Partnerships Keep Children Learning During COVID-19

Abstract

While Zoom classes may work at the college level, they don’t work for all students. For PreK-12 students, educators quickly realized a dramatic and disruptive digital divide among families and students in economically-stressed urban and rural communities across the country. At the start of the 20-21 school year, with COVID-19 continuing, it is imperative to resolve the technology challenge to connect with all families and help all students keep learning.

School doors were closed in March 2020, but “school” and learning were open. The geography of school expanded across neighborhoods into students’ homes and onto kitchen tables. The swift change in policy to children learning at home required new teaching strategies and new patterns of communication by educators, parents, and students. Initially, some interpreted the demand for remote learning only in terms of hightech options, such as online or Zoom classes. While an online learning environment may work at the college level, for PreK-12 students, educators quickly realized that there was a dramatic and disruptive digital divide among families and students in economically-stressed urban and rural communities across the country. Data revealed that millions of students did not have working computers or adequate Internet access at home, and could not participate in online learning. At the start of the 2020-2021 school year, with COVID-19 continuing, it is imperative to resolve the technology challenge to connect with all families and to help all students keep learning.

Research on Summer Learning

Research on students’ summer learning informs us about inequities that occur when students are learning from home. Early studies by Heyns and recent work by Alexander, Entwisle, Cooper, and others indicate that students make an average of one year of progress over one school year, regardless of their starting skill levels. However, during the summer, students from families with low incomes tend to lose an average of two months of reading or literacy skills. They require remedial work at the start of the new school year, which delays their progress in learning at each grade level. By contrast, students from economically-advantaged families tend to maintain or gain skills during the summer by reading books and conducting other literacy-linked activities. Further, as Kim reported, students who continue learning during the summer also gain confidence, and increase motivation to learn, regardless of family income or ability levels.

Focus on Equity with Different Technologies

The COVID-19 closures revealed that rule number one is for educators to know their families’ available technologies and their students’ strengths and needs to develop and disseminate feasible and useful lessons, projects, and activities for learning at home.

High Tech Online Learning. Some teachers, principals, and district leaders use high-tech platforms for 2-way communications with families (e.g., email, Facebook, REMIND), and to disseminate information and activities for students. They tap into high-tech resources to find and adapt grade-specific and skill-specific websites for students to use at home, and that are easy for parents to check students’ work and progress. Some websites build in gamification to make learning fun. These include:

• Kahn Academy and Kahn Academy-Kids for many subjects at all grade levels.

• Education.com for PreK-5 skills in math and language arts, and other activities.

• Education World for teachers to identify activities that match their curricula.

• PTO Today for ideas for family games and crafts.

• Colorin Colorado for connecting with ELL/Immigrant students and families.

Low Tech Learning by Doing. Old-time tools (e.g., pencils, pens, crayons, markers, paints, and other art materials) are valuable resources for all students, particularly for those without computers at home or adequate Internet access. Teachers may design assignments and guide parents to help students strengthen grade-level reading, writing, math, science, and other skills and talents using low-tech traditional materials. Assignments include:

• Read books—fiction, biographies, jokes, poems, sports, etc.

• Create comics and graphic novels and stories.

• Write fables, tales, poems, and raps.

• Draw and sketch people, places, and things in an art portfolio.

• Conduct oral histories and interviews with parents, family, and friends on topics of interest.

• Take photos and add captions for thematic albums

• Critique TV shows, movies, and other experiences

• Compile a favorite foods recipe book

Adaptable Tech: Project Learning. Teachers may design and assign long-term projects in different subjects for high school students and short-term projects for students in the middle and elementary grades. Projects are challenging and fun for students to complete and may link to classroom units of work. Students may use their available technologies—hightech or low-tech—for their projects.

Needed Communications

The first stage of COVID-19 in spring 2020 revealed four basic steps that teachers must take to ensure student success in learning from home, with whichever technologies are available.

Check-in: Teachers must check in with students and families on a regular schedule to learn if they are healthy; need resources and services from school or community; have questions to discuss with the teacher; are “attending” classes regularly; and have time for students to relax, conduct family activities, and have fun at home.

Collect students’ work: Teachers, students, and parents must agree on how teachers will collect and grade students’ work, how students will record reading logs, how “extra credit” may be earned, and how students and parents will know that students are making progress in learning.

Engage students with their parents: Teachers may include assignments for students to conduct positive conversations with a parent or family partner in their home language about their work and ideas. These interactions may draw upon the parents’ “funds of knowledge,” as Moll and colleagues discussed, to help students learn that their parents know many things and use school skills in everyday life.

Make sure about meals: Before any of the above strategies occur, schools and districts must ensure that all students who received free breakfasts and lunches at school know where, when, and how these meals will be available via Grab and Go locations in the community or by home delivery.

Travis Wise via Flickr

Policy Implications

COVID-19 closures showed that education policy leaders must fulfill two major requirements for all students to succeed in learning from home.

1. Focus on equity. District and community resources are needed to close the destructive digital divide so that all students have working laptops, reliable Internet access, and can attend online classes with their teachers and peers. Until equity in technology is in place, teachers must be especially creative to communicate clearly with parents and students who have no computers about paper packets, TV- and phone-based assignments, creative arts, and other traditional learning activities.

2. Recognize educators’ responsibilities. Teachers and district leaders must take the lead in producing and disseminating learning activities for their own students. Every family has many skills and talents to share with their children. However, it is not up to every parent in America to figure out how to develop activities to ensure that their children keep learning important school skills at each grade level. Surveys of parents in the U. S. and in Scotland during COVID-19 closures confirm that they are not “home-schooling” in the traditional sense of that term, nor do they say they are “teachers.” They report confidence about guiding their child’s physical health and emotional well-being, but not teaching math and reading skills. Parents report that they want clear and timely communications from and with teachers whether school doors are open or closed.

Reflection

Just about every district has an official policy stating, “Education is a shared responsibility of home, school, and community.” Last spring, when schools closed precipitously, this policy statement came to life. Everyone learned that teachers, parents, and students in nearly 100,000 schools across the country were, in fact, the most essential workers in the COVID-19 crisis.

In the National Network of Partnership Schools (NNPS) at Johns Hopkins University, Epstein and her colleagues guide over 500 schools, districts, organizations, and state offices to strengthen programs of family and community engagement as a component of school organization. See how they are implementing routine and creative activities during the COVID-19 crisis to fulfill their responsibilities in the e-book of Promising Partnership Practices 2020 on the NNPS website.

Now, in the 20-21 school year, some schools opened with face-to-face classes. Others continued distance learning for students with and without adequate technology. Still others arranged a hybrid schedule with combined modalities. This variation provides a valuable natural experiment for researchers to study the work of teachers, responses of families, and results for students in these school organizations.

These are tumultuous times. COVID-19 created unwanted opportunities to develop strategies and resources for student learning at home. These approaches will be useful in the future when schools are closed by major storms and summer vacations. Without question, the most important and wide-spread confirmation has come from attention to the shared responsibilities—the partnerships—of teachers and parents to ensure that all students keep learning.