The coronavirus pandemic forced the Jackson Street Elementary School kindergarten teacher to teach virtually for the majority of the school year. Garcia found herself pitted against action figures, pets, iPad apps, video games and other childhood delights, as she attempted to teach her class of over a dozen 5-year-olds over Zoom.
“It was nearly impossible to keep their attention,” said Garcia.
Garcia wasn’t the only teacher that had a hard time educating over the virtual platform.
The pandemic disrupted classrooms across the country. A McKinsey study discovered that K-12 students are currently, on average, five months behind in their expected mathematics levels and four months behind in their expected reading levels.
MCAS scores from 2019 and 2021 — the MCAS wasn’t offered in 2020 due to the pandemic — showed a decline in almost every grade level across Massachusetts.
A district-by-district list of MCAS scores can be viewed here.
Professionals attribute the decline in test scores to the state-wide switch to emergency remote teaching during the 2020-2021 school year.
“Drops were seen all over the commonwealth of Massachusetts including in our wealthier suburbs,” commissioner Jeffrey Riley said during a Board of Elementary and Secondary Education meeting where the scores were unveiled. “These are drops we haven’t seen in decades.”
Students socio-emotional development also faltered during the emergency remote teaching model, students weren’t as propelled to interact with their classmates virtually. Educators consider peer-to-peer interaction, especially in early education classrooms such as Garcia’s kindergarten class, invaluable.
Months into the virtual learning model, concerned parents said their children began to hate logging into school.
“My daughter who was happy and loved school now is sullen and hates it,” One Worcester parent told MassLive.
“It is a fallacy that the younger kids are suffering more than the older kids. All ages are suffering,” said another Worcester parent.
Parents are now trying to figure out who’s to blame for the learning and socio-development losses caused during the switch to emergency remote teaching.
'COBBLED TOGETHER THE BEST THAT THEY COULD'
Dr. Torrey Trust, associate professor at the UMass Amherst College of Education, said she doesn’t blame teachers.
“Teachers had little to no training, for online learning in their teacher preparation programs,” Trust said. “They kind of just, you know, cobbled together the best that they could with their resources and tried to replicate in-person learning. And I think that’s where a lot of them went wrong”
The educational professional believes traditional in-person teaching practices are flawed, “‘I lecture and you absorb information’ is not actually how learning happens,” Trust said, adding that the typical teaching model cannot be effectively translated to a virtual platform that calls for more student engagement and self-motivation.
“In a school, it just seems like students are paying attention. But I don’t know about you. I’ve sat in plenty of meetings or classes where I am looking straightforward, but I am not paying attention,” Trust said.
A professional in learning technologies, Dr. Trust said online learning can be effective if done with an adequate level of training.
“I think there’s a lot of potential [in online learning] I think it got ruined by this forced shift to emergency remote teaching,” said Torrey. “Where schools and districts and teacher preparation programs did not prepare teachers for success in this type of environment.”
Garcia and other Massachusetts educators had to learn how to teach remotely with little to no guidance from their respective districts.
“We pretty much had to figure it all out for ourselves,” said the kindergarten teacher.
Garcia and some of her Jackson Street Elementary School co-workers would stay up late into the night practicing self-taught virtual learning techniques with one another.
In a survey conducted by Dr. Trust and Northampton High School Technology Teacher Jeromie Whalen, over 60 percent of educators said they felt overwhelmed with the online learning tools and resources they had available during the switch to emergency remote teaching. Teachers trained in remote learning prior to the pandemic reported fewer issues during the switch.
The survey also showed that student engagement and parental communication were two of the biggest challenges for teachers.
To combat competing interests in a child’s room, Dr. Trust said educators have to adjust their teaching practices so that they’re more interactive and engaging.
“Online learning can be done well if it focuses on humanizing learning,” Trust said. “Bringing in the social connection, captivating student interests, giving student choices and using digital tools to create new types of learning experiences that may not be possible in person.”
EXISTING INEQUITIES
A lack of preparation wasn’t the only reason why virtual learning was ineffective. Professionals believe the pandemic illuminated and exacerbated existing inequities present in Massachusetts schools.
The conditions of students’ at-home learning spaces made it easier for some students to virtually learn and harder for others.
“A lot of families don’t have high-speed Internet,” Garcia said she would have students frequently drop out of classroom Zoom sessions.
Some of the students in Garcia’s class also didn’t have computers, the Northampton School District supplied students who were in need of computers with Chromebooks.
“Chromebooks are not very good,” said Garcia. “They would just have things that were like loading, loading, loading and would never load.”
Students had other problems outside of technological troubles.
A child who had a parent, babysitter or older sibling help guide them through the partially autonomous learning model, were able to stay more engaged, retain more information and learn more effectively than a child that didn’t have those at home luxuries, educational professionals said.
“The pandemic showed this ugly truth,” said Northampton High School Teacher Jeromie Whalen. “We have large equity issues even here in Massachusetts, one of the highest-ranked educational states in the country.”
A HireAHelper study conducted in August 2021, showed that Massachusetts has the highest level of education in the U.S.
Educators, lawmakers and parents are now searching for ways to make up for the learning loss.
In response to a state-wide decline in test scores, the Department of Education said Massachusetts school districts will receive approximately $2.8 billion in state and federal pandemic relief money between the 2021-2022 school year and the fall of 2024.
DESE officials said districts can freely spend the funds to meet students’ academic, social, emotional and mental health needs resulting from the pandemic.
“The results clearly illustrate how the disrupted school year of remote and hybrid learning impacted students’ academic achievement,” Secretary of Education James Peyser said in a statement. “We will continue to work with districts to support efforts to regain learning that did not happen and promote student success and educational equity.”
DESE also released an Acceleration Roadmap tool for teachers and administrators to support the acceleration of student learning in the 2021–22 school year.
Dr. Trust said she’s disappointed in the state’s response to the learning disparity.
“There’s no focus on building teachers’ and students’ technology competencies in the roadmap for educators,” said Trust. “And yet there is a focus on data-driven decision making even though that has been proven to be ineffective for identifying solutions.”
Dr. Trust said funding typically goes toward new technologies, after school and summer school courses as opposed to the hiring of more effective educators, teacher development and a raise in teachers’ salaries.
With how ill-prepared educators were during the switch to emergency remote learning, Trust believes now is as good as a time as ever for Massachusetts to develop and invest in educators’ teaching skill set.
Garcia said teaching virtual learning has shown many benefits, especially when used to help keep a student, who can’t be in the classroom in person, on track with the rest of their class.
The kindergarten teacher said she and some of her colleagues are open to learning more about remote learning in the future.
“With money like this, and with the hindsight of what we learned from COVID, we can make education a little bit more of a nimble enterprise,” said Whalen.
The Northampton High School teacher said he would like to see districts invest in teaching technologies and remote education training that can enhance classrooms in the present. He said if there’s ever a situation in the future where emergency remote learning will once again be needed, teachers will be better equipped to teach virtually.
“The single most effective thing for raising students’ grades and academic achievement is the teacher and the quality of the teacher,” said Dr. Trust.
©2022 Advance Local Media LLC. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
