Re-engaging Post-Pandemic Science Learners
How can we better re-engage learners affected by the pandemic? It goes without saying that the past few years have been challenging for teachers and students. Education was forced into survival mode for all parties and learners were forced to become mature, task-oriented adults in an instant. As educators, we had to consolidate learning tasks into easily consumable chunks and find a balance between standards/rigor and ease of completion for the learner.
Many of these forced instructional models leading up to and during the height of the pandemic highlighted an already growing concern for educators and districts: our learners are losing academic resilience at an alarming rate. As learners finally re-emerged and re-engaged in face-to-face instruction, teachers were excited to focus their lessons on collaboration, risk-taking, and vulnerability. But I believe doing so in today’s environment is like asking a retired gymnast to repeat their best routine on the spot.
Teaching through the COVID pandemic has magnified three already-concerning categories of learners; the Low Performer, the Apathetic Underachiever, and the High-Achieving Perfectionist. To hear more about how these learners have been affected, and how these strategies can be successfully implemented to help them, watch this on-demand webinar now >>.
For learners to feel safe taking risks, it is our responsibility to build a foam pit for them; a low-risk environment where they can challenge themselves without the fear of long-term consequences. Here are three strategies to rebuild the learner’s confidence in risk-taking.
1. Reassess Your Assessments by changing our grading policies and where in the learning process we choose to praise them. To allow learners to feel safe taking risks, we must eliminate situations where failure is unrecoverable. Consider every major assessment one takes in his/her professional career: SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, and Teacher/Principal Certification Exams. You can take every one of those, multiple times, for full credit. So what life lesson do we think we’re teaching with no recovery? Consider more formative assessments, which are meant not to be graded, as ways to recognize areas of learner strength and/or growth to guide your instruction. And when assessing them, focus less on their performance as a comparison to the mean, and more on its representation of the appropriate path of growth for that learner. When the learner truly challenged him/herself to earn a B, celebrate that B! Show all your learners that you praise the effort, not the result.
2. Gamify Your Classroom by implementing the qualities in games that lower the stress and fear for the player. Consider the qualities of first-player online games with mass appeal and apply them to your classroom:
3. Lead With and Revisit Phenomena in your classroom. Science teachers have engaged learners by asking them to consider the science behind real-world events well before phenomena became such a buzzword. It allows them to see science outside of the classroom walls, but more importantly, it provides a safe access point for all learners, regardless of their perception, or lack thereof, of science mastery. For so many learners affected by remote learning, they’ve lost the willingness to take academic risks in the classroom. But by asking learners to share their unique perspectives and experiences related to a natural event, at the beginning of a unit when no one is expected to have the “correct” answer, all learners can feel safe and confident in including their voice in the conversation.
However, some teachers only see phenomena as a springboard for a unit, followed by more content (and teacher) directed instruction. They overlook the golden opportunities phenomena can provide in the learning process. The best phenomena are those that learners will answer differently based on their content understanding. They’re often connected to common misconceptions or are so commonly seen that their true scientific explanations are often passed over. True phenomena-based instruction asks learners to revisit the phenomena as they build a deeper understanding of the related content. Like asking learners to revisit the clear targets throughout a unit, considering how new information may change their understanding of phenomena allows for a deep, metacognitive moment; one where learners can make realizations for themselves.
Before district leaders can begin to assess the gaps in academic learning that the past few years have caused, we must first address the gaps in our students' well-being that have led us to today’s classroom challenges. What is commonly blamed on laziness or apathy is often simply kids unwilling to take a risk in the incredibly challenging environments that we as educators have created for them. If we take a step back to the educational psychology courses we’ve all taken, we will remember the phrase that should become the mantra for re-engaging today’s learners: Maslow before Blooms.
1. Reassess Your Assessments by changing our grading policies and where in the learning process we choose to praise them. To allow learners to feel safe taking risks, we must eliminate situations where failure is unrecoverable. Consider every major assessment one takes in his/her professional career: SAT, ACT, MCAT, LSAT, and Teacher/Principal Certification Exams. You can take every one of those, multiple times, for full credit. So what life lesson do we think we’re teaching with no recovery? Consider more formative assessments, which are meant not to be graded, as ways to recognize areas of learner strength and/or growth to guide your instruction. And when assessing them, focus less on their performance as a comparison to the mean, and more on its representation of the appropriate path of growth for that learner. When the learner truly challenged him/herself to earn a B, celebrate that B! Show all your learners that you praise the effort, not the result.
2. Gamify Your Classroom by implementing the qualities in games that lower the stress and fear for the player. Consider the qualities of first-player online games with mass appeal and apply them to your classroom:
- Target is Clear- Normalize the habit of writing clear learning objectives on the wall, and make sure all learners understand exactly where the learning process is taking them. Consider providing all learning targets, and paraphrasing your state standards so learners can make sense of them, at the beginning of a unit. This way, learners can return periodically and assess their own progression towards mastery of each target.
- Continuous Feedback- By shifting to more formative assessments, learners can immediately recognize how they are doing and where they can self-correct while they are learning. By consistently allowing learners to show progressive mastery of content, those ominous summative assessments seem much less intimidating as they become a chance to “show what they know” rather than “what they don’t.” The time within a unit is often underutilized when it comes to students recognizing their progress. For kids, as is true for us all, the first step of movement is in realizing we’re standing still.
- Same Expectations- Regardless of experience and previous success, all players start fresh. Imagine what that mentality could do for the learner with less than impressive academic statistics but a natural connection to the topic discussed. Or how freeing it would be for the high-performing student with constant pressures of maintaining perfection to know that academic struggle is not only okay but an essential part of the learning environment.
- Positive Peer Response- Build a classroom culture in which supportive collaboration is expected daily; where a learner’s need to communicate and connect to their peers is nurtured and encouraged. This builds invaluable experience in and comfort with a critical 21st-century skill needed for all learners to succeed in the future workforce.
3. Lead With and Revisit Phenomena in your classroom. Science teachers have engaged learners by asking them to consider the science behind real-world events well before phenomena became such a buzzword. It allows them to see science outside of the classroom walls, but more importantly, it provides a safe access point for all learners, regardless of their perception, or lack thereof, of science mastery. For so many learners affected by remote learning, they’ve lost the willingness to take academic risks in the classroom. But by asking learners to share their unique perspectives and experiences related to a natural event, at the beginning of a unit when no one is expected to have the “correct” answer, all learners can feel safe and confident in including their voice in the conversation.
However, some teachers only see phenomena as a springboard for a unit, followed by more content (and teacher) directed instruction. They overlook the golden opportunities phenomena can provide in the learning process. The best phenomena are those that learners will answer differently based on their content understanding. They’re often connected to common misconceptions or are so commonly seen that their true scientific explanations are often passed over. True phenomena-based instruction asks learners to revisit the phenomena as they build a deeper understanding of the related content. Like asking learners to revisit the clear targets throughout a unit, considering how new information may change their understanding of phenomena allows for a deep, metacognitive moment; one where learners can make realizations for themselves.
Before district leaders can begin to assess the gaps in academic learning that the past few years have caused, we must first address the gaps in our students' well-being that have led us to today’s classroom challenges. What is commonly blamed on laziness or apathy is often simply kids unwilling to take a risk in the incredibly challenging environments that we as educators have created for them. If we take a step back to the educational psychology courses we’ve all taken, we will remember the phrase that should become the mantra for re-engaging today’s learners: Maslow before Blooms.
Ramy Mahmoud is a National Science Specialist for Savvas Learning Company and a lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas teaching Educational Technology and Curriculum and Instruction in Science. As a former high school biology teacher of 16 years, Ramy is passionate about engaging all learners to think critically and connect learning to the world around them.
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