Picking up the pieces - how do we address problems were are facing in education?

[Anonymous]

Jeff just locked the remote schooling thread because most posts were rehashing school closure decisions. I'm starting this new thread to brainstorm ideas for moving forward. How do we address "learning loss" and rebuild trust in education at all levels? If anyone starts rehashing whether it was right or wrong to close schools, I will report the post.

All of the research shows that there has been a decline in academic achievement at all levels, which was not limited to areas with extended virtual learning.

I'll start with ideas. We need to rebuild trust amongst all stakeholders to move forward. To do this, I think we need to do the following:

1) Put aside adult issues and openly acknowledge the trauma we all experienced during the pandemic. Let kids know that we understand that some of the decisions weren't ideal. Let them tell us about their experience and what they are feeling now. Ask them what they want in their school experience. Keep asking. Give them opportunities to write about what they feel and what they think about the pandemic.

2) Continue to reinforce that we adults are committed to helping them work through this trauma.

3) Require personalized basic skills courses to help students with communication skills, time management, and study skills. These courses need intensive personal components (perhaps through the use of volunteer mentors?), where each student can receive individualized feedback.

4) Make all remedial supports, including tutoring, available in a one on one and in-person formats. Not every student needs to use this, but it should be available. Use local colleges or other members of the community (paid or volunteer) to provide these services. Teachers, what changes would be needed to assess the academic level of each student and meet them where they are?

5) Create more experiential learning opportunities that encourage students, teachers, and community members to work together. This could include student mentors (older students with younger ones), teacher mentors, and community mentors. Within-school mentoring would build relationships and empower older students.

6) Focus SEL on loneliness and connectedness so that students understand the importance of creating relationships with their teachers and classmates.

7) Do more outreach. Every student and every family needs to have someone try to connect with them to let the know they are a valuable part of the community.

Moving forward requires restoring connectedness, which will rebuild trust. Without that, academic improvement will remain stalled. Given the staffing shortages in education, we need to greatly expand the role of volunteers or community partners in schools or for after-school activities. We need as many opportunities as possible for students to interact with each other and for parents to interact with each other and the school. Maybe some of this could be providing space for organic gatherings manned by volunteers (i.e. the art room is open on Monday nights for anyone who wants to come in). Maybe it's a night when parents can come to school and talk about what their kids are experiencing. Arrange for college students to provide tutoring or help or even just play games with students after school or during scheduled blocks in the evening. Administrators should solicit teacher input on struggling or socially disconnected students and do outreach to encourage participation in tutoring or enrichment activities.

What other ideas do you have?

I'm just a parent, not an education expert. However, I have one kid who attended private school during the pandemic and another who attended public. My public school student, who was a strong student before school closures, is doing poorly. My private school student, who is an average student, has come a long way academically (and socially). I've observed how much the relationships between the students and teachers at my kid's private school and the relationships the students have with each other influenced their academic progress for the better, as well as the flip side - how isolation caused disengagement on the part of my public school student that had not been remedied by therapy and a return to school. The problem is that public schools don't have the time and staff to build relationships and provide extra help as smaller private schools do, so we need more involvement from the community or other outside sources to rebuild.

[Anonymous]

I think that you are spot on with needing community support to help kids. You have to factor in background checks and so forth for having people come in the building regularly. I don’t know what current regs are.

I have seen the problem from the teacher point of view. There is a huge push for every class in the grade to be in lockstep with regards to instruction. The teacher who has all the IEP kids is pressured to keep pace with the teacher who has the AAP kids, because we need to expect rigor for all the kids. That sounds nice, but really, the kids who are way behind need to work steadily from where they are, and not on what the kids ahead are doing. Each classroom does not need to do exactly the same lessons, and it is not equity to insist that they do so.

The really disruptive kids need to be placed where they can get help, quickly.

Each elementary school should have a reading and a math lab, where kids can come regularly for remedial work to catch up.

The expectation is that a 5th grader sits in class for the focus lesson on multiplying decimals, when they are still working on subtraction. They have to be “exposed to grade level content.” They feel stupid, get nothing out if it, use cognitive energy to try to follow along, and then huddle in the corner with the special ed teacher for a ten minute lesson on subtraction.

To build skills in math, they need to move sequentially through skills, not piecemeal here and there.

[Anonymous]

The only reason the pandemic trauma should be re-hashed is as a springboard to move forward. Marinating in the past is not going to be helpful for these kids.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Jeff just locked the remote schooling thread because most posts were rehashing school closure decisions. I'm starting this new thread to brainstorm ideas for moving forward. How do we address "learning loss" and rebuild trust in education at all levels? If anyone starts rehashing whether it was right or wrong to close schools, I will report the post.

All of the research shows that there has been a decline in academic achievement at all levels, which was not limited to areas with extended virtual learning.

I'll start with ideas. We need to rebuild trust amongst all stakeholders to move forward. To do this, I think we need to do the following:

1) Put aside adult issues and openly acknowledge the trauma we all experienced during the pandemic. Let kids know that we understand that some of the decisions weren't ideal. Let them tell us about their experience and what they are feeling now. Ask them what they want in their school experience. Keep asking. Give them opportunities to write about what they feel and what they think about the pandemic.

2) Continue to reinforce that we adults are committed to helping them work through this trauma.

3) Require personalized basic skills courses to help students with communication skills, time management, and study skills. These courses need intensive personal components (perhaps through the use of volunteer mentors?), where each student can receive individualized feedback.

4) Make all remedial supports, including tutoring, available in a one on one and in-person formats. Not every student needs to use this, but it should be available. Use local colleges or other members of the community (paid or volunteer) to provide these services. Teachers, what changes would be needed to assess the academic level of each student and meet them where they are?

5) Create more experiential learning opportunities that encourage students, teachers, and community members to work together. This could include student mentors (older students with younger ones), teacher mentors, and community mentors. Within-school mentoring would build relationships and empower older students.

6) Focus SEL on loneliness and connectedness so that students understand the importance of creating relationships with their teachers and classmates.

7) Do more outreach. Every student and every family needs to have someone try to connect with them to let the know they are a valuable part of the community.

Moving forward requires restoring connectedness, which will rebuild trust. Without that, academic improvement will remain stalled. Given the staffing shortages in education, we need to greatly expand the role of volunteers or community partners in schools or for after-school activities. We need as many opportunities as possible for students to interact with each other and for parents to interact with each other and the school. Maybe some of this could be providing space for organic gatherings manned by volunteers (i.e. the art room is open on Monday nights for anyone who wants to come in). Maybe it's a night when parents can come to school and talk about what their kids are experiencing. Arrange for college students to provide tutoring or help or even just play games with students after school or during scheduled blocks in the evening. Administrators should solicit teacher input on struggling or socially disconnected students and do outreach to encourage participation in tutoring or enrichment activities.

What other ideas do you have?

I'm just a parent, not an education expert. However, I have one kid who attended private school during the pandemic and another who attended public. My public school student, who was a strong student before school closures, is doing poorly. My private school student, who is an average student, has come a long way academically (and socially). I've observed how much the relationships between the students and teachers at my kid's private school and the relationships the students have with each other influenced their academic progress for the better, as well as the flip side - how isolation caused disengagement on the part of my public school student that had not been remedied by therapy and a return to school. The problem is that public schools don't have the time and staff to build relationships and provide extra help as smaller private schools do, so we need more involvement from the community or other outside sources to rebuild.

I am a parent and a teacher. Although my kids stayed virtual until the 21-22 school year, they did most activities, including tutoring virtually until this school year. I noticed that all of the in-person activities at my kids’ two schools and my own have many fewer participants this year than prior to the pandemic so I started asking sponsors, kids, and parents. Most said there is still a preference for virtual options. Sometimes it is about convenience rather than health concerns.

While in-person might be more effective than virtual when it comes to remediation, virtual would be more effective than non-participation. Both need to be available so that families who otherwise would disengage have a choice. There should even be a third option of hybrid so that sometimes students can be in person and other times they can be virtual.

Two colleagues tutor Chinese kids in English via Zoom or Google Meets or something. It’s hard to believe that we should totally write virtual off rather than keeping it as one of many tools we can offer families as we customize approaches.

[Anonymous]

Pay teachers more. We’re going to need the best and brightest, or at least the better and brighter, to tackle this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Jeff just locked the remote schooling thread because most posts were rehashing school closure decisions. I'm starting this new thread to brainstorm ideas for moving forward. How do we address "learning loss" and rebuild trust in education at all levels? If anyone starts rehashing whether it was right or wrong to close schools, I will report the post.

All of the research shows that there has been a decline in academic achievement at all levels, which was not limited to areas with extended virtual learning.

I'll start with ideas. We need to rebuild trust amongst all stakeholders to move forward. To do this, I think we need to do the following:

1) Put aside adult issues and openly acknowledge the trauma we all experienced during the pandemic. Let kids know that we understand that some of the decisions weren't ideal. Let them tell us about their experience and what they are feeling now. Ask them what they want in their school experience. Keep asking. Give them opportunities to write about what they feel and what they think about the pandemic.

2) Continue to reinforce that we adults are committed to helping them work through this trauma.

3) Require personalized basic skills courses to help students with communication skills, time management, and study skills. These courses need intensive personal components (perhaps through the use of volunteer mentors?), where each student can receive individualized feedback.

4) Make all remedial supports, including tutoring, available in a one on one and in-person formats. Not every student needs to use this, but it should be available. Use local colleges or other members of the community (paid or volunteer) to provide these services. Teachers, what changes would be needed to assess the academic level of each student and meet them where they are?

5) Create more experiential learning opportunities that encourage students, teachers, and community members to work together. This could include student mentors (older students with younger ones), teacher mentors, and community mentors. Within-school mentoring would build relationships and empower older students.

6) Focus SEL on loneliness and connectedness so that students understand the importance of creating relationships with their teachers and classmates.

7) Do more outreach. Every student and every family needs to have someone try to connect with them to let the know they are a valuable part of the community.

Moving forward requires restoring connectedness, which will rebuild trust. Without that, academic improvement will remain stalled. Given the staffing shortages in education, we need to greatly expand the role of volunteers or community partners in schools or for after-school activities. We need as many opportunities as possible for students to interact with each other and for parents to interact with each other and the school. Maybe some of this could be providing space for organic gatherings manned by volunteers (i.e. the art room is open on Monday nights for anyone who wants to come in). Maybe it's a night when parents can come to school and talk about what their kids are experiencing. Arrange for college students to provide tutoring or help or even just play games with students after school or during scheduled blocks in the evening. Administrators should solicit teacher input on struggling or socially disconnected students and do outreach to encourage participation in tutoring or enrichment activities.

What other ideas do you have?

I'm just a parent, not an education expert. However, I have one kid who attended private school during the pandemic and another who attended public. My public school student, who was a strong student before school closures, is doing poorly. My private school student, who is an average student, has come a long way academically (and socially). I've observed how much the relationships between the students and teachers at my kid's private school and the relationships the students have with each other influenced their academic progress for the better, as well as the flip side - how isolation caused disengagement on the part of my public school student that had not been remedied by therapy and a return to school. The problem is that public schools don't have the time and staff to build relationships and provide extra help as smaller private schools do, so we need more involvement from the community or other outside sources to rebuild.

I am a parent and a teacher. Although my kids stayed virtual until the 21-22 school year, they did most activities, including tutoring virtually until this school year. I noticed that all of the in-person activities at my kids’ two schools and my own have many fewer participants this year than prior to the pandemic so I started asking sponsors, kids, and parents. Most said there is still a preference for virtual options. Sometimes it is about convenience rather than health concerns.

While in-person might be more effective than virtual when it comes to remediation, virtual would be more effective than non-participation. Both need to be available so that families who otherwise would disengage have a choice. There should even be a third option of hybrid so that sometimes students can be in person and other times they can be virtual.

Two colleagues tutor Chinese kids in English via Zoom or Google Meets or something. It’s hard to believe that we should totally write virtual off rather than keeping it as one of many tools we can offer families as we customize approaches.

I was the OP, and that's why I said that not everyone needs to use in person, but that it should be available. I was not suggesting that we should write it off. I think virtual tutoring is great if it works for a family. It's just not ideal for everyone. One of my kids, for instance, has trouble with virtual math instruction

Personally, I loved virtual back-to-school night because it's so much more convenient. However, having attended my first in-person back-to-school night this year, I can see how the impromptu conversations that happened in person provide a different experience.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pay teachers more. We’re going to need the best and brightest, or at least the better and brighter, to tackle this.

This, and stop encouraging teachers to parent children. School is for teaching and learning. Parenting is for home, including tacking behavioral issues.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pay teachers more. We’re going to need the best and brightest, or at least the better and brighter, to tackle this.

I don't think this solves the problem. Certainly teachers should be paid as much as the market will bear, but the DCPS experience suggests that even having (sometimes much) higher pay than surrounding districts is not enough to retain teachers. They complain of administrative issues and behavioral issues, and are willing to give up higher pay to escape these problems.

Administrative issues seem to be able to be solved, but behavioral issues is a whole other issue. The kids that cause repeated disruptions to class need to be removed. Of course, that means (depending on age) they might just be more likely to drop out. But unless DC government becomes a jobs program, I don't really know that these kids have a lot of options.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Pay teachers more. We’re going to need the best and brightest, or at least the better and brighter, to tackle this.

This, and stop encouraging teachers to parent children. School is for teaching and learning. Parenting is for home, including tacking behavioral issues.

This attitude is exactly how you don’t rebuild trust with parents.

I sort of get what the OP means when she references “restoring connectedness” as a way to rebuild trust, but that is going to be an awfully slow path if you’re mostly expecting parents and teachers to ignore the elephant in the room about what happened. But that may be the only option, since there doesn't seem to be a willingness to address it. But I'm not sure public schools will be able hang on if more and more parents continue to send their kids to private schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I think that you are spot on with needing community support to help kids. You have to factor in background checks and so forth for having people come in the building regularly. I don’t know what current regs are.

I have seen the problem from the teacher point of view. There is a huge push for every class in the grade to be in lockstep with regards to instruction. The teacher who has all the IEP kids is pressured to keep pace with the teacher who has the AAP kids, because we need to expect rigor for all the kids. That sounds nice, but really, the kids who are way behind need to work steadily from where they are, and not on what the kids ahead are doing. Each classroom does not need to do exactly the same lessons, and it is not equity to insist that they do so.

The really disruptive kids need to be placed where they can get help, quickly.

Each elementary school should have a reading and a math lab, where kids can come regularly for remedial work to catch up.

The expectation is that a 5th grader sits in class for the focus lesson on multiplying decimals, when they are still working on subtraction. They have to be “exposed to grade level content.” They feel stupid, get nothing out if it, use cognitive energy to try to follow along, and then huddle in the corner with the special ed teacher for a ten minute lesson on subtraction.

To build skills in math, they need to move sequentially through skills, not piecemeal here and there.

I agree with all of this… but I think classrooms should be on ability. My elementary school has 4 identical classrooms. All 4 are way below grade level even though half the kids in each class could do the grade level work. The grade is taught to the bottom quartile. The top kids are just expected to work on their laptops. Why not have 1 rigorous class, 2 on grade classes and 1 remedial class? I would be very upset to hear that some classrooms are allowed to be on grade level but my kids is not because of the classroom makeup. Kids should be allowed to move between classrooms.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think that you are spot on with needing community support to help kids. You have to factor in background checks and so forth for having people come in the building regularly. I don’t know what current regs are.

I have seen the problem from the teacher point of view. There is a huge push for every class in the grade to be in lockstep with regards to instruction. The teacher who has all the IEP kids is pressured to keep pace with the teacher who has the AAP kids, because we need to expect rigor for all the kids. That sounds nice, but really, the kids who are way behind need to work steadily from where they are, and not on what the kids ahead are doing. Each classroom does not need to do exactly the same lessons, and it is not equity to insist that they do so.

The really disruptive kids need to be placed where they can get help, quickly.

Each elementary school should have a reading and a math lab, where kids can come regularly for remedial work to catch up.

The expectation is that a 5th grader sits in class for the focus lesson on multiplying decimals, when they are still working on subtraction. They have to be “exposed to grade level content.” They feel stupid, get nothing out if it, use cognitive energy to try to follow along, and then huddle in the corner with the special ed teacher for a ten minute lesson on subtraction.

To build skills in math, they need to move sequentially through skills, not piecemeal here and there.

I agree with all of this… but I think classrooms should be on ability. My elementary school has 4 identical classrooms. All 4 are way below grade level even though half the kids in each class could do the grade level work. The grade is taught to the bottom quartile. The top kids are just expected to work on their laptops. Why not have 1 rigorous class, 2 on grade classes and 1 remedial class? I would be very upset to hear that some classrooms are allowed to be on grade level but my kids is not because of the classroom makeup. Kids should be allowed to move between classrooms.

Sounds like a logistical nightmare, and entirely at odds with the path public education has taken for decades.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pay teachers more. We’re going to need the best and brightest, or at least the better and brighter, to tackle this.

So I don’t necessarily disagree (although I tend to think improving workloads of teachers is more important than improving pay).

But, I just don’t see a practical path here. There seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem here. More pay (or lower workloads) is important for improving the relationship with teachers and to address recruiting/retention failures. But the broader public isn’t going to support significant increases to teacher pay, or hiring significantly more teachers to reduce workloads, unless they feel confident that it will improve schools.

If so, it comes back to rebuilding trust with parents. How does that happen sooner than waiting for a new generation of parents to come along?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:..but I think classrooms should be on ability. My elementary school has 4 identical classrooms. All 4 are way below grade level even though half the kids in each class could do the grade level work. The grade is taught to the bottom quartile. The top kids are just expected to work on their laptops. Why not have 1 rigorous class, 2 on grade classes and 1 remedial class? I would be very upset to hear that some classrooms are allowed to be on grade level but my kids is not because of the classroom makeup. Kids should be allowed to move between classrooms.

Teachers and schools aren't allowed to group students this way - it is called "tracking" and it is bad for the students who are in the remedial class. "All the research" shows that including kids who are working on remedial skills in with the kids working or or above grade level leads to less of a gap between highest and lowest performing students. In addition, if your school is fairly diverse racially and socioeconomically, what would happen if you grouped students by ability level would be this: students from poorer families (and more likely students of color) would be overly represented in the "remedial" classes and let me promise you this, NO ONE would be happy with seeing that.

[Anonymous]

Can someone be specific about what the "trauma" is kids are experiencing right now? I have a 12th grader and a college sophomore (and I teach elementary school) so I may not be aware of what issues other kids are having. My personal children are all very active in sports and activities in high school and college now, despite being in virtual schooling for over a year. I'm not aware of a large amount of trauma and stress in their peer group, except for the stress of college applications of course.

Our ES school seems pretty much normal emotionally. Academically there are still some gaps. We spent much of last year bringing students who were behind up to where they should be, academically but it is true that for some students, there are still gaps especially in math. What these students need IMO is individual or very small group tutoring, summer school, after school extra help. We can't provide it during the day because we have to (our school district insists that we) stick to the curriculum unfortunately. I believe this policy is misguided. They tell us we can "weave in" remediation in "mini-lessons" but what these students need are actual lessons, not ad hoc mini lessons.

But emotional trauma at the elementary school level? What are people seeing that needs to be dealt with?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
4) Make all remedial supports, including tutoring, available in a one on one and in-person formats. Not every student needs to use this, but it should be available. Use local colleges or other members of the community (paid or volunteer) to provide these services. Teachers, what changes would be needed to assess the academic level of each student and meet them where they are?

We have data out the wazoo on these students. The issue is time - we need time outside of the regular school instructional period to provide the remedial instruction. Keeping kids after school means we need to have funding for buses. And someone needs to pay the tutors for the instruction. Finally, we need GOOD programs geared toward fast remediation. There are a lot of fancy programs out there that school districts buy that are frankly, crap. And often students are put into instructional groups at or after school because they are "below" grade level, but they are all lumped into one class, even though they have many varied needs. The groups should be skill based.