Educators address student learning gaps

ROGERS — Educators continue work to identify and address learning gaps for students during the covid-19 pandemic.

Laura Quillen, Fairview Elementary principal, gave a presentation Tuesday to the School Board on Professional Learning Community at Work efforts and how her school has adjusted student learning interventions and enrichment during the pandemic.

The Arkansas Division of Elementary and Secondary Education partnered with Solution Tree to launch the Professional Learning Communities at Work project in the 2017–18 school year, according to the Arkansas PLC at Work Cohort 1 Year 2 Report.

Solution Tree is based out of Bloomington, Ind., and works to transform education worldwide by empowering educators to raise student achievement, according to the organizations’s website.

Learning gaps are identified through the project by concluding what educators want students to learn, how it will be determined students have learned curriculum, how educators will respond when learning hasn’t occurred and how they will react when learning has already happened.

Quillen said the project features an ongoing cycle of inquiry that allows educators to identify gaps.

“Part of this cycle is they are offering common assessments to children,” she said. “They are then analyzing the data and determining needs.”

Learning and development have been interrupted and disrupted for millions of students nationwide due to the pandemic, according to the Covid-19 and Student Performance, Equity and U.S. Education Policy report by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. The only effective response is to use diagnostic tests and other tools to meet each child where they are and to devise a plan for making up for the interruptions, according to the report.

The institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank created in 1986 to include the needs of low- and middle-income workers in economic policy discussions.

The pandemic has dramatically impacted how teachers can address learning gaps at Fairview, Quillen said.

The need for specialty teachers to clean between classes has limited the time educators are able to meet to collaborate on the process from 60 to 40 minutes weekly, she said.

Small group learning has also been made more challenging, Quillen said.

“In the past, a grade level would come together and analyze data and form groups based on student needs,” she said. “One teacher might take a group that needs an intervention of one type and another teacher might take a group that’s in need of enrichment of another type.”

Teachers aren’t sharing students during the pandemic, Quillen said.

“Children from one classroom don’t go into another classroom for small group instruction anymore, because we want to keep them as safe as possible,” she said. “Teachers are doing more of the intervention and enrichment in their own classrooms, either spread out in groups or through Google Classroom and other digital means.”

Some educators are examining how they may overcome small group learning challenges to bring students with specific education gaps together virtually through Google Meet or Zoom following the holiday break, Quillen said.

“That’s exciting that teachers are becoming very creative working within the safety protocols and trying to meet children where they need it,” she said.

Knowing how the pandemic has impacted longterm student learning has yet to be seen and varies by student, Quillen said.

“The data is just different depending on the kids,” Quillen said. “We will know more once we continue to take assessments, and benchmarks along the way will give us a good indication.”