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Online Students
Online students or virtual students are those who spent a significant length of time attending school virtually. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many students received their education through meeting apps. As students return to brickand-mortar classrooms, educators may have strong emotions or subconscious expectations related to online students. They may recall the frustration of teaching to a screen full of black squares and the dozens of times they had to remind students to mute themselves. They may worry about the ways being isolated at home has affected or traumatized students. They may expect that online students will not have learned as much academically as students would in a typical year.
Limiting Language
Following the first school year of the COVID-19 pandemic, terms like virtual student appeared in the limiting language lexicon. A teacher might say or think, “Well, Maria was a virtual student all year, so you cannot expect her to have learned as much as the ones who were here in person,” and place that student in a lower lesson group.
The majority of educators and students would agree that, despite their best efforts, virtual learning does not provide the same kind of educational experience that on-campus learning does. Accordingly, concerns about learning loss took over the educational conversation. A Google search for “learning loss 2020” produces over 1.4 billion hits. Articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Education Week join studies from Stanford University and the Brookings Institution in the effort to quantify how much further behind students are because of the pandemic and the educational response to it. New York Times national correspondent Dana Goldstein (2021) highlights the challenges of remote learning and emphasizes that students of color, students in poverty, and students in rural areas have experienced the greatest learning loss. Washington Post social issues reporter Nicole Asbury (2021) explains testing data that show D.C. students falling behind, especially at-risk students. Young students were also particularly harmed, with a Stanford study finding that, for first- through fourth-grade students across the U.S., “development of oral reading fluency—the ability to quickly and accurately read aloud—largely stopped in spring 2020” and resumed growth has not made up for the loss (Spector, 2021).
The Brookings Institution and Education Week describe the learning loss in economic terms. Brookings Institution researchers calculate that students worldwide who learned remotely will lose a combined $10 trillion of labor earnings over
their lifetimes (Azevedo, Hasan, Geven, Goldemberg, & Iqbal, 2020). When it comes to solutions to learning loss, an Education Week article by associate editor Stephen Sawchuck (2020) explains that the most effective intervention for the loss is intensive, high-dosage tutoring, which could cost school systems up to $3,800 per student for a single school year. The article notes that the United Kingdom set aside £1 billion for such tutoring to help alleviate the effects of the pandemic.
Although there are differing opinions on just how much learning and earning was lost, most educators and experts agree that students did not learn as much as they would have in a normal year of in-person schooling.
Language of Possibility
There’s no arguing that student learning progressed less than normal during the pandemic. How much students have been affected varies wildly from place to place, but it appears significant across the board. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University released a study in October of 2020 that looked at the learning loss from school closures in the spring of 2020 in eighteen states and the District of Columbia. By using nationally normed standardized tests and cross-referencing those tests with typical student growth for students in each state, they created a “days lost” equivalency. The estimates for reading ranged from 183 days of learning lost in South Carolina to 57 days lost in North Carolina. In mathematics, the study estimated days lost ranged from 232 days in Illinois to 136 days in Wisconsin (Center for Research on Education Outcomes, 2020). While Canada has done less large-scale standardized testing since the pandemic, smaller studies reveal lower test scores than in years prior. One analysis based on data from Ontario estimates up to a “three-month learning shortfall” (Vaillancourt, Davies, & Aurini, 2021).
While these statistics are troubling and important, metaphorical handwringing about the loss of time in the classroom will not close the gap created by circumstances educators had no control over. It is much more productive to accept students where they are academically. As Mike Mattos (2020), author and RTI at Work™ expert, points out, there would have been many students going into the next grade level behind academically even without the global pandemic. Educators need to assess students individually and fill gaps in their learning if they are not where they need to be academically. Spending one’s energy thinking “if only” (as in, “If only these students were at school every day last year, they would not be so behind right now”) is neither productive nor positive and should be avoided as much as humanly possible.
There is also evidence that teachers are able to minimize learning loss during virtual learning. One effective approach is to focus on ensuring students master what is truly essential in a grade level or course and omitting nonessential standards. At L.L. Owen Elementary School in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, virtual students progressed at a rate similar to their in-person peers. The nationally normed endof-year assessment showed an average in-person student grew 0.9 years in reading and 1.0 years in mathematics during the 2020–2021 school year. Students who remained virtual for the entirety of the 2020–2021 school year grew an average of 1.0 year in reading and 1.0 in mathematics (E. Cooper, personal communication, October 6, 2021).
Even though educators might expect a gap between in-person and virtual learners, there may not be one—and if there is, educators should focus on helping students overcome it. It is important for school and district leaders to remind staff that the reasons students are where they are academically are less important than what staff are going to do to help students move forward. Teachers may understandably tend to bemoan the months and years of virtual learning, so leaders may need to repeatedly redirect this limiting language. The following are strategies a learning leader can use to reinforce the language of possibility. 1. Fall back on the data: Compare student data from common formative assessments, summative assessments, benchmark assessments, or nationally normed assessments from the 2018–2019 school year (the last full year before the pandemic) to current performance data—it may not be as bad as you expect. I have done this with several principals and district office administrators and in each case the students were performing within a range one would expect from different cohorts of students, showing slight differences but not extreme. Leaders can share these data with staff. 2. Provide staff resources for intervening to support students: If the data do show students are significantly behind where they were in 2018–2019, then the leader should acknowledge that and immediately shift the conversation to “What are we going to do about it?” Leaders should provide resources and interventions for staff to use or work with the district or school’s guiding coalition to find resources. 3. Impose a “swear jar” for when staff use limiting language associated with virtual learners: In schools where the leader has a very good relationship with staff, this strategy can be used in a playful way. The leader can inform staff that anytime they are heard complaining about virtual learners without providing ideas for closing the gap they owe a
