Recovery is a journey
This post is adapted from an email originally shared on January 14, 2022. If you would like to receive future emails, you can sign up here.
A belated happy new year! 2022 is not pulling any punches.
Last summer, we all had high hopes for the learning recovery and student support we would be able to focus on this year and feel disappointment when new challenges disrupt those plans. But recovery is not an event; it is a journey. Recovery will not be checked off in the activities of a semester or even a school year — it will be lived out in our commitment to keep working at the job of supporting students’ needs, as long as it takes. Some days, supporting learning recovery will look like coaching instruction and strengthening counseling support. Some days, it will look like another round of schedule revisions and substitute teacher recruitment calls.
In 10 years, when we look back on COVID’s impact on education, we know we will see lasting consequences, and we will all have made leadership choices we regret with the benefit of hindsight. This is the brutal reality. But I am equally certain we will look back and see that the consequences could have been much worse but for the heroic daily efforts of teachers and leaders to keep fighting to support every day of learning. Because every day matters for every student.
We’ll pick up our series on early literacy in a few weeks. Until then, here are some of the resources we’ve found helpful in this moment:
- A throwback to March 2020 guidance on how to maintain relationships during school closures
- Learning for Justice’s resources for teaching a fuller account of Martin Luther King Jr., his peers, and their legacy
- The Annenberg Institute’s brief on high-quality distance learning
- EdWeek’s first-person narratives on what educators are doing to sustain morale and learning momentum
- SchoolKit is hosting a “What’s Working?” virtual summit next Friday, January 21
