Today, the state's board of education said all high school students needed to be back in classrooms full-time by May 17. Elementary school students across the state are already back in person full time, and middle schoolers are set to return tomorrow.
But as more and more students are making their way back to classrooms, school districts and education advocates are exploring how best to support these young people after a less-than-ideal 13 months of learning.
Paul Reville is a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where he leads the Education Redesign Lab. He is also a former secretary of education for the state of Massachusetts.
He argues that districts should abandon a one-size-fits-all approach to helping students and instead tailor their aid to each student's needs. He said that aid should focus first on the social and emotional losses experienced this year by students before handling academic learning losses.
"We need to reconnect students first — to re-inspire them, to re-motivate them, to get them out of their cocoons and getting exercise and out into the sunlight and moving around," Reville said. "All of that needs to precede the actual work of filling those learning gaps. If we don't do the good work of reconnecting students with their teachers and one another and rebuilding their sense of trust and involvement and engagement with the work of learning, then we won't get very far in terms of closing those gaps we're justifiably worried about."
Neema Avashia agrees. She teaches eigth grade civics at Dorchester's McCormack Middle School. Avashia surveyed her students and asked them what they felt they had lost and gained in the pandemic. She said the responses were overwhelmingly things that could not be measured with testing.
"They actually felt like they gained a lot during this time," she said. "That they gained in ways that are about learning about yourself, self discovery, exploring self interest. And the things that they felt like they lost, which were also significant, weren't things you could measure on a test. Kids talked about losing family members. They talked about losing their connection to peers. They talked about, in some cases, about losing their connection to themselves. And they were really distressed to hear that when we're considering what it means to respond to the losses that young people have experienced, our response is so rooted in the measuring of academic standards, as opposed to considering that there are all these other kinds of loss that young people have gone through."
Avashia said communities need to make space for students to heal from their collective trauma from this pandemic and support that healing.
Click on the audio player above to listen to the full episode.
Segments:
Paul Reville - 2:33
Neema Avashia - 16:46
