This third installment of our year-long project exploring thematic teaching using trade books at the I-3 Academy in Birmingham, AL addresses the COVID slide and how the students are rebounding and experiencing academic growth.

The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on learning has been felt in schools throughout the world. Schools in lower- and middle-income nations report that 70% of ten-year-olds are unable to read; pre-pandemic the number was 53% (UNICEF, 2022). Although the United States is a wealthy nation, we have not been immune to COVID learning slides. States are reporting learning losses in both reading and mathematics. The Brookings Institute reports that the socioeconomic test score gap in U.S. elementary schools grew by 20% in mathematics and 15% in reading (Kuhfeld et al., 2022). Beyond these statistics, teachers at all levels, including those of us in higher education, witnessed a drop in student attendance and engagement throughout the last two years (Fortin, 2022).

Many of the students at the i3 Academy struggled with basic literacy skills, and their disciplinary literacy skills were essentially non-existent. They struggled in answering open-ended questions and providing evidence to support claims made when they did answer. Their responses were frequently written in sentence fragments, typically providing short answers while failing to respond to the entire question.

The students initially resisted engaging in complex learning tasks. They appeared to lack the academic stamina and resisted dedicating the time necessary to fully complete multi-step assignments. The students were frequently confused on how to begin tasks that required them to gather and synthesize information from multiple sources.

Our vision for thematically teaching civil rights issues and strengthening these students’ disciplinary literacy, thinking, and argumentation skills drove every activity and one week project in this year-long project. During the initial days of our project, the students were engaged in the content we introduced. They wanted to know more about influential African Americans, especially those who were new to them, and how they fought for civil rights. In looking at their work from August, it appeared to us that their resistance to completing complex assignments was more an artifact of failure avoidance than an actual disinterest in the material.

Overcoming the COVID Slide

            Starting with our first one-week lesson sequence using Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2019), students were tasked with completing assignments that required the use of disciplinary literacy strategies highlighted in Dimensions 2 and 3 of the Inquiry Arc (NCSS, 2013). With modeling and support from the teacher and researchers, students began to cite evidence from provided texts to support their claims when answering open-ended questions. These citations usually took the form of listing the page number where the students found the information to support their claims. Within the first month of our study, we observed students moving from writing sentence fragments to writing complete sentences and short paragraphs. Six months into the school year, students wrote essays explaining what happened leading up to and during the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921. Although most of the essays were about a paragraph in length, students made connections and provided answers that demonstrated economic, civic, geographic, and historical thinking skills. They based their arguments on the trade book Unspeakable (Weatherford & Cooper, 2021).

            In addition to employing disciplinary literacy skills, like synthesizing information from multiple sources and citing evidence, students at the I-3 Academy also demonstrated the components of historical empathy as described by Endacott and Brooks (2013) when completing their essays to summarize the events of the Tulsa Race Massacre. They made affective connections to the individuals studied and demonstrated both perspective taking and historical contextualization in their writing. Students also made connections between events in the past and current social issues, particularly regarding voter suppression and systemic racism as seen in the sample student essay. 

Giving Space to Grow

            The reality is that students are struggling to regain their academic skills and stamina after two years of interrupted instruction caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We encourage social stuides teachers to realize that growth is not instantaneous. Students need to be provided with the time and scaffolding to develop their disciplinary literacy skills. Instead of requiring an essay with citations off the bat, start with identifying key ideas and supporting them with evidence in a short answer format. If students experience success with these initial disciplinary literacy tasks, build upon them. Task students in subsequent learning activities with writing paragraphs and require them to provide evidence for their claims. Over time, the students’ stamina and disciplinary literacy skills will grow. They will, in due time, develop the ability to analyze more complex sources and craft evidence-based arguments with modeling and support by the teacher. As we help students to overcome the COVID slide and develop disciplinary literacy skills, patience, persistence, and a clear vision are key. By visualizing what we want our students to know and be able to do, when combined with the patience to scaffold, students will be able to achieve remarkable growth. This has been our experience with our thematic teaching project at the i3 Academy this academic year.

References

Endacott, J. & Brooks, S. (2013). An updated theoretical and practical model for promoting

historical empathy. Social Studies Research and Practice, 8 (1), 41-58.

Fortin, J. (2022, April 20). More pandemic fallout: The chronically absent student. The New York

Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/us/school-absence-attendance-rate-

covid.html

Gates, H.L, Jr. (2019). Dark sky rising: Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow. Scholastic.

Kuhfeld, M., Soland, J., Lewis, K., & Morton, E. (2022, March 3). The pandemic has had

devastating impacts on learning. What will it take to help students catch up? Brookings

Institute. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2022/03/03/the-

pandemic-has-had-devastating-impacts-on-learning-what-will-it-take-to-help-students-catch-up/

NCSS. (2013). College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for social studies standards:

Guidance for enhancing the rigor of K-12 civics, economics, geography, and history. Author. 

UNICEF. (2022 January 23). Scale of education loss ‘nearly insurmountable,’ warns UNICEF:

Media fact sheet. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/covid19-scale-education-loss-

nearly-insurmountable-warns-unicef

Weatherford, C.B., & Cooper, F. (2021). Unspeakable: The Tulsa Race Massacre.

            Carolrhoda Books.