What are we really teaching students during the Covid-19 pandemic?

What are we really teaching students during the Covid-19 pandemic?

As of April 19th, there have been over 50 million students who have faced school closures in the United States.  At least 35 million students will not be returning to school this academic year, and nearly every student in the United States has faced some change to their daily routine or schedule.

For both teachers and students, the last few months have been a challenge to create and work within a new framework, which comes with both unique problems and new opportunities.  Teachers have had to create new methods of communicating, teaching, and evaluating learning.  Administrations have had to examine and restructure expectations to meet with new guidelines from governing bodies.  Students have had to learn new platforms and adapt to increases in personal responsibility and time management.

One of the primary areas of concern has been how students will access material, be held accountable, or meet the standards of their classroom.  The ability to be resilient, self-motivated and manage their time might be the most important lesson they take away from this experience.  It is difficult, frustrating, and might pay of dividends in the future if approached appropriately. 

We are now faced with greater disparity between degrees of student opportunity.  Those who have readily access to the internet or resources and those who do not is only part of the story.  The gap between the varying factors of privilege, of wealth inequality and other discrepancies are moving towards the forefront of educational policies.  Now, more than ever, we are also grading a student's ability to self-regulate.  But are we teaching it?

The modern American education system is built on a foundation of co-regulation principles.  We do not expect students to take full responsibility of regulating their time, actions, or behaviors.  We use bells, schedules, units of instructions, even dress codes to help students manage how they learn and behave in the school setting.  The school building itself is designed to help students construct a physical environment to improve learning.  

This creates less of a demand on executive function, which is still developing during the school age years.  Students do not need to decide how to manage their time, the bell does.  They do not need to decide when to eat, they are assigned a lunch. Students do not need to decide what content area they will focus on, they are provided standards.  Students have been trained to rely on this co-regulation as they are part of a system that uses this scaffolding to supplement their developing executive function.

Recently, that scaffolding was removed.  The training wheels were suddenly taken off and a new level of personal responsibility was placed on their shoulders.  It should not be shocking to any educator that those students who required constant reminders, often forgot their homework, or struggled to stay on task were more likely to fall behind.  Students who have limited support structures outside of the classroom are now in a place of larger cognitive requirement as they must figure out not only what to do, but also how, where, and when to do it.  

Shifting Curriculum Focus

We often forget that content is often a vehicle to teach more important skills that are required beyond the classroom.  The Covid-19 pandemic has increased the attention on issues of education that have been lurking in the shadows for decades, and one of those issues is the division between hard skills (content) and soft skills (behaviors).  Bruce Tulgan, who specializes in management training, remarked that "people get hired because of their hard skills, but get fired because of their soft skills."  In a three year study conducted by Leadership IQ, a global leadership training and research company, 20,000 new hires were tracked after being hired in public, private businesses and healthcare organizations.  Nearly 50% of these new hires were let go with eighteen months of being hired, but only 11% were because they lacked the technical skills required.  89% were let go because of a lack of various soft skills such as lack of motivation, coachability, and social emotional skills.

Organizations like Forbes, Rasmussen College, and Monster.com list similar skills that employers are looking for in the digital age.  The include problem solving, communication, flexibility, time management, resiliency and initiative; which are the same skills we can focus and hone with the recent changes to most schools across the country.  The question is whether we are looking at this as roadblock to traditional education, or an opportunity?  Are we helping our students to practice these skills in a real-world situation? 

In order to help students get the best possible outcome from this situation, it requires thoughtful and intentional practice, and also a willingness to change our focus. 

Skills such as controlling emotions, time management, impulse control, and self-regulation are all attributes of executive function and are vital to roles of individual responsibility.  These skills extend beyond the workplace and play a role in how we interact with friends, family and community.

We can help students practice improving their attention and focus without their normal structures and routines in place.  A study conducted at the Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center has shown that students improved their ability to focus and maintain attention when provided with guided practice followed by personal reflection.  Students experienced greater growth when the child understood the training process.  While executive function is largely connected with brain development, it can also be trained and developed with intentional scaffolding and the use of co-regulation.

The truth is that schools and teachers have always played a role in the development of executive function and its correlated soft skills such as time management, focus, inhibition control and planning. The natural progression from co-regulation to self-regulation is the unspoken backbone of human cognitive development.  As students struggle with lack of the routine structures that helped facilitate their learning it provides schools with a unique opportunity to shift their attention and focus on how to improve skill sets and practices that are only going to become more opportune in a digital world. Focusing on building these skills should be our priority, even before our content. Make it very clear to students that part of what they are learning and what we want them to practice is how to manage their time or adapt to new scenarios. Now, without the added support of our physical structures, we need to increase our role as co-regulators of their executive function. 

As many businesses and organization move towards increased online or work-from-home scenarios, students are being provided a trial-by-fire tutorial in potential changes to the global workforce.  Schools are now being afforded the opportunity to facilitate learning that is directly applicable and has been pushed to the forefront of a changing landscape.  The Covid-19 pandemic will become one of the defining moments of this generation and schools should be sending a message to our students about what they can do instead of what they cannot.  It should be seen as an opportunity to develop resiliency and problem solving, to practice time management and personal responsibility.  How we handle this event will have lasting impacts on our students, but it won't necessarily be about content.