Loses and Gains - No Gaps to Fill

 "There is no such thing as learning loss.

When it comes to K-12 schooling, the truth is that some of us are more used to interruptions than others. Those of us who have to move around a lot, are living between two countries, or who have experienced a major injury, illness or are chronically ill, and even those who just changed schools once know what loss feels like.

But it is not a loss of learning.

It is loss of a previously imagined trajectory leading to a previously imagined future. Learning is never lost, though it may not always be “found” on pre-written tests of pre-specified knowledge or preexisting measures of pre-coronavirus notions of achievement." 

- Rachel Gabriel, Author/Educator

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        As we have progressed through the pandemic with it's numerous economic closures, shifts to remote learning, quarantines and waves of transmission, I think all of us are feeling a little battered and worn - some of us a whole lot more so than others, depending on how frequently we have been personally impacted by any or all of these circumstances. And there is no doubt our children have experienced the pandemic through their own lenses with a wide variety of impacts and implications. 

            For the greater part of this 2020-21 school year, I have been considering the impact on children from the perspective of emotional wellness and how the school might best support and sustain students' well-being as we gather in-person every day under very unusual circumstances. 

             We have worked hard to stay focused on the core work we believe sustains students - using peace education, place-based learning and design thinking to continue to build our learners' academic tool kits so they will be able to successfully engage in real world learning and understanding. This has included our highly focused work on improving student writing that we took up this year as part of our school development plan. 

            We have engaged in a variety of personal well-being activities intended to promote a sense of familiarity, fun and collegiality when we cannot gather in our usual ways to celebrate and share learning. Things like Spirit Days, virtual Peace Assemblies, the virtual '12 Days of Christmas' concerts, the Peace Book Video Challenge just recently launched - these are all intentional strategies intended to foster a sense of safety and well-being in this tumultuous school year.

            When I saw Rachel Gabriel's post called "What Learning Loss Really Means" it gave me pause to consider how we will continue to teach and learn past the pandemic.  Although I have clearly stated many times I do not consider this to be a time of learning loss we will need to make up, but rather a time of learning differently we will need to leverage and build upon for and with each child to catch them where they are and scaffold their learning forward, I had not considered the many implications the idea of 'learning loss' might have for students in schools.  Gabriel's post brought the idea of 'filling in learning loss gaps' much more clearly into focus.

"The legacy of the standards movement of the 1990s, and the high-stakes testing it inspired in the early 2000s, is a version of education that is assumed not to exist or matter unless or until it is predicted and measured. The pandemic has illustrated with searing definition how wrong that assumption is. We have all learned, every day, unconditionally...

Students are learning how to reset the rhythms and structures of their days. They are learning different patterns and modes of communication. They may be taking on different roles in their homes and learning how to complete new tasks, engage in new games and develop or sustain new and different activities.

Some are learning from the outdoor world on walks that go slower and last longer than before. Others are watching nature change day-by-day out their window, in their gardens, and along trails and bodies of water. Some are spending more time in their imaginations because it’s the only place to go, but this is not unimportant work.

Students cannot help but learn about themselves, others and the world around them in this time when solitude has steadily increased alongside disconnection and uncertainty. Even those who are too young to verbalize their understandings understand their world has changed, and are changing right along with it."

        Wow! These words abruptly shifted my thinking away from 'how will we help children learn the skills and strategies they missed out on as a result of the impacts of the pandemic?" to 'how will we acknowledge and honour the learning children have experienced as a result of the impacts of the pandemic, and build new bridges with them to leverage these experiences in support of learning?' 

        The truth of the matter is that our trust foundations, whether we are young or old(er!), have been definitively rocked and knocked about. Nothing we counted on can be counted on anymore - our health, medical care, jobs, homes, school, travel, relationships, governance, community supports, how we gather, play and celebrate life - to be the same as it once so concretely was in our lives. Even those of us who have managed to persevere relatively unscathed with health, jobs, homes and relationships relatively intact have all experienced the insecurities of familiar routines, gatherings, experiences all evaporating inexplicably and unexpectedly. It is hard to lose what we trust - it is harder still to trust what replaces the familiar.

        The truth also is that there have been gains. We do not see the world with the same eyes we filtered daily living through just one short year ago - yet we are finding ways to survive and even thrive. Gabriel captured some of this in her article as well:

"(Students) learned to take gym class on YouTube, that people you have never met can be your greatest teachers, that the ability to go outside and play during the day makes every day brighter, and that their safety depends on the decisions of others.

They learned that...learning does not require feet on the floor, hands on their desks, and eyes tracking the speaker. They learned what taking breaks does for them as learners, and what conversation and companionship means for them as individuals. Teachers learned too — that their already lean curriculum could be even leaner and more focused. That practice and application could and should look different at home, and that family members, friends and neighbors are a resource not only for supporting what happens in school, but for extending and elaborating on it in ways we cannot predict."

            In other words, children learned to trust different structures than those we counted on to frame the concepts of 'school'. As adults, we are struggling to trust different structures as well - neighbours who help brighten our days in little ways, community drives to support families struggling with job, home or food insecurities, working from home, trying to make sense of what 'economic recovery' might really mean if it doesn't restore the world we once knew, grappling with the idea of recurring waves of variant transmissions and vaccine uncertainties and where in the world we find enough truth about anything to feel like we can trust our world again.

            Learning to trust again is a by-product of any disaster and our world has been completely upended during this global disaster. Our children trust - generally speaking - more readily than we do as adults - they trust us to provide a safe world to live in. We are scrambling, trying, re-arranging and re-considering everything as we work to honour their trust even as we ourselves no longer recognize the best path. Gabriel captures this best when she notes:

"The truth is that we are all in the process of learning and unlearning; of being schooled and unschooled. Our imagined trajectories were disrupted, and this particular disruption with its layers of grief and edges of uncertainty cannot be overestimated in scope or impact. This is precisely the reason we must stop telling the Corona Kids that they fell behind and have to catch up. Anything other than acknowledging unconditional learning is a lie that sustains fear-fueled systems of inequity...sometimes you have to unlearn things in order to get them right.

Where this is the case, then the academic version of so-called “covid loss” should be considered humanity’s gain. Some of us unlearned taken-for-granted assumptions about our neighbors, ourselves and our history. Some of us unlearned our relative contempt for teachers when we saw how hard it was to teach our own children at home.

Now, it is time to unlearn our trust in companies that stimulate fear of low achievement to sell tests and remediation programs. It is time to relearn what learning really looks like."

        In September 2020, we welcomed students back to EHS both in-person and as part of HUB online learning. We established as one of our school development goals to focus on helping students improve with their writing. Regardless of where students were with developing writing proficiency when schools switched to online learning in March of 2020, we knew every child would have experienced a 5-month gap in daily learning with a change in their approaches, skills and strategies associated with writing so we determined we would personalize their learning-to-write experiences as much as possible. 

            Although it seemed like an enormous task to take up last September, teachers have invested great efforts into approaching the teaching of writing with specific scaffolds, opportunities to practice and practice in gentle ways without overt assessments or demanding expectations, offering time and space for children to engage in learning as they felt ready and supported. Five months later, we assessed their progress and compared it to the progress of our students a year ago in January, 2020. We were amazed to see students progressing as we would have expected them to - sometimes with greater success - despite the disparities and perceived 'gaps' that were evident in September.

            Children bring their best selves to school, full of all the experiences and perceptions that create their lived experiences. As teachers we need to meet them where they are, honour their worlds and offer, as gently as possible, the time/space/unique scaffolds/abundant opportunities for each child to proceed to the best of their own abilities. This has punched some holes in our long-honoured scope and sequence plans but it has also offered us the gift of teaching differently within the context of each learner rather than the lesson plans, the anticipated trajectories of student learning we have become so familiar with and the expectations we all bring to the table of 'school'. 

            I am coming to see that even more than an economic recovery from the pandemic, we are all in need of soul recovery - a way to accept what is, navigate new paths and not apply pre-pandemic blanket thinking to children whose lived experiences are considerably different than what we had experienced pre-pandemic. Soul recovery means we need to find the grace for each child to be valued as they are, the time, space and opportunity to try learning out in a variety of ways until they feel comfortable with moving forward. We are not removing targets, expectations or curricular goals. We are simply finding comfortable ways to navigate a new reality. 

        There are no gaps to fill - just an awareness finding our ways to success might mean building new bridges and learning maps for each child. And that is, in my opinion, an amazing opportunity to learn from and with our students.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School