Un-Preparing, For a Post Pandemic School Year

Image by Daniela Dimitrova from Pixabay

The unparalleled level of interruptions and changes to your child’s learning over the past 16 months is raising questions about what the next school year will look like. Will my child be “behind”? Will they have to do extra work to “catch up”? Will there be big “learning gaps”?

These are all terms and phrases that we have heard often in recent months. Parents are rightfully concerned about pieces that may have been missed during the pandemic. While this is understandable, it does not reflect how we see our students and how we approach our instructional planning.

In some cases parents may even want their child to repeat their current grade, or are wanting school jurisdictions to present this as a potential option for families. Most of these same jurisdictions will recognize this as a misguided strategy that will ultimately not meet the learning needs of their students. Here's why.

The influences that lead to a child underachieving at school are complex and can vary greatly from child to child. They can include learning disabilities, social-emotional issues resulting from trauma, neglect or current environmental conditions, as well as early childhood factors and experiences. In many cases the influences can include more than one of these and how they interact can compound the learning challenges for a child. Schools and school systems know that the conditions that lead to the child underachieving in the first place, will still be present the following school year.

While schools have known this for some time, the current research also supports it. John Hattie's work, Visible-Learning.org indicated that not only was the retention of students an ineffective means of improving student achievement, but it actually had a negative effect that was measurable.

We recognize that not all learning takes place at the same time for our students. Each year, including non-pandemic years, we create positive learning environments in classrooms that may have 2-4 year differences in reading levels, multiple students with identified, unique learning needs, equal numbers of students with unique learning needs that may not yet be identified. Although our program of studies is organized into specific grade levels with expectations attached to each, how and when students achieve these can vary greatly and that’s ok.

We are very accustomed to personalizing the learning experiences for our students. Our responsibility is not to get our students to “catch up”, or fill in “learning gaps”. Our responsibility is to assess our students accurately to see where they are, and move them forward from there. That is what we will do next school year because we are teachers, and that is what we always do.

The best things you can do to prepare your child for next year include connecting them with family and friends they may not have seen for a while, spending lots of time being active and being outside, and maybe spending some time reading to them and with them. If they feel happy and confident about coming back to school in the fall, that is all they really need. We will take care of the rest.