Reframing Learning Loss

In this episode of Room to Grow, Joanie and Curtis discuss the challenge of pandemic “learning loss” and provide ideas for math teachers to reframe this concept. They speak about the potential negative impacts of deficit language as students return to classrooms across the country, and emphasize the importance of creating a positive classroom culture for learning, grounded in beliefs that all students can and will be successful. Acknowledging that educators are facing significant pandemic-related challenges, our hosts also talk about the power of collaboration and how it is even more important for the success of teachers and students in the 2021-22 school year.

Listeners are encouraged to consider these additional resources for managing learning in the new school year:

Continuing the Journey: Mathematics Learning 2021 and Beyond – joint publication from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics (NCSM) and the Association for State Supervisors of Mathematics (ASSM).

Learning Acceleration for All: Planning for the Next Three to Five Years – TNTP’s resource for educators responding to Covid-19’s impact on learning

These blog posts on The False Construct of Readiness in Mathematics and A Process to Address Unfinished Learning in Middle School Math (which has ideas applicable to all grade levels). 

Share your feedback, comments, and suggestions for future episode topics by emailing roomtogrowmath@gmail.com. Be sure to connect with your hosts on Twitter and Instagram: @JoanieFun and @cbmathguy. 

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Room to Grow. I'm Curtis Brown. And I'm Joni Fenderberg.

SPEAKER_01 0:04

We work together at Texas Instruments, and we're glad you're here. We're looking to continually improve our practice, and we understand that you are too. We hope that you'll find this podcast as a room for you to grow along with us as we wrestle with and explore ideas about teaching math even better. In this episode, Curtis and I tackled the challenging and timely topic of reframing learning loss. We consider how deficit language can negatively impact students and share some of our favorite alternate language. We discuss the most important work of teachers returning to a new school year after the disruptions to learning and our lives brought by the pandemic. We suggest how educators can collaborate on vertical articulation to help pair back their scope and sequence documents and create a reasonable amount of math content for deep and meaningful learning for students. We also discuss a really interesting metaphor for learning. You won't want to miss it. Let's get growing.

SPEAKER_00 0:57

Well, Joiny, I am so excited to be sitting down here again chatting with you today. We're going to be talking about a topic that is on a lot of people's minds as we return back to school this year, either face to face or as some students are returning in a virtual manner, Lord. So many of us are going to be dealing with this term that we've heard all over the place called learning loss. And so today we're going to be chatting about the concept, maybe reframing our view and our language around it. So, Joni, I'm so excited we're going to be chatting about this. And so I've got some questions for you, maybe that we can start with. First of all, yeah, first of all, I think uh it would be really maybe a good idea to kind of get a definition about what is this term like getting at? What do we mean when we say this term learning loss? And then maybe some of the reframing of it, some of the rephrases that we that we've proposed.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Yeah, I I think that's a great place to start, Curtis, because I we're seeing this phrase learning loss. And really we have for more than a year now. We've seen this phrase learning loss all over, you know, in the news and in newspaper reports and in, you know, educator conversations and conference sessions and all of those things. So, you know, I think the what where we're operating from in our conversation here today is that we're talking about the fact that students have not had a sort of standard traditional classroom education experience for well over a year and a half. And the impact of that on their academic progress towards standards, um, you know, being whatever those standards are at any particular state. Um so basically the thought that students have had missed opportunities or uh missed time to be able to engage in learning that they would have had the pandemic not occurred. So we're with that being our common understanding of what it is we're talking about, there's also a lot of uh voices out there talking about the potential dangers around using this term learning loss. And folks might have heard this described as deficit-based language and that kind of being the problematic thing about it. So I think, you know, in some of the arguments that I've read, they've shared that this term learning loss, like something was lost, implies that uh it it would could have been avoided, that you know, students were subjected to something that shouldn't have happened to them. And there is a lot of attention, I think, also around the pandemic, around social emotional learning and the, you know, the traumatic impact of the pandemic on a lot of students and their learning. So there's uh I think rightful caution around language that we use as students come back and as we try to return to more normal kinds of learning experiences, uh, we don't want to start students off by thinking that they're behind or that they've done something wrong or that something has happened to them that is problematic about their learning. Instead, I think the ship the encouragement to shift our language is to help acknowledge that this was a traumatic event for everybody, for students, for educators, for families, like all of us experience trauma uh in in going through this pandemic. And there, you know, were there were some disruptions and there were some missed opportunities for sure. Um, but we're gonna just pick right up from where we are and and do our very best to move through. And I think our students knowing that, we believe that they've, you know, did the best that they could through the pandemic. Their families did the best that they could to support their learning, their teachers did the best that they could to give them meaningful learning experiences in uh amidst crazy and chaotic circumstances. And it's okay. And we're gonna be okay. We're gonna pick up and we're gonna move on and we're gonna and we're gonna move through it. So um I'm I'm curious, you know, I I have one particular phrase I'll hold off on sharing that's my sort of favorite replacement phrase, but I would love to your perspective on, you know, what you've heard and what do you what do you think about this? And maybe what are the downfalls to saying we shouldn't say learning loss.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

So I think there's some some interesting things there, Joni. And I I sure appreciate um your perspective on that. And I I share many of those things, many of those thoughts too, that like this concept of of learning loss can be perceived and and can be um can result in uh deficit attitudes and like feeling like we're um we're putting something on students that that they then feel responsible for. And we'll kind of dive into what that can hap what can happen as a result of that. But um I I also think there is some caution of getting caught up in this conversation, right? And spending a whole lot of time uh talking about what why we shouldn't say learning loss, and we should say things like um, you know, learning delay or unfinished learning or learning gaps or things of that nature that kind of capture the the intent. Um and we get all caught up in that and then we we lose the time uh to to focus on, okay, so what's the what's the solution? So um while I'm I'm a hundred percent on board with um you know making sure that that we're using language that doesn't put students in an awkward position or an awkward thought process, we also need to solve the problem. We also need to come back and admit that that, hey, so we've got this thing going on. What are we gonna do uh about it? Regardless of what we call it, what are we gonna do to kind of help students um overcome and and teachers overcome, right? Um and perform and be successful and and maybe treat this more um uh as an opportunity to excel, right? Um instead of some problem uh to fix. And so I I think that might help us um, you know, once we've we've kind of acknowledged that, yeah, there's there's language that can be deficit and certainly can impact student um attitude. And and I certainly don't want to uh downplay any of that, but I also want to just make sure that that now that we've acknowledged that, we can move forward into okay, so what are the things we can do?

SPEAKER_01 7:48

Yeah, I so appreciate that because I think in in this day and age, it's really easy to get caught up in the language and sort of um, you know, language policing people and like, don't use your deficit language. And although we can see, you know, and I just momentarily ago made an argument for why that could be harmful to students. I I agree with you. I think we shouldn't use that as an excuse to say, oh, well, if we just use the strengths-based language, that will solve the problem. Like that's just the first step, like, right? That's just the first thing we do in interacting with students. And you and I've had this conversation aside from our recording of the podcast that what if we said, let's not use deficit-based language with kids? Um, I'll I'll un unveil my favorite phrase, and it's the one that uh NCTM president Trina Wilkerson used in her um, you know, in a recent president's message about this, and she called it perceived potential learning and opportunity gaps. And I thought, oh, that's just beautiful. Um, because what I really, what I really like about that is it, it doesn't go straight to the deficit-based language of something was lost. I love the opportunity word in there because I think for a lot of students who who did miss learning through the pandemic, it wasn't because they did something wrong. It was because they didn't have the opportunity. They didn't have the right systems and structures in place. And maybe it was that they didn't have a quiet place in their home, or maybe it's that they didn't have, you know, a device to engage in remote learning or or uh reliable internet connection or any of those things. So I love that phrase of opportunity. The other thing I love in this phrase is perceived. Um, you know, we it makes sense that there would be some stuff lost, that kids would not be as far along in their learning trajectories in math that they would have been if the pandemic haven't hadn't happened. But in reality, like, do we really know? Like we're kind of starting this new school year assuming that kids are missing things. And so it's this perceived gap rather than a gap we really know exists. And I think it's really important for one of the most important things that educators I know are doing right now as we're recording this, and lots of folks are headed back to school or getting close to heading back to school is figuring out how are they going to uh determine what students did learn, what they've retained from pre-pandemic, what they learned during the pandemic, and and knowing like, okay, where are they? So we know um how to start into grade level content and and you know what that's gonna look like during instruction.

SPEAKER_00 10:39

So we are we're talking about um this idea of okay, so we've acknowledged now that there is a is something going on. Um and so what are the next best steps? What are the things that we can can do to go about exceling in this uh this opportunity that we have here, right? Like what are what are some of the first things that maybe uh you think of as uh as we approach this?

SPEAKER_01 11:08

Well, I love that taking this positive attitude towards this is an opportunity for us to excel. So for me, one of the opportunities that this situation affords that I would love to see as many educators as possible take advantage of is collaboration and vertical articulation. Like we have to talk to our fellow teachers and we have to talk to the teachers in the greater course above and below the one that we're teaching. Like I just feel like that communication is even more important now than it was before. And for me, those first conversations are gonna be around, okay, let's get realistic about our curriculum. Let's get realistic about our scope and sequence documents. You know, Curtis, it's been a while since I've been in the classroom, but I always remember struggling with how much content I was expected to teach students in a given school year or course. And it it never felt realistic to me. I remember back in the 90s, the catchphrase in my district was a guaranteed and viable curriculum, right? How do we say this is the curriculum that we're gonna ensure that all students learn? And I just think all of that is amplified even more in the current situation that we're in. In the best of times, teacher scope and sequence documents were too big. There was way too much content for teachers to feel like they had the time to teach things well. So for me, the very first step is to collaborate with other teachers of the same grade or course, collaborate and employ vertical articulation with teachers of other grades and courses to ensure that you can really pair back that scope and sequence to something that is realistic, not only for the teacher, but for student learning as well. And quite frankly, that means doing less than we've done in the past. It means being okay with letting some topics go and say, you know what? We're not gonna quote unquote cover everything, you know, that's supposed to be covered in this grade level. Cause you and I both know covering isn't learning, you know, exposing kids, you know, hey, we get one day on how to do this math idea. That's not what results in student learning. So for me, that's that's number one.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Yeah, for sure. I and I wholeheartedly agree with that, that concept, establishing what are the big ideas and the big connections across our grade levels and the things that we can build a foundation on. Um, because I know, you know, there's another catchphrase that's flying around. And and I wanted to ask you, you know, this this uh this idea of of just in time learning versus just in case learning, right? And and and doing this, um, yeah, I I think that might be an another concept to kind of explore a little bit in this in this uh solution as we're as we're kind of talking through, okay, so what are the things we can do to to respond? Like are we really gonna go back and and try to reteach all of this content to every student? Or are we really going to to take some time and and um realize that as I approach this particular um piece of content, I know that my students need XYZ foundational piece beforehand. Um, you know, how are we doing here? Uh and and be able to move forward with, okay, everybody's good to go. Or hey, I might need to provide some some extra attention, scaffolding, whatever, um, for certain students.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

For sure. I love the the just in time and just in case. I think just in case intervention describes, you know, certainly what happened in the early part of my teaching career, right? Like, oh, this student has not mastered their, you know, whatever it is, their multiplication facts. So our response to that student's, you know, uh unfinished learning or that student's gap in knowledge is to take them back to that and then try to bring them along through all of the content that would happen between then and now. And yeah, I mean, you can just talk about that and realize that's not a realistic approach. Right. And you know, what other the other thing that's really interesting, Curtis, is as math educators, we know that, you know, math is math builds on itself. So math is, I think, special more so than um in other content areas in school. Like you do have to have some foundational knowledge to progress through math learning through the grades. It sort of is a logical thing to say, well, we have to meet kids where they are and then bring them along to grade level content before they can access grade level content. We have to, you know, be sure all the prerequisites are in place. But what we know about research about learning math is that that that's actually not true. That learning doesn't happen, you know, in like this straight line where you get this and then you get the next thing, and then you get the next thing, and then presto, you've learned. Um, so rethinking kind of how do we, how do we picture how students learn helps us shift our processes for engaging students in learning. So knowing that learning is an iterative process and we need to be, you know, we need to expose students to concepts a bit at a time. Like any teacher who's been in the classroom, math teacher's taught for more than a couple of years knows kids don't learn a concept by you just teaching it for one lesson, right? It's not like, okay, guess what? Today we're gonna do addition of fractions with common denominators. And tomorrow you're gonna know how to do that. Like it doesn't work that way. There's this, you know, a little bit, and um, you know, you work on it, you build those concepts, and then you come back and you build on it more. And and our hope is that we the grade level instruction is where we start this school year and we know like what are the things that we're hoping to build on. And and like you said, what might we need to put in place to help anchor um those things that are a little shakier than they might have been, except for the pandemic. So I think it's a combination of like blowing out our false belief that we have to have everything in place that is a prerequisite before we can start. We don't let's just start. Um and then let's fill in those pieces as we can. Um and and then also knowing like what is the appropriate fill-in. And I love that you said, like, do I need to plan some scaffolding for some students? Maybe there's something where I'm gonna need to scaffold for the whole class, and that's gonna be a different approach than, oh, I really just need to, you know, pull a handful of students aside. And how do I decide who needs to get polls aside? And how do I decide if the whole class needs to? So all of those are the the kinds of ideas that I think educators are really gonna be wrestling with, not just this school year, but for the next few school years.

SPEAKER_00 18:06

Yeah, for sure. I think that, yeah, for sure. It's gonna extend for uh a few years. And and and truthfully, hopefully this actually impacts our practice to begin with for the positive in the future. Because when we begin to think about um hopefully what this does when we when we concentrate on the big ideas and and doing some of that that vertical planning, um we begin to note um those things that that are um foundational connections among the grade levels. And we can maybe begin to trim off, I hate to say trim off the fat a little bit, but you know, get down to what really are the core ideas um that are important in my grade level and how they connect both um to the to the previous grade levels um and how they connect to the future learning and and what can I do to ensure that my students leave here with these five core ideas or whatever it is, right? Um that that I can that I can move. And I love the fact that you came up with and and that you responded to the the that math is not linear learning, despite what logic might say, um, because we do know that math builds um uh on foundations and there are certain foundational pieces, but but just because a student has uh an issue or a gap in a particular place does not mean that they can't access other portions of learning um uh uh around that. And then we can go back and fill in that gap or or or give them some pieces um that help make a connection, right? Um in that space. I love that that we are talking about this this concept of learning um as an iterative process. And I have a I have a friend um who used to do used to talk uh a lot about this. She was a trainer for um a program that I was actually a part of um when I was in the classroom, and she would talk about the process of making a candle, and that learning these math concepts is similar to to the way you might make a candle in that you have the, you know, that that core string or whatever, um, the wick of the candle that you would dip dip in the wax and you dip it once and and and then you're gonna need to dip it again. And and I love just the correlation, even between the idea that like you can't just dip it twice right in a row. There's a period of like dry time and cooling off time that needs to happen before you bring them back in and and do this again. And I think there's more connections that are often made right from a math perspective. You go back and you go, oh my gosh, you know, I thought I knew there was, I thought I knew everything there was to know about proportions. And then all of a sudden, uh now I've seen this new seen them in this new light. Um, and I'm able to make and establish uh a deeper understanding of proportions. And I wouldn't have gotten that if you'd have tried to to per to uh present that to me in you know three or four uh classroom iterations right back.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

All at once, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

And so just being able to allow students some time to process and to think and to and you know, there's a ton there's a ton of different, you know, pick your metaphors for this. But I just love the the concept of, you know, it is an iterative process. It is a a time to to let students to um you know, let things think uh to sink in and let them think on something and and really uh digest it um before we just all of a sudden move on to the next thing or we represent it in a new form and um don't make the connection. So um certainly uh a good a good piece. So I like that we we're talking about that. Oh, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 22:00

Oh, I just wanted to pause for an extra long minute on that creating a candle analogy. I just think that's so beautiful. And you know, this idea of like I I don't know, maybe I'm gonna try and go a little too far with the metaphor here, but that's what I mean by like scaling back your scope and sequence, right? Like we have to, we have to cut some things out in order to provide that sort of wax drying time, like the uh the opportunity for an idea to, you know, we're gonna start to deal with the idea, but then we have to have time for it to solidify and for it to gel and um you know make sense before we can build another idea on top of it. So I I really sorry, I just wanted to slow us down and appreciate of that analogy. I think it's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 22:52

That's so great. No, that's really good. I'm glad that we uh glad you you kind of jumped on that. And so so where I was headed um at the end, so we've kind of talked about um pulling back and and thinking about um our language and the reasons behind that. And and I didn't get to to ask this question maybe before, but we know we we talk about um students and their um their perceptions from us as teachers, you know, the things that we say, the things that we do, how we interact with them, um, that impacts their um their thought process of who they are and how who they are as a math uh learner. Um it also it also impacts just the way that we believe about them. So, like what our beliefs um are matters in the way that we interact with our students. But I I want to just kind of get in closer on that student perspective and what kind of position it puts them in when we use that kind of deficit language or when we use that kind of space. Uh do you feel like, and and is there a way to even maybe um talk about this, that when we're using that language, it kind of sets the students up for uh some of these uh feelings about mathematics that are unfounded, sort of the things that puts them into sort of a math anxiety or a math um fear sort of mode that, oh no, I've I've I've I was supposed to have learned this last year and I I have I can't or I didn't. Um my mom couldn't help me or I didn't have access, whatever the the issue might have been. Um what do you think that does to students' ability now that they're back in a regular classroom?

SPEAKER_01 24:40

Yeah, it's such an important point, Kurt, because you know, we know the there are those handful of students who their home environment is, oh, well, honey, I was never good at math, or your dad was never good at math, so you're not gonna be good at math either, right? Like that's that's a really common um belief or even approach in in families in our society right now. And then add on top of that the pandemic, where in in a lot of cases for students that did have some continuity to their learning, it was because of parental support. So if you've got a parent who doesn't have the good understanding, um, yeah, I can totally just see a student coming back with a whole lot of anxiety, even amplified anxiety around what they have or haven't learned and whether they are or aren't on track. So um I think it's a really interesting point because when um the students are in our classroom and and have that anxiety sort of uh, you know, hanging over their heads, I think there's there are a lot of implications that we as teachers don't always recognize as being tied to the fact that they're feeling that tension and that anxiety. So I think as often as possible, you know, I'm I maybe I'm going too quickly into solutioning around that. Um, I would love to hear you uh talk a little bit too about what you feel like those implications are. But for me, I think if, you know, the approach that I would take with students, and I'm I'm back to talking about my nephew and my work with him, because he had, you know, when I started tutoring him, it was around a lot of math anxiety for him and his belief that, oh, because, you know, A, B, and C are true, I'm not good at math because this is what's valued in his classroom or in the learning experiences that he had had. So for me, I feel like the the kind of fallback approach for educators is to really help every single student make sense of mathematics because math does make sense, right? So helping kids for me work through math anxiety is helping them tap into their own personal sense making. And, you know, that I think with that approach, then the then students can say, oh, wait, actually, maybe I am okay because that does make sense to me. And so validating, validating their experiences, validating their feelings, and then helping them see that they they can make sense of mathematics because mathematics makes sense. So it's all that work, and this is a whole, this is another podcast uh topic for us to do, but that idea around my own identity and my own agency in mathematics is is hugely, hugely important. And again, back to why we should be careful around deficit language, especially with students.

SPEAKER_00 27:27

Yeah, and I think that was the that was the reason I brought it back, um brought this back up was I wanted to to hear you talk a little bit about that whole um connection between our beliefs and attitude and the and their um their attitude as a result, right? And and how we can how we can help influence their um beliefs about their own ability to to accomplish uh the tasks in front of them, right? And and this cool year is going to be a a massive task. You know, we're we're we're finally back into sort of um uh a face-to-face environment. Many students uh and teachers are in that uh right now, and uh and some of that's getting shut down. Um, and I know that you know things are are changing every day. Um, but hopefully um this at least gives some some ideas. We've we've kind of landed on a few ideas today um to uh talk at least or have a conversation with colleagues um about um returning to the classroom and and sort of this uh approach for uh uh uh uh addressing this concept of uh delayed learning or unfinished learning um that uh is certainly something we're all going to be dealing with and and then just what are what are we gonna be able to do? So, Joni, I really appreciate your thoughts today. It was uh a good conversation. Um, and I'm looking forward to uh continuing this conversation here in the next couple of weeks.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

Yeah, there'll be a lot more to say about this. And I just wanna end us today, Curtis, by a shout out to all of our educators out there who have managed through the pandemic, who are, you know, doing back to school with their uh smiles on their faces and a can-do attitude. And um, you know, it's it's it's been a ride and it's gonna continue to be a ride. But um just a huge shout out and and uh words of gratitude to all of our educated listeners for all the work that they're doing every day.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Hear, here.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

Well, that's it for this time. Be sure to check the show notes for the resources we mentioned and others you might want to explore. We would love to hear your feedback and your suggestions for future topics. And if you're enjoying learning with us, consider leaving a review to help others find us and share the podcast with a fellow math educator. See you next time.