Pandemic PTSD Barrier to Better
At the beginning of each new year, there is a tradition to make a resolution for the year ahead. The resolution often involves continuing a good practice, changing an undesired behavior, or accomplishing a goal. No matter the resolution type, it comes down to one commonality, a focus on being better than the year prior. But far too often we forget to look to the past to evaluate whether what we are resolving to do is truly better than what we did prior. This is the central problem facing educators as we try to deal with the problems exacerbated by the pandemic.
The mere mention of the pandemic can be a trigger for the trauma experienced by so many. Trauma results form an extremely stressful even that causes severe disability in the functioning of our daily lives. With known cases of COVID totally over 100,000,000 along with over 1,000,000 COVID related deaths, it’s no wonder the desire to leave the pandemic behind is so strong. We want to fully return to a pre-COVID time, when our lives were not disrupted, when we knew what to expect each day we woke from a night’s slumber. While the pandemic protocols and daily updates are seemingly over, parents, students, and educators know that things have not gone back to normal despite our best efforts, nor should they.
The lingering effects of the pandemic can be measured in numerous ways. Public school enrollment has dropped by over 1,000,000 students. States also report an increase in the number of students chronically absent, missing at least 15 days of school in a year, when comparing the 2018-2019 (pre-pandemic) school year to the 2021-2022 (post-pandemic). Some states reported a near-doubling of their chronically absent rate. Educators know that students who aren’t in school, are more likely to perform poorly compared to peers who regularly attend school.
Then there are measures of student achievement. The high school class of 2022 had the lowest ACT scores in over 30 years. Students’ scores declined in math and reading relative to pre-pandemic levels on the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, otherwise known as “The Nation’s Report Card.”. This caused greater learning gaps among children of the same grade with those students who schools stayed in remote learning the longest, suffering the most. Sadly, the pandemic exacerbated the growing educational divide along racial and socioeconomic lines. The data shows that those students that were already low performing, dropped even farther. Then there is a growing employment gap as the retirement rate and the number of vacant teaching positions are at an all-time high. A return to pre-pandemic teaching is not going to fix the growing gaps and education problems inherent in our factory model system.
The pandemic caused schools, educators, and students to adapt quickly to remote and hybrid learning. While I will not even attempt to debate pandemic learning was a wholesale educational success, we did learn several lessons that we can apply going forward. The challenge of students attending class, whether in person or virtually, dramatically increased the learning gap between students. A traditional model of teaching, with the teacher giving knowledge to all students at the same time was made more difficult due to that learning gap. But those teachers that provided a blended learning format were able to meet the students where they were in the curriculum and then facilitate learning for each child based on their individual needs. Students were able to focus on their learning instead of having to wait for everyone in their class to be at the same place. I saw the success of this model firsthand as a school superintendent and more importantly as a parent to four elementary children.
The level of success, during the pandemic, for my children and others correlated with which teachers in what subjects utilized a blended learning format. Most often the teachers using a blended format would provide videos, either self-created or from online providers connected to the learning to master for that lesson. Once the students thought they had mastered the learning for the lesson, they completed a check for understanding with mastery as the desired outcome. This allowed the teacher to consistently know where each student was and to tailor the learning to close any learning gaps before moving onto the next lesson. While a smaller percentage of teachers utilized blended learning before the pandemic, the format was forced on the greater majority during the pandemic. Whether it is during my travels to schools around the nation, through conversations with teachers and administrators or seeing the learning my own children are exposed to in their classes, most teachers returned to the classic way of teaching despite the known educational issues.
After experiencing so much upheaval and trauma, a return to what was known and comfortable is understandable. When we experience trauma, we want to return to some form of normal. The problem with doing so in our schools it that by every measurement, the way we educated students was not working prior to the pandemic and the learning gap has only grown. If we truly want to move past the trauma we all experienced, we must focus on creating a better way of teaching, a better way of learning. Providing each child with access to a self-paced, mastery-focused education, is how we close learning gaps while also transforming our traditional educational system to a better, modern classroom.
