This year sucks for education (and so many other things). Parents face impossible choices. Students face impossible changes. Teachers face impossible tasks. And, I’ve seen countless posts on all of social media trying to reassure everyone that just doing what you can do of your job is enough. That’s just not true. Students have lost instructional time, which certainly impacts the long term progression of their education. Compound this with the stress of spring adversely impacting their ability to learn and I don’t know a single student whose education hasn’t suffered.
I’m not blaming teachers, because they need specific training to be effective online educators. Most were trained to teach in-person (and even then we have testing that doesn't align with the best instructional practices they learned in college). And to make matters worse, requiring some to do simultaneous remote teaching and in-person teaching means that either in-person students or online students get all the attention or neither gets even half of what they need. And even teachers, who just have to deal with in-person “traditional” teaching have many of their usual tools gone because of social distancing. I’m not blaming parents, because there is a huge difference between parenting and teaching even though both involve providing guidance and instruction. But, not being at fault doesn’t mean we don’t have to deal with the consequences of how badly education is failing kids this year.
Each month large portions of the students fall further behind and research shows that replacing those lost gains can take years. And make-up that gap assumes we can return to traditional in-person teaching with no distancing restrictions within the next year. Except, returning to “normal” won’t fix the losses. We need to revamp education to empower children to learn whether they are in the classroom or not. Without changing how we educate this generation will continue to see large portions of the cohort fall further behind.
We currently teach children to be passive learners. We spend numerous hours educating them on how to sit still and listen (valuable skills, but not conducive to engaged learning). We also teach them that they will be told what to learn and do. I see so many students struggle in college and work when they are expected to figure out where and how to get the skills they need because no one will tell them everything. Our brains make amazing connections and can develop these skills early. We just need to teach children to focus their natural inquiries in a productive direction. Giving them the skills to learn independently will enable them to make up the learning gap, which will be different for each child.
