Column: SAU 16 - Focus on the learning, not the leaning
David Leonhardt recently wrote in a New York Times Morning Newsletter article (No Way to Grow Up, January 4, 2022) that “children fell far behind in school during the first year of the pandemic and have not caught up.” While most can agree that the past two years have been hard on everyone and traditional instruction was significantly interrupted and/or altered due to building closures and technology obstacles, rest assured that students did not stop learning. The learning certainly looked different, but it didn’t stop.
We have learned that we cannot simply ask students to jump through endless hoops, fill in endless circles and memorize endless lists, then expect them to emerge after 13 years as critical thinkers and engaged citizens. On the contrary, the very students who seem to excel at this type of “learning” are the ones who are the least prepared for the problem solving and relationship building that comprise the basis of post-secondary school life in the 21st century. And if we are asking our students to be critical thinkers with the capacity for reflection and self-evaluation, then we must engage in those activities right on up the chain of learners, all the way to the lead learners. We must create the conditions where reflection and self-evaluation are not just something that we ask education professionals to do sporadically and in a vacuum. Reflection and self-evaluation must be the building blocks of the system. They must be embedded in the architecture itself.
Learning is not how much content can be covered in a period of time; however, content is used to foster learning. Teachers and students utilize subject matter units such as world conflict, poetry, matrices, and colligative properties as a vehicle for students to master critical analysis, communication, problem-solving, and collaboration.
Understanding and practicing with concrete facts is not exclusively an exercise in rote memorization like math computation or alphabet recitation. Facts can be substituted depending upon the subject matter; however, the skills being practiced in all content areas are the same.
Our teachers and administrators recognize the importance of meeting the learning needs of our students. The challenge continues to be helping our students, staff and parents understand traditional grade-level benchmarks are not used to measure “how far behind” a student is, and to understand where to begin the teaching and learning process with each student. The pandemic has provided an opportunity for growth for our educators to implement the seven design principles of competency-based education (Aurora, 2019). The concerns around learning gaps have forced educators to, as the Aurora Institute presents it, clearly identify “rigorous common expectations for learning that are explicit, transparent. measurable, and transferable.” As we continue to fully implement a competency-based education (CBE) system in SAU 16, the fear that “my child is behind in school” diminishes as each student advances at their own learning pace and not in competition with their peers.
The pandemic has taught all of us how important it is to build upon the resilience and grit that may have escaped many of us prior to these past two years. Although the amount of core content that was “covered” may be less than in years past, our students have demonstrated how they can continue to grow and survive in a world that changed for them on a near constant basis. Each student met different challenges with varying levels of success and were put into uncomfortable positions as a result of those challenges. Seth Godin tells us “Discomfort brings engagement and change. Discomfort means you’re doing something that others were unlikely to do, because they’re hiding out in the comfortable zone.” Given the amount of discomfort we all shared, it is a safe bet that learning and growth were abundant.
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This is not to say that learning didn’t come without sacrifice and pain – we see it and work with it every day. Early in the pandemic each of us was forced into mental and physical isolation for lengthy periods of time with students living in questionably safe conditions being most affected. Our school leaders have described the arduous path they have followed to help students recover the social and emotional development skills that were stunted. Teachers continue to devote much time to helping students simply speak with kind and caring words toward their classmates. The anxiety, phobias, and lack of trust that the pandemic generated is still evident in all of our schools.
Dr. Robert Macy, founder and president of International Trauma Center in Boston, has shared his clinical observation that students have been traumatized by the events of the past two years and their disruptive and unruly behavior upon re-entry into their schools is a result of reverting to what they have known and consider safe. We are working to support our educators to understand that some of the “younger” behaviors are not a permanent regression and are actually indicative of students searching for solutions that previously helped them feel safe when they were younger. Learning how to support our students as a result of trauma is a critical component of our ongoing work in this area, and we are fortunate to be able to provide professional learning in the areas of psychological first aid, secondary trauma, stress management, and how to respond to student behaviors with research-based trauma informed best practices.
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Over the past nine months, we have listened in SAU 16 to negative public perspectives about statewide school rankings, perceived lack of rigorous academics, and failed leadership. We disagree with the purpose and contents of these messages. David Leonhardt’s article exacerbates these sentiments with a general purpose description of the current state of the nation’s education system. We can understand where these sentiments come from given the sources’ superficial understanding of how navigating a catastrophic event like a global pandemic can affect the ecosystem of a learning organization such as ours, but we will not be distracted from our primary purpose of improving learning for all students. Our students, families, and educators have grown too strong through their discomfort to lean in any other direction.
David Ryan is superintendent, Esther Asbell is associate superintendent, and Christopher Andriski is assistant superintendent of SAU 16 schools.