools bask in the excellence of the all-stars, work the heck out of the backbones, and carefully use the roles of the fillers. 

I will not go into depth to describe the attributes of each category of teachers.  Instead, please consider a continuum of high to low on three professional traits:  empathy and care for all children, engagement in the art and science of teaching, and enlightened classroom performance. 

Empathy for all childrenHighSometimeLow
Engaged in the art and science of teachingHighSometimeLow
Enlightened classroom performanceHighSometimeLow

Personalize this by considering all the teachers in your personal history – your elementary, middle level, secondary and even post-high school instructors.  How does your memory distribute your teachers on these three traits?  The fact that you remember some more clearly than others, probably the all-stars and sadly the fillers are most memorable, states the case.  All schools have all-star, backbone, and filler teachers.

Principals and personnel directors have work to do

Let the all-stars produce strong learning outcomes.  Principals and all-star teachers collaborate to cause the most talented instruction to interact with the most students.  Unless there is an ego problem, all-stars don’t need direction.   We exploit their talent for enlightened teaching, instructional leadership, and curricular planning.  Incidentally, it is true that some all-stars shun leadership and curricular opportunities; they just want to teach.  So be it and thank you.  We use their luster to add to the reputation of the school.  The bottom line is we do what it takes to sustain an all-star’s happiness and satisfaction and reap the rewards of their exemplary work.  This is not “babying”; it is respectful recognition and appreciation.  We give all-stars as many opportunities to work with our Susies as we can while understanding that children of all abilities want and should be in an all-star’s classroom. 

Grow backbone teachers, the heart of the faculty, in their instructional and curricular skills.  Principals coordinate with and coach their backbone teachers through meaningful professional development.  Respectful relations are essential with backbone teachers, because they do so many things well and deserve constant reinforcing commendations.  They also have large potential for growth and  Improvement of their teacher talents.  We coordinate their pursuit of masters degrees, national board certification, professional workshops, and leadership of district initiatives.  Coordination is required because, backbone teachers fill so many roles in the school, they face potential burn out.  We weave backbone teachers into the decision making and program development of the school so that the strength of our faculty is invested in the school’s ongoing work. 

Our administrative work is to cause all children to be nurtured as learners and to learn from their lessons by gathering the best faculty of teachers we can.  Given annual changes in the faculty, the availability of highly talented and talented teachers makes a huge difference in student success and satisfaction.

Principals play general manager with the fillers – grow or go.  We are careful with fillers’ instructional assignments.   Lackluster teaching can impede the overall teaching enterprise as well as stunt student progress.  We are thankful that many fillers are first to accept necessary ancillary assignments such as taking tickets at athletic events, selling in a concession stand, and supervising field trips.  They do this to demonstrate their value to the faculty.  Principals, however, look more clinically at their empathy and care for all children, the art and science of their teaching, and their achievement of student learning resulting from their teacher performance.  Fillers have demonstrated deficits in these three key traits.

Fillers do not go unnoticed.  The majority of parent and student complaints about school are associated with filler teachers.  Principals observe what critics say about filler teachers.  Too many worksheets.  Too much sit time.  Incomplete lessons that don’t bring student learning to closure.  Impersonal student relationships.  Lectures or non-directed student projects.  Too much lag time in class periods waiting for the bell to ring. 

School is a dynamic organism, and its faculty changes every year.  Teachers go and teachers come.  Ironically, this is the natural sequence that allows principals to upgrade their faculty by hiring an all-star or backbone when a filler leaves.  Another force in the dynamics happens when principals take purposeful action to cause a filler teacher to become a backbone teacher or to leave the faculty.  Principals construct and diligently supervise tactical plans for a filler’s professional improvement.  As a general manager, end their employment to create the opportunity to employ an all-star or backbone teacher. 

We have urgency in our work

Susie and every child in school deserves a talented teacher all the time.  Principals place Susies with as many all-star and backbone teachers as possible.   However, some grade level and course assignments will be with a filler teacher.  Some refer this to an “unluck of the draw”.  But there should not be luck or unluck in Susie’s teacher assignments.  If she isn’t getting quality instruction, she is falling further behind because of her starting points.

A principal’s work with a filler teacher is “pull up your socks” time for both.  For teachers, pulling up the socks means finding ways to improve their empathy and care for all children, increasing and sharpening their teaching skills, and delivering complete lessons that lead to measurable student learning.  For principals, pulling up the socks means either improving a filler’s work to the backbone level or ending the filler’s employment in the school.  In most schools, this is a two-year work effort because of the time and documentation required to terminate a teacher’s employment.

Truth be told, executing a grow or go plan for a filler teacher takes persistence and often the many other issues of schooling allow the filler teacher to slide into yet another contract year.  After a time, a status quo emerges, and the filler reaches 10+ years on the faculty and a grow or go process becomes harder to enact.

The final truth is this for principals:  moving a filler teacher off the faculty roster makes room for an all-star or a backbone teacher to join the roster.  Terminating employment is a business-like process that seems counter to everything else we do in school, but it is necessary work.  Its effects on instruction and schooling for children can be a revelation.  So, pull up your socks to ensure all the Susies in your school a talented teacher who is empathetic and caring, is a skilled instructor using an array of the arts and sciences of teaching, and who moves Susie’s learning needle in a positive direction.

No Time For Dull Teaching Tools

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I turn wood on a lathe.  A sharp edge on a steel tool is required to ensure clean cuts expose the beauty of the wood and the shapes I design.  As a rule, I sharpen a chisel or gouge after 15 to 20 minutes of use.  The contrast between using a sharp or dull chisel is apparent when I stand back and examine my work.  Dull tools leave torn and ragged wood fibers, uneven edges, and the appearance of sloppy craftsmanship.  Products I will not display.  Who would choose to use tools that are not sharp?

How does this apply to causing learning?

Professionally speaking, sharp tools also cause better results.  A professional tool is a strategy or methodology used to cause a positive response or to eliminate an unwanted outcome.  Some professional tools are hardened steel, but most are mental or dispositional or best practices for doing the work.  Prospective teachers in their teacher preparation programs learn a variety of pedagogical strategies for causing children to learn content, skills, and ways of considering their world.  They take methods classes and use student teaching to practice and learn to apply the strategies of teaching.  This is an introduction to the tools of their profession.

A teaching tool is the philosophical construct used to design units and lessons of instruction.  Sharply cut designs engage children with questions and problems and ideas that get into each child’s head at the start of a unit or lesson.  Good designs cause children to want to know what comes next.  Every lesson in a unit needs to fit into this pre-conceived pathway along which the teacher uses other specific teaching tools to shape student knowledge, skills, and dispositions for learning. 

Teaching tools include strategies for introducing and engaging children in a daily lesson, leading a discussion with insightful questions, using positive reinforcement to strengthen learning outcomes, or reflection and reteaching to correct or strengthen lesson outcomes.  Drill down on any of these, the use of positive reinforcement for example, for the explicit words, phrases, body language, and context for giving a child reinforcing positive messages.  Each teacher will find their personal use of specific words, a way of saying those words, and a way of looking at a child when saying the words that causes the most positive reinforcement for that child.  This is a sharp tool.  Conversely, using the dull tool of a casual comment leaves a child unsure of the strength of their learning, uncertain that their learning matters, and more likely to disengage.

While there are general pedagogical tools used by all teachers, there also are grade level and subject area tools that are required across the 4K-12 continuum.  Down on your knees physical proximity to a young student works wonders but not so much with a high schooler.  Shared glee with a kindergarten child is not only contagious but an essential tool shaping their young ownership of their learning.  Inquiry and problem-based learning strategies are strong tools for social studies teachers.  Sharply honed lessons with timely propositions, strategic access to resources, time outs for “tell me what you know and what you need to know next”, and opportunities for differentiated presentation of results hook children into being avid learners at all ages. 

Specific tools are used by teachers of children with special education and gifted educational needs.  Some exceptional needs children need tasks and ideas broken down into smaller tasks and ideas with special consideration for sequencing and pacing and reinforcement.  Others require more room for creativity than the classroom and teaching skills and mentoring that push the teacher as much as the student.

And, the universe of teaching tools is constantly being added to and modified, even though we think good teaching practices are timeless.

How often does an educator stand back to inspect the effects of her teaching tools – the sharpness of her teaching practices?  Inspection is a meta-self-analysis of a teaching practice and the individual tools a teacher uses to shape student learning.  It requires taking lessons apart after they are taught for tool inspection.  “What did I say and what did I do?  And, how did students respond?”. 

Once examined, how often do we resharpen our teaching tools?  Sharpening is focusing on the “What did I say and what did I do” that could be reworded to provoke a clearer meaning, a more specific direction, a more illustrative modeling, or a leave a student with a better understanding.  Sharpening is changing unit and lesson designs to ensure that the next time the lesson is taught, the teacher will use these sharper tools.

The children we teach are our products.  Sharp teaching tools cause children to be successful learners and achieve educational outcomes we can be proud of displaying.  Just as in wood turning, dull teaching tools cause dull products.  How often do we inspect – not often enough.

Why is thus?

  • Every teacher is the product of a teacher-as-student academic preparation program.   The teacher-as-student learns the content knowledge and skills to be taught and the pedagogical tools of teaching.  Colleges and post-baccalaureate teacher prep agencies provide the prospective teacher with an initial toolbox of teaching skills.  Learned and practiced in student teaching, these are the tools a teacher brings to her first classroom.  This academic and sheltered preparation is intended to be adequate for her to be a successful teacher of children.
  • The first year on the job is a test drive of teaching skills.  Just like a new car owner test drives a vehicle that has passed assembly line inspections yet needs to be road tested to create confidence and assurance, a first-year teacher tests her tools against the realities of school and a classroom of children.  Absent mentor observation and coaching, the test driver also is test assessor.  Yikes!  It is hard to make critical self-assessments while trying to steer a test drive.
  • We assume that continuous practice keeps teaching tools sharp.  However, the school year is a constantly moving conveyor belt of units and lessons.  The school calendar does not stop for an inspection of tools, or the effects caused by teaching tools.  A teaching tool literally is used and placed back in the teacher’s toolbox for a next use without dedicated inspection or consideration of its sharpness.  The pace of schooling creates its own obstruction to tool inspection and sharpening.  The calendar presents little to no time to do so.   
  • Each child and class of children is like a new specie of wood to be turned on a lathe.  A teaching strategy that worked well in causing one child or one class to learn may not be as efficient or effective with other children.  Tools are constantly being modified rather than remaining constant, hence sharpening a tool is sharpening a constantly changing tool.
  • Teacher evaluation systems take a broad view of teaching effectiveness and efficiency.  Pedagogical skill is less than 25%, perhaps 10%, of the evaluation process.  Wisconsin’s Effective Educator system looks at planning and preparation, learning environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities.  Inspection of effective teaching tools is smothered by non-instructional concerns.  Combine a flaccid EE with the statutory fiat prohibiting the use of student achievement scores on state mandated assessments to describe a teacher’s effectiveness and the sharpness of teaching tools falls out of evaluation conversations.

What to do

When facing obfuscation, don’t go there.  Obfuscation is all the reasons we tell ourselves or others that the status is okay or even very good.  Or, it is the reasons we accept for why we cannot change.  Instead, make new declarations for improvement of teaching tools at the school site level.

Principals need to declare that the conscientious use of universal learning designs is prioritized by all teachers.  If adopting UDL, declare that a teacher’s application of UDL will be part of the teacher’s professional development and professional evaluation.  Tools that are embedded in UDL need constant professional discussion, demonstration, refinement, and critical examination.  Walk the talk of engagement, representation, and action/expression.

Use lesson studies.  Record teachers’ classroom teaching and establish collegial, non-evaluative study groups to provide the teacher with feedback on what they see in the recordings.  When every teacher records and every teacher provide feedback, every teacher grows sharper teaching practices.

In the sequence of professional development make learning new teaching tools, refining teaching tools, sharing knowledge and experience of teaching tools, and evaluating the effectiveness of teaching tools in causing student learning an essential part of the school culture.  Important things in school a given time in the calendar; give discussion and examination of teaching important.

Don’t abide teaching that is chronically not sharp.  I have known some great people, really kind and caring people, people who will do everything asked of them at school, who could not teach a coherent lesson.  They did not have nor did they work at acquiring sharp teaching skills.  Help them find their way to another profession.

The Big Duh!

Teaching children is the most important profession in the world.  It also is incredibly hard.  And, teaching is impossibly hard without efficient and effective teaching skills.  We no longer can assume that skills learned in a baccalaureate program are sharp enough to last a career.  Professional development of our pedagogy needs to be a way of life for every teacher.  If it isn’t sharp, sharpen it.  If it can’t be sharpened, find a new tool.  If professional work isn’t sharp, find a new professional.

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.