Emotional support increased during COVID pandemic, but young learners struggling to read
Early educators are crunching numbers to see how teachers and students are progressing nearly two years after COVID-19 threw the sector into an ebb and flow of uncertainty.
Remote mentoring systems, a return to in-person learning and health protocols adjusted to maximize student engagement have shown promising results — but troubling trends in early literacy and communication skills have teachers honing their focus on those areas.
Lyn Lucas, the senior vice president of early education & program evaluation for Camp Fire First, said that students who showed signs of struggling last year continued to show some signs of being behind in those areas.
“Toddler communication skills … (in) the babies who are now toddlers and experiencing the second year of their entire lives, still in pandemic restrictions, have begun lower than last year’s, by 7%,” Lucas said. “This is somewhat to be expected, since last year’s toddlers were not learning for as long under the same conditions.”
Camp Fire First, a nonprofit that provides after-school programs, mentors early educators and partners with school districts to increase academic outcomes, has worked with Fort Worth ISD for years.
“(The data) is an indicator for us to give extra focus to this area of development between now and the end of the year,” Lucas said.
The data comes as the district continues to push literacy as a top priority after struggling to maintain or increase reading scores over the years.
Ninety-five percent of students who are now in pre-K met age-appropriate skills in math, although early literacy was also a struggle for that age group.
As a result Camp Fire worked with teachers and families to send books home with children, increased one-on-one reading and focused on educators pulling masks down while students kept theirs on, so that children could see their faces when they were reading.
Advocates, educators stress importance of social emotional learning
While academic skills have been front and center for schools and academics, there has also been concern about delays in social skills and emotional awareness and education.
Justina Schlund, the director of content and field learning for the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning, said that early research underscores the need for increased focus as teachers look at teaching priorities in the coming years.
“In early childhood specifically, we’re seeing some early research that suggests infants born during pandemic times may be showing lower scores on developmental assessments of social and motor skills because of less social interaction,” Schlund said. “The increased stress that caregivers are feeling, as well as limited interactions with peers because children have had fewer playdates or been out of child care centers, can have an impact on young children.”
That was apparent early on in Camp Fire child development data shared with the Star-Telegram, with personal-social skills falling 7% for infants and 10% for toddlers between the 2019-20 school year and the 2020-21 school year.
Increased training and focus for teachers has shown improvement at campuses so far this year, according to Dearrine Morrow, a child development specialist with Camp Fire.
Seventy-seven percent of students were meeting age-appropriate milestones at the end of last year.
“We’re already at 75% (for mid-year) and we are projected to be at 80%,” Morrow said. “It is showing that the work we are doing, the mentoring, the side-by-side coaching is working. There is room for improvement, but our centers are progressing at a rapid pace.”
Schlund said that even small delays in development should be paid attention to.
“Social and emotional learning is essential, not just in this immediate moment — but as we deal with potentially many years of impact on child development because of the pandemic,” she said. “The early childhood years of infants born during this time, especially as they enter schooling, will require much greater attention to their social and emotional development.”
Teachers scored high marks on emotional support over pandemic
Child Care Associates, one of the largest providers of child care in North Texas, has been tracking data on program quality and student outcomes for years — partnering in 2016 with the Center on Research and Evaluation at Southern Methodist University.
Dylan Farmer, the assistant director of strategic partnerships for the center, said that teachers stepped up across CCA and other programs during the pandemic in a way that researchers were not expecting.
“We saw a lot of increases in quality where we expected quality to take a back seat to just basic necessities,” she said. “That’s not what we saw, so now we’re really trying to understand what kind of effects the pandemic has had on student learning.”
One of the key ways teachers stepped up was in providing social emotional learning to students, where teachers demonstrated the highest emotional support scores since the evaluations began in 2016.
CCA recently promoted Karin Scott, who oversaw data collection for Head Start programs, to chief performance officer — a position that will crunch data across the program.
“The new role will work to create a culture of results across the whole organization (including) child care subsidy, business coaching, organizational functions, etc., building on what we started in Head Start,” Scott said in an email.
Scott said the high scores in emotional support are just the beginning of teaching kids as the pandemic subsides and beyond.
“Even during this particularly difficult and stressful time for teaches and families, CCA classrooms earned the highest Emotional Support scores since third-party observations began in 2016,” she said. “CCA teachers are providing warm and supportive environments where children can learn to give up that stress, build strong relationships with adults and children alike, and become curious and excited about learning.”
Schlund said that for those reasons, it is imperative for more districts and organizations to focus on helping families and students with emotional support and social learning coming out of the pandemic.
“Social and emotional learning assists students and adults to express loss, talk about pain with shared language, making them less vulnerable to social isolation and sadness, making it an important lever to help with many of the stressors of the pandemic,” she said. “The awareness of this need meant that an increasing number of teachers, schools, and districts are adopting social and emotional learning practices.”
That is why part of that support at CCA moving forward, Scott said, is recognizing the traumatic experience children and families have gone through over the last two years.
“Children are sponges for stress and through COVID, many children’s normal routines and structures have been flipped upside down and their families are stressed,” she said. “The education team with members of the mental health and disabilities team have come together to support families and staff with additional resources during this time.”
This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
