Reducing the COVID-19 Achievement Gap

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

As children and young adults return to school, parents and teachers watch with trepidation. Hoping for the best, most school boards are preparing for the worst (a return to online instruction for everyone). Many school boards have encouraged parents to choose between face-to-face and online instruction and many are offering hybrid models that combine face-to-face and online instruction in interesting ways.

There are conflicting estimates of how much learning loss occurred last Spring when most instruction occurred online. Some of the learning loss occurred because there was little instruction since many teachers concentrated on ensuring the emotional and physical safety of the students for whom they were responsible. Some of the loss occurred because, despite the instruction that occurred, students had fewer opportunities for teacher guidance in using what they were learning.

No one denies that learning loss has been significant and, now that schooling has resumed, teachers are working assiduously to address the loss. The students for whom lost learning time has been most detrimental include students for whom English is a second language, special needs learners, and low-income students.  

Medical health officers showed foresight in the Spring when they signaled that, if schools resumed in September, conditions would be different. Only a minority of students have a schedule that permits five days of uninterrupted school attendance in a classroom with all their peers. The school experience is much more fragmented and is likely to be interrupted again depending upon health conditions.

The lost learning time and the potentially fragmented conditions pose a significant challenge for teachers. But the accumulated evidence in education indicates there are several things that teachers can do that will make their work more manageable and the overall student experience more successful.

1. Avoid the temptation to assign project work. Project work requires students to work on their own over a long period of time. This requires significant motivation and self-discipline. Few parents have the time or capacity for monitoring project work.
2. Assess what students know and can do that is foundational to continued success in the subject. Ensure that students have the entry-level knowledge to proceed with the instructional material intended for students at that level.
3. Arrange instruction in small, discrete units that can be assessed for mastery. It is harder to spot the specific challenges that students are having if their performance is not assessed until the conclusion of a long instructional episode. This is true whether we are talking about a single, lengthy instructional episode or a collection of instructional episodes that have been grouped into a unit. Waiting until the end to assess makes it harder for both the teacher and students because there are more things to look for. When instruction is organized into smaller chunks, each with its own brief assessment, it is easier to spot the challenges and the students who face them.
4. Break the work into smaller bits - each with its own, focused assessment – making the teacher’s job less challenging. Focused classroom assessments are easier to construct, are easier to evaluate, and are helpful in getting a student or group of students back on track. Knowing that I have not succeeded on a specific dimension of the work and that the teacher will help me master what I have not yet learned is more encouraging than being told that I did not master the material in a larger body of work. The latter is often overwhelming.
5. Encourage and provide feedback. Feedback is important for continued success (for both the students and the teacher). From the teacher’s point of view, knowing what students know and can do helps them to plan the next steps. Knowing that students are performing in accordance with expectations for students at that grade level is reinforcing to the teacher. From the students’ point of view, knowing what one knows and can do reinforces a success ethic.
6. Provide feedback and re-instruction to individual students if only one or two students are having difficulty. When more than one or two are unable to demonstrate mastery, re-teaching the entire class is called for. When there is a growing number of students with insufficient knowledge to proceed to the next lesson or unit, the teachers job becomes much more difficult because the gaps between students grow. Large gaps, and the more of them there are compound the complexity of the teacher’s work, making a difficult job almost impossible.

Teachers who read this blog before it was posted say that this advice (which is based on the accumulated evidence about teaching and learning) applies to in-class instruction as much as it does to on-line instruction. And it does.