Are Students Learning?
We are quickly approaching the one year mark since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Last January, classrooms across the country were filled with an average of 25-35 students and when you think about it, we had many of the same worries then as now. Are they learning? Are their basic needs being met? How are our students coping socially and emotionally?
As a teacher, administrator, and parent, I’ve often been more concerned about meeting my students’ basic needs such as food, clothing, and sleep. Once we can meet or plan for these, we can dig into the relationship and then turn the focus to academics. The students that cross our paths carry so much on their shoulders. We not only want to teach them how to read, write, and compute math but how to problem solve and be resilient.
How do we work on developing these skills in our students? As a teacher, when a student would ask me for help, I would begin by posing the question, “how would you figure this out if I wasn’t here?” This resulted in students prompting each other to be resourceful, attempting to problem solve themselves before going to an adult.
We also need to recognize that some of our most vulnerable students have been “lost” during the pandemic. The United States has approximately 50 million students who attend public schools and of those, around 3 million continue to be unaccounted for since the pandemic began. Let me explain what I mean as “lost.” Lost students are ones that haven’t been to school in any form since last March. They may have had no access to the internet for online learning. Or they could be students who are responsible for taking care of their siblings and are just trying to survive. There are also students who are homeless and trying to find shelter each night during the pandemic outways attending school. But these “lost” students haven’t been seen by school personnel since March. These same students may have been the students whose attendance wasn’t great, to begin with, or the family was transient. Where are these students? How many more will go unaccounted for? Let us not forget about these lost students!
#standreadytosupport
