Embracing Student Engagement: The Pathway to Post-Pandemic Learning

As schools emerge from remote learning, educators are understandably worried about content and skills that students would otherwise have learned under normal circumstances. This raises the very real possibility that children will face endless hours of skill-and-drill remediation that is intended to help close gaps but could lead to students disengaging from school entirely. In fact, new research conducted by the EdWeek Research Center and commissioned by Newsela, suggests that most administrators increased their reliance during the pandemic on self-paced computer interventions that offer focused skills practice/remediation and 93 percent say their use of these interventions will remain the same or higher in 2020-21. Yet the same survey also suggests that when it comes to pandemic recovery, educators prioritize not rote memorization but student engagement facilitated by high-quality instructional materials and social emotional learning. This webinar will use survey results to shed light on the gap between educators’ perceptions and their practices while also discussing practical approaches to start down the path of engaging and enriching post-pandemic learning.