Years after pandemic closures, we are seeing their effects inside our schools

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Since school buildings reopened after the COVID shutdown, I've heard teachers say, time and time again, that the older elementary kids in their classrooms just aren't the same.

I run a small network of schools and many of our current fourth graders are still dependent on the opinions of adults and find it difficult to move from one problem to another without reassurance. Our fifth graders can solve a basic math problem, but often have difficulty explaining how to answer a word problem. In fourth, fifth, and sixth grades, we see students having trouble sharing, taking turns, and working with others—symptoms of developmental milestones that many children have missed in recent years.

What exactly did they miss?

As an early childhood specialist who taught kindergarten through second grade for 12 years, I remember observing the progression of cognitive and social development throughout the early years of elementary school.

At the beginning of kindergarten, my students would crowd at the door, crowd around me, all asking questions or wanting to show me the bobu on their finger. At times, it seemed as if they didn't even realize that they weren't the only child in the room. They had to learn to exist in a large group.

Once they learned how to function in a group, we began to work on interpersonal relationships, such as sharing, answering a question, and showing empathy. Kindergarten children often respond to questions with statements of unrelated facts that are of interest to them. For example, if you asked the class, “What do you notice about the main character in this story?” They might say, “My uncle is having a puppy this weekend,” or “I had pancakes for breakfast.” Throughout the year, they moved toward understanding that their perspective was not the only view of the world.

My first graders understood that there were other people and perspectives. This made them good at working with partners. They wanted to please the adults by following the school rules, but their good intentions could fall by the wayside if they wanted something badly. Because they knew the rules but sometimes couldn't help but break them, first graders sometimes lied. “No, I didn't!” It was a frequent refrain.

For first graders, the playground was a magical place filled with fairies, knights, and superheroes, because all you needed was the right stick or flower or a small scarf tied around your neck to transform yourself. These types of imaginary games are part of the development of complex representational thinking, which helps our minds visualize characters in novels, understand the symbols that replace equations in algebra, and think about a variety of outcomes so that we can make strategic decisions in the future. life.

My second graders were terrified of making mistakes and froze when what they tried to draw didn't suit their underdeveloped fine motor skills. They wanted a lot of peace. They wanted to be able to do the things that older kids did, but they weren't quite sure how. They loved routine and working together to tackle complicated tasks, whether it was creating the class or garden newspaper, or managing the school post office. Second grade was always my favorite because of that incredible industriousness.

Isolated at home during the pandemic, early elementary school students missed the complex, fantasy game and were already over it by the time we all returned. I'm concerned that this might get in the way of tasks that require symbolic reasoning. We see, for example, that our fifth graders can answer an objective question about something they have read, but they have trouble making reasonable inferences.

Many grades have had to go back a few years to teach students some of the most basic concepts. We have adopted a social-emotional curriculum that teaches children to recognize and name their feelings, how to calm themselves, and how to explain to another person the impact of their actions on them.

There is so much to study about the impact of those two years of COVID on learning that I have no doubt it will be the subject of a PhD. dissertations for decades. But in the meantime, schools and educators are tasked with catching up students on what they missed. The New York Times recently published an article with a tool where you could type in your local school district and see how far behind it was in math and reading compared to pre-pandemic years.

I believe in evaluations. It is essential to understand what your students know and what they still need to learn in order to teach them well. But it is also important to remember that child development involves much more than learning multiplication tables or the fundamentals of reading. Even as we measure academic progress and gaps, we must recognize the other skills that many of our students also need to catch up on.

In our rush as adults to get through this pandemic, let us not deprive our students of the time they need to explore who they are in relationship to their peers. In turn, hard-working teachers and school leaders need grace as they try to figure out how to give each child what she needs and deserves in this unprecedented time.

chalk beat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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