Pandemic causes a great deal of a learning loss. Many students lost their skills, for example, the kindergarten in 2019-2020 never finished kindergarten and they returned as second grade. They were expected to know how to add, subtract, know letter sounds, write and they did not. Teachers were new to teaching through a camera. They had to be trained. However they were trained during the summer. Between March and June 2019, no quality instruction took place. Besides academic underperformance, the remote learning mode also results in isolation and social emotional issues. “Adolescent mental health disorders, which were already on the rise, are even more of an issue now as teens experienced impossible circumstances”, says Frost (2021). Under this circumstance, how to meet the growing needs of education to engage and provide learning opportunities for today’s students?
One of the strongest predictors of student success is teachers believe in their students, and that comes with engaging students in good instruction. “Believing in students is not simply telling them that you believe in them. These words matter only if they are true and if you demonstrate them by your actions”, says Curwin (2012). Hattie mentions believing students “requires teachers to have high respect for their students and to show a passion that all can indeed attain success” (p.30). Teachers should praise students for each of their efforts and accomplishments, encourage them to keep trying with a smile, give them chances to redo, and create a welcoming environment. When students are motivated, they can do better in academic performance and social emotional well-being.
Believing in students helps foster a positive teacher-student relationship. “High-quality teacher-student relationships are another critical factor in determining student engagement, especially in the case of difficult students and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (Fredricks, 2014)”. As a positive interpersonal factor, teacher-student rapport is conceptualized as “an emotional connection between teachers and their pupils based on understanding, caring, and mutual respect” (Lammers and Byrd, 2019, p. 128). Learning can be difficult and challenging, but when the teacher gets to know about students and embeds their interests and cultures into the lesson, students would like to participate more. “To achieve such positive classroom control, there needs to be close inspection of the teacher-student relationship” (Hattie, 2012, p.77). Harmonious rapport is built through small things, such as teachers make efforts to learn how to pronounce students’ names and match their names with faces, write their birthdays on the wall calendar and lead the class to sing “Happy birthday” songs in multiple languages to the birthday boy or girl, and go to their sports games and shout out for them. Rapport can also be built through teachers’ intentionally promoting a healthy lifestyle to them by asking them if they had good sleep, what did they have for breakfast, what do they do to reduce stress, and what sports or workout do they do. When teachers and students mutually enjoy the harmonious relationship with respect, they can make more achievements. The strong bond between the teacher and students can make them feel safe and capable of teaching, learning and progressing. To explain the positive consequences of teacher-student rapport, Ibarra (2014) states that “establishing friendly relations with pupils enables teachers to enhance students' willingness to engage in the learning process”.
Frost (2021) states that Social Emotional Learning (SEL) “was an important initiative, during the pandemic it has taken a front seat role, with educators and families recognizing that a child can't learn without these competencies first” (para.7). According to the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning website, “SEL is an integral part of education and human development” and its five competencies are “self-awareness, self-management, responsible decision-making, relationship skills, and social awareness”. Many schools open mental health classes and hire SEL instructional lead personnel to integrate and implement social emotional learning for students and staff. Some schools have a SEL committee that is composed of various stakeholders: teachers, administrator, district social worker, and district college and career coordinator. They meet regularly to discuss how to support students and staff’s social emotional well-being, conduct the pre-survey to collect the data to analyze their needs, and implement and monitor SEL learning. The quantitative and qualitative data can reflect the benefit of the implementation.
Even though it is crucial being emotionally supportive to students, promoting SEL alone can not bring students to proficiency in standards and skills. Honestly, what it comes down to is the teacher. Good instruction will always help students succeed over the obstacles that they have in their lives. Hamlet (2022) states “connecting students’ studies to their everyday lives often helps them see why they matter in the first place (para.15).” One of the factors Pino (2014) suggests to consider in designing lessons to help increase student engagement behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively is to make it meaningful. Thompson (2017) argues that human beings will master the content if the instruction is real-world which means students can see a reason outside the classroom for learning what is going on inside the classroom. The meaningful instruction is unpredictable which means the answer cannot be looked up by the end of the book. In addition, the meaningful instruction is student-driven and an emotional experience.
Based on the analysis of 800 meta-analyses, 50,000 research articles, and 240 millions students, Hattie (2012) suggests “visible teaching and learning occurs when learning is the explicit goal, when it is appropriately challenging, when the teacher and student both seek to ascertain whether and to what degree the challenging goal is attained, when there is deliberate practice aimed at attaining mastery of the goal, when there is feedback given and sought, and when there are active, passionate and engaging people participating in the act of learning” (p. 22). Most significant discovery of his studies is that any intervention can make a difference in student learning. He displays the ways of maximizing impact on visible learning by calculating and ranking the effect size. In his barometer, 0.4 is considered a high point, that is any intervention with an effect size less than 0.4 does not produce desired effects. The highest influence on student achievement is “how to develop high expectations for each student” (p.270) with a score of 1.44. Drew (2022) defines high expectation as “believing students should always strive to achieve their best” (para. 2). The top five approaches he recommends to set high expectations in the classroom are “teach about growth mindset, focus on efforts, ask students to try again, express unconditional positive regard, set achievable but difficult tasks” (para.1). There are many surprising influences revealed in Hattie’s study. Some of the commonly neglected negative impacts on student achievement include:
Not being liked in class (-0.19)
Lack of sleep (-0.05).
What teachers think usually works, but actually have little impact:
Use of PowerPoint (0.26)
Individualized instruction (0.22)
Learning styles (0.17)
What teacher do not allow in class, but have high impact:
Teachers working together as evaluators of their impact (0.93)
Seek help from peers (0.83)
Classroom discussion (0.82)
Errors and trust are welcomed opportunities to learn (0.72)
The core of Hattie’s visible learning and teaching is to make student learning visible to teachers and make teaching visible to students. In order to do that, teachers should apply more approaches with the effect size larger than 0.4, especially the one we do not usually allow in class, for instance, teachers working together as evaluators of their impact (0.93) and seek help from peers (0.83). Meanwhile we should care about students’ emotions and feelings with more mindful support to make them feel comfortable and welcomed in the classroom, remind them the importance of enough sleep, and apply more interactive activities besides using the slides to promote class discussion to increase the deeper cognitive thinking and social skills.
Traditional approach to learning loss was via remediation models which will keep students below grade level. This means students are never exposed to their enrollment grade level. Hattie’s suggestions now should be on an accelerated approach to close the learning loss caused by the pandemic. An acceleration model uses a student's enrollment grade level standards, and skills and fines support strategies to help them master their actual grade level material. In a sense, they do not receive a watered down version of their curriculum with all proper supported instructional strategy, and it keeps them at grade level. Hattie’s visible teaching and learning is about teachers and students actively engaged in instruction. Teacher teaches, then gets feedback from students to see if they comprehend. Could be an exit ticket, a quiz, a simple oral question. If students do not understand, the teacher then re-teaches it with a different strategy and again checks for understanding. This goes on until students understand and comprehend the standard the teacher was working with.
In the learning process sometimes we notice the obvious hopelessness in students. Hattie (2021) mentions “in such a situation, the student avoids and does not engage with achievement tasks, protects their sense of self by gaining reputation or success from other activities (such as naughty behavior), and does not see that achievement gains are due to his or her actions or control” (p.50). Wimberley (2022) points out that many young children have the negative thinking that they can not do certain things, such as math. They develop “learned helplessness” at a young age. As they move farther into the learning system they struggle more due to the lack of confidence and motivation. In order to build confidence in students, he suggests the concept of “language dancing” which refers to the fact that we should start working early with the preschool population. He says it is important to engage preschoolers at an early age, because it is in those years when we are really able to influence them so that when they do get into the learning process they are much more confident. Parents and teachers should start off very early in the preschool years and get them ready to form positive learning habits.
Hess (2022) argues “education technology tends to be endlessly hyped- and just as endlessly disappointed. For the past century, reformers have promised that each new technological advance would transform schooling” (p.13). From the utilization of motion picture, radio, television, to Chromebook for education, the educational technology tools inventors and designers should have a deep understanding of students and teachers’ needs and “think about how it changes what students and teachers do” (Hess, 2022, p.13). It is true that technology brings many benefits to education, for example, it makes learning more accessible, affordable, and interactive, it helps teachers save time in designing games, grading, and delivering the lesson. One-to- one Chromebook programs made remote learning possible. However, it does not guarantee quality education. Only when teachers mindfully guide students to use technology in learning, demonstrate how to explore information, train them in the ability of concentration, and teach them cyber safety skills, technology can be a beneficial tool in education, instead of a distraction. “Given the human interactions at the heart of learning and the plethora of demands on teachers' time, the best measure of most K-12 technology may be whether it makes it easier for teachers to do their job well”, says (Hess, 2022, p.24).
The additional internal and external factors including but not limited to class size, standardized curriculum, and democratic classrooms, that affect the learning of today’s K-12 students. Parents and teachers believe small class size can increase teaching quality and learning achievement. It is easier to manage the smaller class because the teacher can pay more attention to individual student and meet his or her learning needs. Jepsen and Rivkin (2009)’s study finds that “the ten-student reduction in class size raised school average mathematics and reading achievement by roughly 0.10 and 0.06 standard deviations of the school average test score distribution, respectively, holding other factors constant” (p.224). In reality, in most public schools if the class size is 13-15, school districts can not afford to staff salaries and benefits of the amount of teachers needed for the small class, so they increased the number to 20, and 37 in my school.
“Standardized curriculum is the idea that all schools nationwide should have a set curriculum that they are to teach to their students, so each one will be on the same level as the other (Miller, 2012)”. It is helpful to set up goals and expectations, and easy to assess students’ achievement. It provides consistency for students across district and grade levels. Having a standardized assessment along with the standardized curriculum will help show students’ proficiency and learning needs. It is also helpful to guide new teachers to follow the structure and pace to teach. However, “Creativity as a critical 21st-century skill and argue that the preoccupation with curriculum standards that are overly prescriptive undermines efforts at facilitating creative processes and outcome'” , says Nodding (2013, p.2). No curriculum can meet the needs of every child in a classroom (Remillard, 2005). Under the standardized curriculum, teachers may “make adaptations to meet the learning needs of the children they teach” (Copple & Bredekamp, 2009, p. 21).
According to Marshall (2021), “a democratic classroom engages students in living democratically by promoting values such as inclusion, voice, representation, and participation”. In my opinion, even though democratic classrooms promote students’ autonomy and creativity, foster students' concept of democracy, and enhance students’ sense of responsibility and accountability, there is a great need for a well planned framework. Without the structure, the class can go out of control and become chaotic due to the excessive freedom and choices given to students when they are so young that they are still learning right from wrong.
In conclusion, there is no single solution to meet students’ growing needs of education and provide them with learning opportunities. Teachers should believe in students, foster positive teacher-student relationships, provide meaningful instruction, develop high expectations for each student, and use technology with the purpose of improving teaching and learning. The reduced class size, adapted standardized curriculum, and democratic classroom with the guided structure are also crucial in affecting today’s K-12 students. Educators should continue keeping efforts to get to know and meet students’ academic needs and social emotional needs.
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