What Just Happened? Analyzing the impact of the pandemic & strategies to mitigate the losses
First Presenter's Institution
Joanne M Billingsley
First Presenter's Brief Biography
JOANNE BILLINGSLEY is a national presenter, author, consultant, and award-winning teacher. Joanne inspires and motivates educators to explore NEW techniques and strategies for reaching and teaching all students, particularly ELLs, special populations, and those that struggle to succeed in school. Joanne’s work combines current neuroscience research with best practices in teaching. She is passionate about supporting educators and sharing creative strategies for building brain-friendly, language-rich, interactive classrooms. Joanne is the President/Founder of Billingsley Education and the creator of Vocabulary Magic, a research-based 6-step process for accelerating the acquisition of academic language. Her guiding principle is, "Words have power. Knowing, owning, and choosing the right words can impact the very direction of our lives. We must teach...students must learn... the words they need to succeed in school and life." She is the author of multiple books, including: Aim to Grow Your Brain - The Secret Mindset of Underachieving Students (Dogear 2009) Making Words REAL - Proven Strategies for Building Academic Vocabulary FAST (Routledge 2016)
Document Type
Event
Primary Strand
Youth Resiliency
Relevance to Primary Strand
The brain is a social organ. Humans are hardwired to interact and communicate with others. Students learn best in small, supportive communities. Isolation from the pandemic has left many students without the social and emotional skills required to work and learn in a community with their peers. Purposeful strategies must be employed to nurture these skills. We must reconnect as we restart.
Alignment with School Improvement Plan Topics
Student Learning and Development
Brief Program Description
Peer interactions are a crucial ingredient in learning. School closures and lockdown measures drastically changed students’ social interactions and peer environments. A return to “normal” is not an option. Implementing strategies that address the unique social and emotional trauma resulting from the pandemic must be the new normal. Teachers need innovative strategies to ensure students reconnect with each other, the school community and content they must master to succeed.
Summary
School closures during the pandemic deprived students of the equalizing force of education. Analysis confirms the pandemic created inequalities and learning gaps that could persist as students’ progress through school, putting future opportunities at risk. Online education, we discovered is an imperfect substitute for in-person learning, particularly for children from low-income families. Peer interactions are a crucial ingredient in learning. School closures and lockdown measures drastically changed students’ social interactions and peer environments. A return to “normal” is not an option. Implementing strategies that address the unique social and emotional trauma resulting from the pandemic must be the new normal. Teachers need innovative strategies to ensure students reconnect with each other, the school community, and the content they must master to succeed. We will share a plan for welcoming students feeling isolated, disconnected, and disinterested back into the school community. Let’s shut down the laptop and power up collaboration and learning!
Evidence
Kuhfeld, Megan, James Soland, and Karyn Lewis. (2022). Test Score Patterns Across Three COVID-19-impacted School Years. (EdWorkingPaper: 22-521). Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University: https://doi.org/10.26300/ga82-6v4
Thomas Kane, faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, is part of a team that recently released the broadest analysis of pandemic learning loss to date. They crunched data from over 2 million students across 10,000 elementary and middle schools.
Learning Objective 1
identify research supported evidence on the impact of the pandemic on learning and emotional health.
Learning Objective 2
review key components for building social and emotional skills in the classroom
Learning Objective 3
practice two specific learning strategies that nurture social and emotions skills while developing academic language
Recommended Citation
Billingsley, Joanne M., "What Just Happened? Analyzing the impact of the pandemic & strategies to mitigate the losses" (2023). Southeast Conference on School Climate. 27.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/secsc/2023/2023/27
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
What Just Happened? Analyzing the impact of the pandemic & strategies to mitigate the losses
School closures during the pandemic deprived students of the equalizing force of education. Analysis confirms the pandemic created inequalities and learning gaps that could persist as students’ progress through school, putting future opportunities at risk. Online education, we discovered is an imperfect substitute for in-person learning, particularly for children from low-income families. Peer interactions are a crucial ingredient in learning. School closures and lockdown measures drastically changed students’ social interactions and peer environments. A return to “normal” is not an option. Implementing strategies that address the unique social and emotional trauma resulting from the pandemic must be the new normal. Teachers need innovative strategies to ensure students reconnect with each other, the school community, and the content they must master to succeed. We will share a plan for welcoming students feeling isolated, disconnected, and disinterested back into the school community. Let’s shut down the laptop and power up collaboration and learning!
