Students Can Learn in a Pandemic
By Meredith Liu, Chief Design Officer
When our remote school year first kicked off in August, we were unsure what the year would bring. Our first priority was to keep children, families and staff safe and well. We also knew it was important to ensure students continued to make academic progress, even when learning outside of our classrooms. With our school-wide shift to focus on literacy instruction over the past year, we made an important decision last fall: we would continue our efforts to double down on literacy and adapt our new literacy approach to a remote context. We know literacy skills are the foundation that all learning is built on, and that this investment in the early years will help accelerate learning in other areas. Amidst many competing demands on time, energy and resources, this kind of focal point allowed us to build our remote programming around a common goal.
Last month, as we closed out our first full semester of remote learning for a majority of students, we took a step back to see what we could learn from our data. In September, all of our students were assessed with a comprehensive literacy assessment, which was repeated again in December, giving us an opportunity to compare. Examining the data from those assessments both surprised and delighted us. Based on these early results, all of our students have made progress in learning to read, and the vast majority - 79% - of our 1st through 3rd grade students are on track to make a year or more of growth by June. (For literacy wonks, this means that 79% of students grew one or more microphases on the EL Literacy Assessment, in both encoding and decoding skills.) This indicates that despite the many obstacles students, families and educators have faced, students at The Primary School are learning to read during a pandemic.
We believe we can attribute these promising early results to three key factors.
More individual and small group time: As shared in our October post, we have provided fewer, more targeted and intentional learning opportunities by having all instructional staff working with a caseload of students, largely focused on reading skills. We have limited whole group and overall screen time to prioritize the more interactive and individualized learning that can happen in small groups.
A strong focus on differentiating based on need: We have been adjusting dosage (frequency and type of supports) based on student need. In practice, this meant that some students received 1:1 instruction four times a week, whereas others received two small group sessions and one 1:1 session each week. Our early results show that our students with special needs are keeping pace with their peers.
Expanding reading supports beyond the classroom: In addition to our direct instruction, we are seeing pay off from other opportunities to build literacy rich environments outside the classroom. First, we launched a mentorship program focused on reading, where mentors join their students weekly for 30 - 60 minutes to read together, culminating with students co-writing a book. The results are promising - 87% of students who participated in mentoring grew by at least one microphase, meaning they are on track to meet their goals. We hypothesize this is both because of the importance of relationship and connection and the additional at-bats of having dedicated reading time. Second, we built on the strong foundation of relationship and trust that we have developed over multiple years with parents through our parent program. This year, our teachers have collaborated with parents and parent coaches to jointly set literacy goals for students, ensure parents understand our approach to teaching reading, and provide at-home learning supports for literacy.
While these early results are promising, we know that this literacy data is only one piece of a large and complex puzzle. Doubling down on literacy skills and assessments has meant that other important things - like math instruction and our work around health behaviors beyond staying COVID-safe - have not received as much time and focus. We fully recognize this, and know that our progress in literacy doesn’t necessarily represent a holistic view of student progress.
We also know we still have growth to make and ground to make up, as this growth, however great, will not cover the ground lost when we first shut down in March. But through our focus on this common goal during this unprecedented time, our school has gotten smarter and faster as we continue to improve and iterate on what is working for different students.
What’s next?
As we consider how to bring the momentum and lessons of this past semester forward and build on our progress in the months ahead, we have our sights set on a few key steps:
Renewing our commitment to social-emotional learning and supporting the whole child - This is core to our work and the foundation upon which The Primary School is built, and we continue to be a top priority in COVID times and beyond.
Planning to continue small group, differentiated reading instruction - Based on both the data we’ve seen and the stories we’ve heard, we know this small group approach has been an effective way to help build reading skills, and we will continue to build on this throughout the year.
Focusing on oral language and academic language development across the school - Our instruction focuses on teaching the building blocks of reading, e.g., phonological awareness. We are now also building more intentional ways that students have access to academic language and rich vocabulary.
Focusing more on content based literacy - i.e. reading for meaning - Similarly, given the success of our structured literacy skills, we are ready to push our students forward into engaging and getting excited about texts, where they are not only able to decipher the words but also engage in the narrative.
Planning for an increased and sustained focus on family communication around academics - COVID has made clear that we have at times fallen short in sharing with families how their students are doing and ensuring they have the tools to continue to support them outside of school hours. We are continuing to make it a priority that parents are well-informed of their child’s academic progress and that they are partners in achieving our joint literacy goals.
While we have much work ahead of us, seeing the progress our students have made so far this year is inspiring and motivating. In a year where they, their families, and their teachers had to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles to ensure they learn, these results put the dedication, commitment, and intentionality of our entire school community on full display.
Resources
We hope these resources are helpful for other educators looking for ways to build literacy: