As schools across the country shut down, parents, students, and teachers are left with uncertainty and questions about what the future holds. As advocates for a high-quality education for ALL students, we’ll work to keep you up to date on the education world’s response to this crisis. As we’ve seen time and time again, many of our nation’s students are particularly vulnerable during times like this. We need to remain vigilant, stay informed of how the response is affecting ALL of God’s children, and advocate for our students’ protection and well-being.
Here are the stories that we’ve been focused on this week.
Teachers and Students Describe a Remote-Learning Life via The New York Times
“So much of what we do in classrooms are driven by student responses and reactions. I’d give anything to watch their faces light up, their hands in the air, their smiles and fist pumps when they share a new learning or big idea with me.”
Students will go back to school eventually. Here are 5 concrete ideas for helping them catch up, readjust via Chalkbeat
There are no easy answers. But research offers a number of concrete ideas for helping students respond, from changing how the next school year is structured to making sure students don’t lose access to mental health professionals.
Schools can pull off some of these on their own. Others depend on policymakers allocating extra money, or at least protecting schools from deep cuts, a big ask during an economic downturn.
Using Distance to Grow Closer: How One School Is Leaning on Its Student Relationships to Create Community in a Pandemic via The 74 Million
I sent an email out to my teachers saying I view this as an opportunity to change the way we do education, really putting a focus on the social-emotional piece, because we can’t just do what we did in the classrooms and expect to do it with distance in between us now.
And it’s not teaching in general; it’s crisis education. There’s no state testing. We as a school don’t really teach toward the test anyway, but that definitely takes pressure off of teachers. So really being able to grab it and look at it as an opportunity to grow and be innovative and be flexible and be OK with failing and fixing things as we go.
One thing to read this week
What Teachers Need to Make Remote Schooling Work via The Atlantic
As the coronavirus pandemic has forced the vast majority of schools across the country to close, educators are scrambling to find ways to keep reaching students during a crisis that is exacerbating existing inequities and increasing academic gaps. The twelve teachers interviewed for this story—from the Mississippi Delta to San Francisco, Texas, Arizona, subarctic Alaska, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—identified the four most urgent needs that must be addressed in order to help reduce rapidly increasing disparities in access to learning.
Did any of these articles particularly speak to you? We would like to hear your thoughts. Let us know in the comments below: