My second year in the classroom was in actuality my first. I started teaching transitional kindergarten in the fall of 2020, initially over Zoom and then switching over to a hybrid model for the final six weeks. My sophomore year of teaching came around and we were all returning back to the classroom after a long 17 months, and any anxieties I may have felt after being away for so long came second to the excitement of once more being surrounded by kids learning and playing together.
Pretty soon though, much of that excitement was dashed. The students were sweet and funny and painfully cute. The families were engaged and collaborative and communicative. And still, every day was incredibly hard. Kids were ripping toys away from their peers, pushing and shoving each other during every conflict, and bursting into tears at every inconvenience, weeks into the school year.
I assumed it was just because I was teaching four-year-olds, but my middle- and high-school teacher friends shared somewhat similar stories with their students. I then figured maybe it was because I was a novice teacher, but then my veteran colleagues would remark incredulously on this being one of the most difficult years of their careers. I thought maybe it was my site or my district, but then more and more reporting came out on how all over the country, students and teachers were having a really hard time coming back into the classroom. No explanation made sense, besides the most obvious one.
In the latter half of 2022, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released its annual “Report Card,” confirming the drop in average reading and math scores from 2019. When the global coronavirus pandemic began to upend life as we knew it, closing down schools and forcing teaching, students, and families to cobble together virtual education infrastructures, fears around “learning loss” became constantly stressed and religiously reported on. “Learning loss” prophesied that COVID-related disruptions to education would result in students from kindergarten to college “falling behind” academically and we would see the erosion of any scholastic growth that had been made thus far.
What this discourse eclipsed, however, were the gargantuan other losses students were experiencing. Children lost their routines and their vacations and their friends. Those in households viewing first-hand the rises in substance abuse and domestic violence lost their sense of safety. 200,000 children in the United States lost a parent or a guardian to COVID-19. But these losses, and how to consider and combat them, came second to concerns around “learning loss.”
School leaders, politicians, journalists, and other adults charged down the myopic path to understand and ameliorate “learning loss,” sidelining the other colossal traumas experienced by children and reinforcing a familiar pattern in education in which academic performance is prioritized over student-wellbeing. What would it look like instead to reimagine and reconsider what students need in this “post”-COVID moment to help them thrive and succeed, and not just in the years to come, but today too, in the here and now?
My first step was to lean on the families in my classroom. They had been around their children around the clock for months before we came back to school, and I knew they would be the best resource. They got used to calls from me during the day, and I got used to texts from them at night, as we all tried to transition the kids into a completely new environment. All whilst being bombarded with messages reminding us that schools were in disarray, public education was failing, and students would be ruined forevermore.
Assessments came near and my worry grew at the thought of having to test my four-year-olds. With the support of families, students were slowly growing more accustomed to school, but many were still unable to sit through lessons or activities. They had missed the pre-school experiences that would have taught them how to follow directions, work through frustrations, and identify and articulate their needs. But the district continued to emphasize the state- and federal-level concerns around instructional minutes and academic standards, whilst providing less guidance and support on the social-emotional needs central to addressing “learning loss.”
My lifeline was the early childhood teaching community. As I muddled through lessons those first few months, they stated firmly in professional developments and professional learning communities that their priority would be play and routines and relationships building, not letters and numbers. They reminded me that I didn’t need to put pressure on myself or on my kids to be at a certain place academically, and that by focusing on that reintroduction to school, I would see in the long-term the academic growth I was working towards. So our playtime became longer, our dance parties more frequent, and we spent every moment we could outside, learning and co-creating what we wanted school to be.
“Learning loss,” conceptually, is based on many assumptions and makes many more. It focuses on what was not learned academically and seeks recourse. It ignores what students were learning socially-emotionally during months spent at home and fails to consider how those latter may be impacting the former. Furthermore, “learning loss” elevates the use of standards – that have only been around for 30 years – as the most salient metrics and measures of achievement. Obsessing over where students “should be” starts us all off on a deficit-mindset, assigning students, teachers, and families the Sisyphean task of turning back the clock to a world that doesn’t exist. Finally, “learning loss” is framed as a pandemic problem, in which the hypothesis was that school closures, virtual learning, and other shocks to the system would result in said losses. However data from NAEP and other sources continued to indicate that more saliently than whether a school was closed for weeks or months were social factors, with poverty being a much more effective means of understanding “learning loss.”
“Learning loss” is not a problem to be understated. Schools can ease the burdens young people are facing by equipping them with the knowledge and skills to employ for future education and careers. Moreover, the attention around “learning loss” brings to light how much schools and those inside of them require support. Hearing that the kids are not alright lights a fire in us to do right by them by providing a quality education that all students deserve but only some get.
The problem with “learning loss” is that it inadvertently confirms persistent inclinations to prioritize academic losses above all else. We need to expand our goal of getting students back on track to include the emotional (and material) support they and their families need, if anything because we know that is what will improve academic performance. Instead of more tutors, more minutes, and more tests, our students need more counselors, more rest, and more care, not only so they can be at level, but so that they can be best equipped to live the lives that they choose too.
After months of social-emotional learning through play and routines, it was time to go back to traditional instruction by the time January came around. With trepidation, we sat on the rug, and did learning centers, and completed worksheets and assessments, and this time, it all worked. Students were now familiar with school, familiar with how it all worked, and were ready and excited to learn all the academic standards we were meant to tackle.
And they soared. Within weeks, I saw my students writing and spelling their names, identifying and creating patterns, and demonstrating a real joy and excitement about school and learning. The commitment from families made it all possible, working with their children tirelessly outside of school, and helping me be the best teacher inside of school too. Not all of them were where they were “supposed” to be, but all of them grew, which to me, was most important.
Students of all ages underwent an enormous trauma because of COVID, and what they need now more than anything is an attentiveness to their well-being. If we want them to succeed academically, that might counterintuitively look like moving away from academics to better support their social-emotional growth and trusting that the rest will follow. The pandemic took a lot from kids. What do we want to give them back?
I’m so glad you had community to reassure you about focusing on the kids’ wellbeing without guilt. Speaks to the importance of colleagues who stay connected and in honest conversation! How do we create more of that time for all teachers?