My Summer Read: Rebound!
Educators are known for their flexibility, it is something we thrive in. Two years ago, we did not know that we were going to have to completely revamp our entire way of teaching with a day or two of notice (if that). As always, educators rose to the occasion and even came out of the pandemic with new teaching strategies and styles under our belts. No matter how hard teachers tried, COVID-19 still created learning gaps.
However, what if we don’t think about those gaps and instead jump right into higher thinking learning and teaching while also focusing on SEL? That’s what the book Rebound dives into.
Rebound is separated into 8 Modules, each one providing educators with strategies to help us accelerate student learning while we begin to recover from the trauma of COVID. The book begins with discussing educator needs and reflects on how we cannot thrive on a lonely teaching island. The pandemic did not only affect our students, it also caused an extremely stressful situation for our teachers. Rebound discusses the trauma that educators went through and how we can help one another resurface and come out stronger than we were prior to quarantine education. One cannot pour from an empty cup, so when we have a grasp on mending our emotional state from the continuing stress of pandemic teaching, we can then reassemble education for our students who deserve and desperately need it. We can re-establish students' relationships to learning and merge how we taught pre-COVID with new strategies we learned during COVID.
Essentially, COVID-19 created a whole new ACE (adverse childhood experience) for our students. This does not mean we need to go backwards in our teaching to fill in any gaps our students may have endured. The book Rebound taught me that if we focus on rebuilding through linking our curriculum, instruction and assessments, students will begin to recover in their learning. This means that we need to pinpoint what is critical within our content and give our students a chance to excel. All assignments need to be grade appropriate, we need to provide strong instruction, high expectations and deepen our engagement strategies. This way, our students will not only be able to recover within their learning gaps, they will also have accelerated their achievements.
So, where do we begin with interlinking curriculum, instruction and assessments? We start at the beginning with communicating to our students what they are learning and why. We deconstruct the standards with them so they understand what their learning goals are which in turn will help them learn even more. Once they know what their outcome should be by the end of the lesson/unit, we can focus on students collaborating with one another in a way where they will recognize that they are learning. Rebound states that, "a reasonable goal is that, on average, 50 percent of the instructional minutes are spent in student-to-student interactions." This will allow for a deeper conceptual understanding and students will begin to problem solve with one another. Assessments are not always your end game, assessing should be continuously happening throughout the lesson, which is where educators' flexibility comes into play the most. Assessments should be constantly utilized to drive instruction along with making changes to lessons, tasks, student groupings, etc. Connecting curriculum, instruction and assessments will help accelerate student learning and Rebound goes into full detail about how to successfully incorporate this within the classroom.
Check out the book with this complimentary reading of the Introduction form Corwin.
Rebound is a book that I highly recommend all educators read. The authors provide extremely valuable insight in rebuilding our students´ education. Throughout the book, there are numerous spots for self-reflection along with real-life examples of teachers utilizing the strategies that the authors suggest are put into place. Beyond this brief overview of a handful of the modules, there is so much more to unpack within the book that every educator, no matter how many years of experience, can benefit from.
"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts." (C.S. Lewis) And now is the best time for students to soak up the knowledge that educators can provide.
