Giving Compass' Take:
- The summer program at Santa Fe Public Schools is a successful example of acceleration strategies that help curb learning loss in students due to the pandemic.
- How can donors support schools that want to adopt acceleration strategies? How can COVID-19 relief funding help address learning loss?
- Read more about combatting the COVID slide.
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Everywhere you look, it seems, people are talking about “learning loss,” or how much students haven’t learned during the tumult of the past two years. But for all the conversations in the news and on social media, one place we’re not seeing it as much is in schools themselves. At the Institute for Teaching and Leading, a professional learning organization that I co-founded, many of our partner districts are focused less on deficits and more on active learning, which we call the asset-based mindset.
Instead of endless conversations about what students missed out on, school leaders are increasingly talking about “unfinished learning,” a term that acknowledges that students across the country had wildly diverse learning experiences over the past year. And with the shift in terminology comes a shift in practice. An asset-based approach emphasizes acceleration and enrichment, with a focus on designing rich, high-quality instructional experiences that provide accessible entry points for all students.
As a bonus, these accelerated learning approaches give a lower priority to repetition or “skill-and-drill” uses of instructional technology. In other words, it’s not about memorizing everything you should have learned, it’s about moving you forward so you pick things up along the way.
The design of a summer adventure program at Santa Fe Public Schools exemplifies some of the best of these emerging acceleration strategies. While summer school often conjures up images of reluctant students sitting in rows, watching the clock or gazing out the window, the scene inside Santa Fe’s Math Adventure Camp could not be more different. There, students are embarking on a quintessential hero’s journey—all about the high seas—that centers an asset-based approach to the teaching of math.
Read the full article about acceleration by Elizabeth S. LeBlanc at EdSurge.