Accelerating schools and the economy, post-pandemic
Post-pandemic, we will have two problems that will need fixing or they’ll severely harm our children’s futures. I believe we can solve them both and at the same time, a nice win-win after this worldwide crisis.
The first problem is that our children will have lost months of learning and as much as a full year of skills. Children in better resourced communities and more organized households will likely lose less, but many in under-resourced areas will likely show up in classrooms with the same level of skills they had in the Fall of 2019, having lost anything they gained in school this year before the coronavirus shutdown. The “summer slide” learning loss is a well-documented phenomenon; the upcoming “corona slide” is likely to be even more severe.
The second problem is that, even once schools reopen, many of our students’ parents will continue to be unemployed following the vast shutdown of our economy during the pandemic. Restaurants and hotels and clothing stores, along with many other public-facing industries are likely to take additional time to reopen after their nearly total shutdown. While workers with those skills and experience wait for employment, they will need an income.
To fix both of these problems at once, I propose putting a second adult in every classroom in America, or at least every classroom in the lower grades K-3rd. These second adults do not need to be certified teachers with years of training and experience who can keep a whole classroom of up to 30 students behaving and on task. Rather, they can be out-of-work folks from the service industries or any other businesses that are slow to reopen. Anyone with a strong desire to help children learn, and a good work ethic, could be trained in two days to do the work I have in mind. I say that with confidence because I’ve seen this work in dozens of schools in Chicago over the past 10 years.
So, what is the work I have in mind and how would it fix problem number one, our students’ learning loss?
The role I am proposing for the second adult in each classroom is to provide more moments of actual learning during the regular school day. You may not ever have thought about when and how learning actually occurs for a young student, but we all need to think about this if we want to provide more. “They go to school and learn for six hours,” is too broad and not helpful. During 37 years of work with inner-city Chicago schools, I have come to understand that, at the micro level, learning occurs in a “loop” consisting of a teacher providing a stimulus (“What sound does this letter represent?”), the student responding, and the teacher providing feedback that tells the student whether the response was right or wrong. In these loops, the student says, at least in his or her head, something like, “Oh, I get it!” or “Aha!” or whatever metaphor you want to use for “learning happens.” It’s all about those learning loops. If the student doesn’t get it the first time, the teacher offers more loops until the “aha” moment does occur.
The way to provide more learning is to provide more loops. If each loop takes 10 seconds to complete (though I’ve seen good teachers do them much faster), then doing six per minute means doing 60 in 10 minutes and so on. More time means more loops means more learning. The way to achieve accelerated learning is to spend more time on learning loops.
The role of this second adult is, thus, to provide more loops. While the classroom teacher is leading a small group of students on one side of the classroom, the second adult is leading another small group on the other side, and the rest of the students are working quietly at learning centers around the room. I have videos of adults leading such small groups, where every student gets 60 or more loops in a 20-minute span. That’s a lot of learning.
We must restart our economy, once the scientists and doctors say it is safe to do so, and get people back to work and making money to survive and feed their own children. At the same time, we must restart physical schools where students, especially our most vulnerable, can learn face-to-face with teachers. The longer we wait, the more likely it is that many students will have lost as much as one full year of skills. If we do not do something differently once schools are back in session, that loss may never be recovered, which would be a sad, sustained, and profound additional casualty of this worldwide disaster. Happily, this particular loss is preventable.
