Have you heard about 'Learning Loss'?

There's a new buzz word in town and it's causing a bit of a stir.  Parents, educators, and universities have recently been expressing concerns that they feel their children or students have fallen behind as a result of remote learning. Worryingly, some universities and industry experts have warned that graduates seem to lack the prerequisite skills required in order to access content, or meet basic level expectations.

My intention is not to trivialise these concerns. Besides, I don't have access to data that tells the richer stories across our many and varied settings. However, I question what it is our students really need now, and in the future. I suggest that our goal should be (and already is for many) to foster student agency, creativity, a capacity to collaborate and problem solve. But if students have suffered from a lack of deep learning, motivation, and engagement during remote learning, then surely that would be a more significant 'learning loss' than the inability to access a specific decodable text, or to divide fractions?

Maybe as we start a new school year, we could support each other and our students to provide more opportunities for them to develop self-regulation, self-direction, curiosity and drive.