Unfinished Learning is Unfinished Teaching

The Problem
 
In so many classrooms across the country, children will walk into their first day of school with lots of unfinished learning and already behind grade-level. Teachers across content areas will have prepared for this inevitability and adjust their content to meet the kids where they are. And for many, meeting kids where they are will mean remediating to below grade-level standards or starting with last years’ content.  Students will make progress against the goals that their teachers have set for them, and at the end of the year, we will celebrate their academic growth, acknowledge their grit and even marvel all of the things our students had to overcome to get to this point. And while the end of year goodbyes and reflections will bring tears and some insights about our practice, this fact will remain: Starting the year with below grade-level standards and content guarantees that our students who started the year below grade-level will also end the year below grade-level, if not further behind. Furthermore, the stories we tell ourselves about why our students are behind will undermine our ability to learn from our own practice. As a result, the instructional decisions that led to this outcome will remain uninterrogated and will even be validated as acceptable, despite the levels of student achievement they failed to yield. And when we allow this to happen, we will abandon our locus of control and systemically abdicate the power we have to create access and close opportunity gaps for all of students.
 
The Impact
Within our education system, models for learning presume that the path to mastery is a singular, linear path. Therefore, when students are below grade-level, many educators chose to ‘go back’ to the gaps in student understanding and then continue ‘in order’ until students are back on grade-level. While this approach does allow teachers to address unfinished learning, it simply does not account for time. The time spent ‘going back’ takes away from the time designated for grade-level content. As time runs out, so do student opportunities to grow against grade-level standards.

When teachers choose to remediate to below grade-level standards, students are not exposed to grade-level content and never receive the opportunity to ‘catch up’. However, even though students did not have the opportunity to learn grade-level content, they are held accountable for it when they are tested on grade-level standards they were never exposed to. And when those students are black, brown or learning English, that accountability in our education system looks like being retained, being pushed into special education and ultimately being labeled as unteachable, absolving teachers and schools of our responsibility to teach them. While our jobs are done, their learning remains unfinished and unaddressed.

The Call to Action
I would like to put forward the notion that unfinished learning is unfinished teaching. That gaps in student learning are actually gaps in our teaching. That gaps in our teaching are actually opportunities to identify and implement scaffolds that create access. That there are multiple paths to mastery and that teachers have the power and the responsibility to open those paths to mastery for their students. That our call to action is to identify how to create access to grade-level content, while students are learning grade-level content. I call you to stop remediating and start creating access.
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When we remediate students to below grade-level standards, we resign our actions to the belief that our students will never be able to access grade-level and eventually college-level content. Instead, let’s assume that all students can learn grade-level content. If we can embrace that assertion, then if and when students struggle, we will find barriers to grade-level content and remove the barriers, instead of removing the grade-level content. Start the school year with Day 1 of grade-level content. Identify the specific questions, tasks, and lessons where explicit connections or instruction on the previous year’s content creates access, then move on. Filter all of the instructional decisions through the lens of this question: Will this create access to my grade-level content, today?

If the answer is yes, then that is wonderful! If the answer is no, then we have the responsibility and an opportunity to learn a way to do better. So let’s address this unfinished learning by addressing our own unfinished teaching with scaffolds that create access to (not remediate away from) grade-level content.