The COVID epidemic is still with us in many ways.

Today, teachers share how it’s still affecting their classrooms and how they are responding to those challenges.

‘Increased Behavior Challenges’

Jennifer Orr is in her third decade of teaching elementary school students in the suburbs of Washington. She is also the author of Demystifying Discussion: How to Teach and Assess Academic Conversation Skills, K-5 and the co-author, with Matthew Kay, of We’re Gonna Keep on Talking: How to Lead Meaningful Race Conversations in the Elementary Classroom:

This question is one I’ve been thinking about A LOT in the past few years. I had more than 20 years of elementary school classroom teaching experience when COVID hit, so I had many years of observing students from kindergarten through 5th grade.

Since 2020, I’ve taught 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders and I have some theories on how COVID has impacted their learning and them as people.

First off, their learning. The students I’m teaching were in their early-elementary years when they locked down for COVID. (Because I teach on an Army post, my students experienced that in a wide range of ways as they lived in many different places around the globe in that time.) As educators, it was challenging to address all that needed to be addressed when teaching in 2020 and 2021. We were facing many unknowns in our lives, both personally and professionally, and were rapidly adapting and changing again and again.

We were also teaching students who were facing those same challenges. We were certainly not teaching as we’d always taught before.

For my students, that resulted in some gaps in their early learning. My students struggle with their handwriting, even the most basic formation of upper- and lowercased printed letters. (And I struggle with how much time to spend on this when I believe they won’t do a ton of handwritten anything in their lives full of technology while also believing they should be able to write in ways that are legible to others.) It’s not always clear to me if my students understand when to use an uppercase letter because I’m not certain they always know which letters those are!

So do I need to teach them the letters and how to form them or do I need to teach them when to use which ones? Or, quite likely, both?

Another gap for many of my students impacts their reading and spelling. They did not all get strong phonetic instruction in their early-elementary years. In the midst of teaching my students all that is expected of them in upper-elementary, it has been a significant challenge to address the range of gaps in understanding letters and sounds that are hindering them as readers and writers. The needs range greatly and require small-group or one-on-one support.

We have and will always see gaps in student learning because students are people and have had different experiences. I think the areas in which we see COVID learning gaps are more consistent across these people and experiences because we, as teachers, often let go of similar instructional goals or expectations, out of necessity.

In my mind, the greater impact of COVID is on our students’ social and emotional well-being. No matter their age, they were impacted by the stress and uncertainty of 2020 and 2021. Many of our students lost family members to COVID or have family members impacted by long COVID. The pandemic cost them opportunities to develop social skills with peers and other typical activities.

We’re seeing the results of this in increased behavior challenges and mental health issues with students of all ages. Our students are not OK, and we have to do more than talk (or complain) about the ways their social and emotional gaps are impacting them in schools. We need to work with our counselors, social workers, and psychologists to identify the needs and take steps with individual students. We need to reach out to parents, share our concerns, and work as partners together to support their children’s development and growth.

COVID is going to impact our educational system for far longer than we’d like to admit.

The Trauma Continues

Dana Clark is a literacy staff developer with Gravity Goldberg, LLC. Jigisha Vyas is a university professor, instructional coach, and certified mindful educator. They are co-authors of Read-Alouds with Heart: Literacy Lessons That Build Community, Comprehension, and Cultural Competency (Scholastic, 2023):

Dana vividly remembers her younger son Tommy’s response to his new reality during COVID. He was in 3rd grade, and up to that point, he loved school. Being a jovial and energetic kid, school gave him a place to play, connect, and explore his world … until it didn’t. Tommy came to Dana a few months into virtual teaching and learning, his big brown eyes brimming with tears, and said, “They took all of the fun out of school, and all that’s left is work.”

Of course, his teachers did their best to recreate the feel of a community, but without chats during lunch, tag during recess, and play date planning during the walk home, social connections evaporated, and social development stalled. School became a series of assignments to be turned in, laying the groundwork for beliefs about learning that linger today.

While virtual teaching didn’t last forever, the disconnection and trauma it created remains for many children. For some, social anxiety prevents them from engaging with each other. For others, delayed socialization means that students find themselves “in trouble” more often. And for others, the computer assignments and the “turn it in” buttons created a completely isolated experience, which led to apathy and disinterest in learning.

The good news is that there are tangible ways to turn schools into places of joyful learning, but one of them is NOT to throw a bunch of intervention programs at children or put them on screens for hours of computer-based support. Of course, students benefit from academic support, and we’re not suggesting ignoring their needs, but to respond to students’ needs with academic intervention alone is to ignore the root of the issue: disconnection.

Educators MUST work to create classrooms that forge connections, celebrate the beauty and brilliance in all children, and teach social and emotional learning because learning only happens when students can regulate their emotions, connect to topics of study, and feel a sense of belonging.

In her Ed-Talk, Learning with an Emotional Brain, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a professor at the University of Southern California and the director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education, says, “Our emotions and our relationships and our cultural experiences in the social world literally organize and shape the development of brain networks that allow us to learn.” The pathway to deep thought and learning is formed through connection and care.

So how do educators cultivate communities of connection and care? By creating spaces that allow students to be present to share their unique gifts, experiences, and perspectives with each other, using some methods outlined below.

Start with yourself. Gholdy Muhammad calls on us to unlearn false narratives and deficit mindsets in her book, Unearthing Joy. Ask yourself how your identities and the ways you’ve been socialized are influencing how you see your students’ strengths. Reflect on the language you use to describe students and whether that language focuses on strengths and assets or challenges and deficits.

Use circle seating to build community because a circle is a living symbol that sends a message of equality, connectedness, and responsibility to one another (Clark, Smith-Carrington, & Vyas, 2023). Gather the children, pose a question or prompt, and invite them to share their ideas with the whole community.

Avoid teaching social and emotional learning in isolation. One of our favorite ways to do that is to tie SEL to a read-aloud. Through the exploration of characters’ challenges, responses, and emotions, students are practicing empathy. Then, you can intentionally use the situation as a jumping-off point to teach into a SEL competency.

Be picky about technology and how often you use it with students. While there are ways to use technology to co-create and enhance learning, too often children hide behind screens and seem far apart, even when in close proximity to one another.

The trauma students experienced while living through COVID will continue to show up in different ways for a long time. What we all must keep in our hearts is that healing doesn’t happen in isolation, and it doesn’t happen overnight. Healing happens through the accumulation of tiny moments of love, connection, and humanity.

’

A New Educational Landscape’

Melanie Shoffner is a professor of English education in the College of Education at James Madison University. Angela W. Webb is an associate professor of science education there as well. They have co-edited the collections Reconstructing Care in Teacher Education after COVID-19: Caring Enough to Change (2022) and Care and Teachers in the Induction Years: Supporting Early Career Educators in Today’s Teaching Landscape (forthcoming):

COVID has distorted what we once found familiar in our K-12 and university-level classrooms. The elements we love are still there—energetic students, far-ranging discussions, lively collaborations—but we see things differently now. Students and teachers alike have pandemic-informed perspectives, reshaping what is and isn’t important to us.

While we began our professional lives as high school teachers—Angela in science, Melanie in English—we are now in the university classroom, preparing our students to teach secondary science or English/language arts. Our jobs as teacher educators have not changed post-pandemic, per se, but our perspectives have. Like our students, we see the familiar now from an entirely different viewpoint.

We find our university students unwilling or unable to engage in pre-pandemic ways of schooling (and to be fair, the same is true for us). Students have different priorities—more relevance, more authenticity, more honesty—which means reframing what, how, and why we teach. We are operating in a new educational landscape, and it will not snap back into a familiar focus if we just squint harder.

Relevance has always been key in curriculum; it is even more so now. Students have no patience for what they deem unimportant, having moved beyond “Is this on the test?” to “Is this in my life?” The topics addressed and the work assigned need worth and value for students beyond the classroom, and we must be ready to help them recognize the value of their learning or change our curriculum to better serve this goal.

For example, education students are genuinely interested in learning how to teach all students; matters of curriculum, instructional practices, and assessment have little value when divorced from the issues of equity that allow them to teach diverse student populations. That relevance is often thwarted, however, by societal and political opposition to DEI-labeled initiatives and programs.

Yet, classrooms have never been just one thing. Teachers shape them into the spaces students need them to be: places of safety, areas of curiosity, venues of knowledge-building. The pandemic spotlighted the ways in which teachers respond to more than academic needs and confirmed that teachers cannot meet students’ human needs by themselves. Schools and universities must create, bolster, and leverage a network of support for students: school counselors, educational psychologists, and school nurses in K-12 schools; health centers, counseling centers, and deans of students in colleges/universities.

This means more from our educational administrators and institutions—financial support, human resources, time, space—and more awareness of and connection to that support for students and their families.

The daily work of education clearly changed for teachers during the pandemic, from learning how to deliver instruction via Zoom to developing connections with students at a physical distance. We were forced, overnight, to rethink what it meant to be a teacher. There were no physical or temporal boundaries between work and living as we taught from our kitchen tables and held virtual office hours in the evenings, with our home lives happening in the background. Despite (or perhaps because of) the infiltration of our work lives, we became more attuned to personal interests and hobbies, more focused on connecting with loved ones, more aware of physical and mental health.

Our experiences primed us to push back against the pervasive culture of busyness in education, as well as the expectation that educators are always available to others. Now, we are more willing to establish boundaries between professional and personal, set parameters with students and colleagues, and check in with one another on our efforts to do so. We understand the importance—in ways we could not pre-pandemic—of saying no and setting boundaries, so we (attempt to) better prioritize taking care of ourselves within systems designed to value the work we produce more than the people we are.

The pandemic provided a clear view of what was and wasn’t worthwhile; that view has changed now, but its importance has not. Relevance, support, and boundaries were important in classrooms and schools well before COVID-19. Now, however, looking through the windows provided by the pandemic, we view teaching and learning in a new light, and what we see is worthy of our attention, in our classrooms and our lives.

Thanks to Jennifer, Dana, Jigisha, Melanie, and Angela for contributing their thoughts!

Today’s post answered this question:

What are the main ways the COVID pandemic still affects your classroom, and how do you respond to those issues?

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at lferlazzo@epe.org. When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

You can also contact me on Twitter at @Larryferlazzo.

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