[ad_1]
II had the impression that this fall would be – well – different.
As of March, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, just under 40% of American students were still learning entirely by distance. About the same percentage was back to full-time in-person learning (23% of students were enrolled in blended learning).
Thanks to a constant flow of vaccines and much anticipated national public health leadership, it finally looked like schools could be safe enough to push for reopening in person for most students this school year. And yet, the new Delta variant of the novel coronavirus has left the United States with uncertain prospects for in-person schooling this fall.
Get essential education information and commentary delivered straight to your inbox. register here for the daily 74’s newsletter.
One thing is clear: Families with young children are going to end up with bad options this fall. Reopen schools even as pediatric infectious disease specialists warn us that the new variant of COVID-19 is a threat to our children? Keeping schools primarily virtual as our collective mental health continues to deteriorate? There is stress, anxiety, suffering and trauma in both cases. The only certainty is that families and their children will suffer another beating.
Think of it as a universal form of long COVID. Most of us, maybe all of us, whether or not we’ve contracted the coronavirus, will carry some of this collective trauma with us for years to come – perhaps for the rest of our lives. For our house, it’s the pains of the aging parent body worn out by 18 (and more) months of juggling two full-time jobs and full-time child care for three young children. I also enter the post-pandemic period with a sense of shattered social trust after months of navigating our repeated collective failures to seriously deal with a generational crisis.
I also carry the lonely echoes of children screaming at each other from windows and porches this past spring, voices that bounced off the row of houses and across our block in a city frozen and silent by lockdown. Even when they were merry, the enveloping loneliness was terrifying – a dystopian backdrop for an angry and anxious season.
Months have passed. These same children came to me when I was on a sneak walk with our baby. They had been chasing lonely games and distracted, exhausted caregivers to ask about the child in my stroller, and if I knew the school they attended before the virus, and had I noticed the stick tent that ‘they had built?
As you rush to throw away your masks, while you go on vacation, know that children are not doing well. Some are traumatized, most experience significant daily stress and almost all feel lonely. Last fall, in a Parent Institute for Quality Education survey of Spanish-speaking families in California, nearly two-thirds of those polled said they were “concerned about the emotional needs of their children.” Food instability increased dramatically for American children during the pandemic, especially children of color. Research on children and social isolation suggests that the impacts of this protracted disaster will not simply go away with the end of closures and full reopening of schools.
That’s why educators need to put the social and emotional well-being of children in the spotlight this summer and fall, whether or not they can safely reopen. It will not be easy in all communities. Many administrators will naturally want to focus all of their energies on academics. The data suggests that various models of learning during a pandemic were not particularly effective for most children: many schools will feel the pressure to rearrange their schedules around initiating remedial programs or educational strategies aimed at identifying the problems. math skills (or reading, or science, etc.) that kids missed out on last year… and then they got their teachers to tackle these issues eagerly.
Related: A Better Equation: New Pandemic Data Supports Acceleration Rather Than Correction To Make Up For COVID-Related Learning Loss
But in most cases, this will be both a conceptual and a tactical mistake. First, it confuses teaching and learning with simple, cumulative processes. High-quality education is not just about pouring knowledge into children like water in a bucket. It’s a process of talking and connecting, figuring out what a child knows and what they don’t know, figuring out what interests them and what they’re afraid of, and then bringing them back. this place to new material. Children learn best when they feel safe enough in their classroom and school community to explore and take risks. In essence: all learning is both social and emotional.
Second, schools that scramble their pandemic recovery efforts to drive out student “learning loss” risk ignoring the depths of social and emotional challenges that children are likely to bring back to campus. The emphasis on triage of students’ academic needs is unlikely to be as effective as it seems.
Whenever schools bring their entire student body back for in-person learning, most will find that children will not come back fully whole. They will not immediately be ready to embark on aggressive and intensive academic teaching. They’ll come back from training in, well… everything. They will need time to get used to focusing on learning in the presence of friends, spending entire days indoors around crowds, working in educational structures of schedules and authority. Students need to practice learning to be in communities with their teachers and peers.
Educators need to start there: helping children re-acclimatize to the basics of spending their days living and learning in groups with their peers. It means giving kids time to organically and authentically reconnect with kids and adults. It means making room for children to talk about their feelings, struggles and challenges of the pandemic so that they don’t carry all of that stress with them throughout the school year. And that means starting with some informal activities that make the reopening feel like the celebration and the slow return to normal that it should be. Importantly, as they bring children back into daily school routines, educators and administrators need to watch for red flags from those who may be suffering from trauma and other adverse childhood experiences.
Related: Albright: Physical health is only part of what makes a school safe. 4 ways to include student mental health in reopening plans
This is just one more example of a pandemic lesson worth putting forward into the future: For over a year, many of us have had to repeatedly learn the hard way that we don’t. cannot define the conditions for a return to normal. Time and time again, we have tried to hurry beyond the serious work of leaving the crisis behind, and we have continued to see that there are consequences in skipping steps. Reopening schools is no different: We can get children out of pandemic containment and go back to school, but that doesn’t mean the pandemic has finished affecting children.
Related: Subscribe to the 74 newsletter
[ad_2]
Source link