Kids must get up to speed, but ‘the definition of up to speed in 2022 is a lot different’ than before: expert
Jessica Wong· CBC News ·
For the CBC News series Learning Curve, we asked Canada’s provincial and territorial governments about their plans to help students recover from pandemic education. Here’s a summary of what they shared and what education experts think about the details. (Illustration: Micheline Parent/CBC; Photo: Oseremen Irete/CBC)
Some young learners are struggling to build early reading skills while others stumble over math concepts. Repeated pandemic pivots have left students out of practice with classroom learning, impacted their mental health and distanced them from peers. The CBC News series Learning Curve explores the ramifications of COVID-19 for Canadian students and what they’ll need to recover from pandemic-disrupted schooling.
What school looks like under COVID-19 has differed depending on where you are in Canada, but all students have experienced at least some form of disruption to their learning since March 2020.
In just the first 14 months of the pandemic, for example, province-wide closures of in-person schooling ranged from nine weeks in British Columbia and Quebec to 19 weeks in Ontario — closures that later increased during the more recent Delta and Omicron waves of COVID-19.
With students from kindergarten to Grade 12 winding down a third school year impacted by COVID-19, CBC News asked Canada’s provincial and territorial governments about their plans to help students recover from pandemic education.
We also asked a trio of experts to review the information. They said the details shared don’t go far enough and flagged key areas — from assessment and curriculum reform to tutoring and other targeted support — that need more attention to help struggling learners catch up and also revitalize Canada’s education system.
I’d also remind readers of two articles I have posted in the past:
One of the lines from Kohn’s work is particularly important when looking at this issue.
More important, none of the research on this topic actually shows a diminution in learning — just a drop in standardized test scores (in some subjects, in some situations, for some kids).
I also think these lines in the introduction of the Spencer’s post speak to it well:
I’m not terribly concerned about learning loss. Don’t get me wrong. I think learning loss is real and we should try to address it. However, when I visit classrooms or work with the teachers in my cohort, I see bigger concerns than learning loss. Often, the biggest issue seems to be the lack of soft skills or the absence of student self-direction in their learning.
In the body of the piece, Spencer expands upon this idea when he says:
If the goal is curiosity or creativity and they lose a sense of wonder, I’d argue that’s a bigger learning loss than the failure to factor polynomials. If it’s to prepare students for the future we need to recognize that our future is wildly unpredictable and our curriculum maps alone won’t get students where they need to be.
I think this is the key. What standard in grade three mathematics or grade seven social studies is just a construct that some politician and policymaker decided on. The fact that students are losing their ability to be critical thinkers and to evaluate information that they receive. The complete acceptance by large segments of the population of what is complete misinformation is a great illustration of the true learning loss that has occurred in society – and that started well before the pandemic!
The other issue – and one that I have pushed a lot personally – is that if Ministries of Education or Departments of Education were really serious about learning loss, Ministries/Departments would have recognized that the 2019-20 school year was disrupted and teachers lost between 20% and 50% of their instructional time (depending on whether they were semesterized or not). Any MOE/DOE that was concerned about learning loss should have immediately examined all of their curriculum standards to identify which grade three mathematics standards were necessary for curriculum continuity for grade four mathematics (and so on). This action would have allowed educators to identify the 5% or 15% of the previous year’s curriculum that needed to be covered at the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, and also what portions of this year’s curriculum educators could drop or spend less time on to make room to accommodate having to cover the previous year’s standards.
This model was assuming that schools were open to in person learning for 100% of the 2020-21 school year with no disruptions. As the CBC article notes, the reality was that there continued to be province-wide and regional school closures throughout the 2020-21 school year- and while we did a bit better job with the provision of remote learning, these disruptions still decreased the instructional time available to students.
We are now closing in on the end of the 2021-22 school year, and I have yet to see a single Ministry or Department – really anywhere in the world – that has had the honesty to look at their curriculum and provide this information to their educators. Educators lost at a minimum 20% of their 2019-20 school year and additional instructional time in 2020-21, but Ministries of Education and Departments of Education still failed to act. They will all tell you how concerned they are about learning loss, but they still fail to do the most basic step that would help mitigate that learning loss. They are like the obese person who laments about being overweight, but refuses to make changes in their diet or activity to address the issue.
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