Let’s Meet Our Students Where They Are…
As our children grow, they achieve developmental milestones. Most of us begin to learn and encounter these milestones with our children during pregnancy. Once a child is born, we begin to really measure things like height, weight, percentiles, etc. We come to rely on these metrics at each appointment and worry if our children aren’t within a specific range. “Oh no, Junior is only in the 93rd percentile in weight, what’s wrong!?” One of the most important reasons for this tracking is to monitor the child’s ability to thrive.
As our children age, the well visits and collection of these metrics become less frequent. As our daughter and son develop, we’ve realized they experience some of their milestones at completely different times. Our daughter didn’t walk independently until she was almost 15 months old, as she found crawling to be quicker and more comfortable. However, our son walked at 9 months. It didn’t mean he was more advanced. One factor to consider is that he had his older sister modeling this behavior.
I believe it is important that we remember these milestones and expectations when we are working with children at school. Too often with veteran teachers, I’ve heard comments like, “They are in 5th grade and should know how to do X.” “X” could be anything from having all their multiplication facts memorized to completing their assignment tracker to remembering to empty their backpack. These comparisons need to stop. All our students do not come to us with the same set of skills achieved. At work, we don’t all possess the same skills at the same levels. Take a minute and think. We all know that person (maybe you) that is always late for work. This co-worker may have an excuse each time, but we were taught in school to be in class by the time the bell rang. So why is this person always late?
Let’s commit to meeting our students where they are and not where we think they should be. We have to remember that not all children come to us with the same foundation and many will have significant gaps as a result of COVID-19 or were already experiencing significant gaps before the pandemic.
#standreadytosupport
