Is “Teaching Loss” a Myth, Too?

Learning loss? What about Teaching Loss? It might be harder to prove that this concept isn’t real.

By Pav Wander

If you’re anything like me, the end of the school year was a little bittersweet. It was anything but an ideal year, with several twirls in and out of the classroom, resulting in a very disjointed 18 months. We were riddled with challenges that prevented students from learning like they normally would and we had inequitable access to technology, preventing a consistent and quick start to the desired learning environment. 

I remember a few months into the pandemic, I started hearing about this concept of “Learning Loss,” and I completely bought in. I was worried about how much of the curriculum students were losing, and how they would “fall behind” with...well...whom? It was a scary concept that parents and educators began to ponder, as the pandemic rolled on-and-on, past 6 months, past a year, past a year and a half. 

There have been many conversations, including one from us on The Staffroom Podcast (Episode 88) with respect to whether or not Learning Loss was something we needed to to be worried about, and how to combat the myth of it, if it was indeed a myth. Despite the fact that this is something we have experienced or come across, it also became abundantly clear that students weren’t the only ones that may feel they have lost something in the past year and a half. 

There are certain traumatic events and experiences in our lives that we tend to talk about rather nonchalantly after the experience passes. Childbirth in one such example. I feel like I can speak on this because I’ve gone through childbirth, and more than once, at that. Once the experience of having a baby has passed, mother and child are healthy, and the mother has healed from the trauma of it, they tend to relay the feelings and experience with a lot of objectivity. It becomes something they “just did” because they had to, and often, as a defence mechanism, the horrendous pain and utter discomfort gets removed from the storytelling. After all, the pain and discomfort wasn’t the focus, it’s about the baby! 

I don’t want to compare the pandemic to the devastation or even elation attached to some very extreme and sometimes traumatic life experiences, but this past year and a half of teaching was something I’ll likely continue to talk about with a lot of objectivity for the rest of my career. And, just like with my birthing experiences, I’ll probably leave out the really painful bits. I’ll probably want to think about the positives from the experience when I relay these thoughts 20 or 30 years down the road. 

“It wasn’t that bad,” might be something I say

Girl! Yes it was! Why are you lying?! We don’t have to cover up our feelings of pain from this past year. Many of us have also experienced the trauma of losing loved ones while still being present for students that needed us to keep it together, in our own perceptions. We can own these feelings and then also at the same time work through some of the reasons we haven’t seen and felt our experiences with all perspectives. 

I’m not saying we need to change the lens that we see situations like this through, not at all. I’m saying we need to embrace all the perspectives, all the negatives and all the positives that have come from this journey. This is a difficult thing to do, especially in terms of equity. It’s not easy to have a growth mindset when encountering a topic that has affected so many of us differently during this pandemic. Some of us had bigger challenges than others. Some of us had greater successes than others. Some of us are still struggling to get back to some level of productivity and achievement. 

When we first encountered the idea of learning loss, Chey and I dove right in, and tried to learn everything we could. We formed our opinions, we had discussions with one another and with many other educators, and we really reflected on the concept of it. Learning loss is the notion that students have missed out on learning because of a prolonged absence from the classroom, from the learning environment. This can be a literal absence, in that, they haven’t been to class during a certain period of time, and so they have missed the school work being done, or it can be a much less obvious absence. The many disruptions to the learning environment we have encountered in the last year and a half have resulted in an inability to maintain fluidity to learning, and thus have missed out on important content throughout the school year. This can also be the result of inability to optimize the virtual learning environment, inability to focus, when we are learning virtually. 

Reading and hearing about this idea of learning loss then made me think of another affected group of people - did teachers miss out on being able to have a fulfilling teaching experience? 

I’ve experienced Teaching Loss in the past. When I was on maternity and parental leave with my two children. In Canada, parents have the opportunity to take one full year (actually 18 months now) to be with their children after they are born. I wouldn’t give that time back for the world. It was a bonding experience with my two children that I am so grateful for. However, in that time that I was home caring for my children, I wasn’t at work...and work continued. Education didn’t stop for me because I was at home doing another very important job. Things changed while I was away. Policies, curriculum standards, protocols, schedules, buzzwords, pedagogies - they all kept going, and I wasn’t there for any of it. I felt a great sense of loss during this time. For all the beautiful time that I got to spend with my growing boys, I wasn’t able to dedicate myself to my career, my profession, my passion. 

I compare this experience to the past year and a half we have experienced during Covid. So much happened that prevented us from truly being able to enjoy, or even be a part of, the full teaching experience. We were knocked off our foundations, we were just barely managing to keep learning meaningfully, and many of us, including myself, describe this past year as “just trying to stay afloat.” I didn’t feel like I grew professionally the way I wanted. I didn’t achieve my goals, complete the certifications I wanted to complete, the courses I wanted to take, or even make the connections with other teachers and students the way I wanted to. There was so much LOSS. 

And I am one teacher. There are likely so many others that might have experienced this sense of loss over the past year. This can include new teachers, teachers that recently moved to a new grade level, new division or new school (I fell into this category!) Teachers that were approaching retirement also might have felt a great sense of loss, as they likely never imagined their final year of teaching to be the way it was. There’s another group of teachers that might have experienced Teacher Loss - anyone that really loves their job. We all set goals for ourselves when we start a new year. We might want to establish deeper, more meaningful and lasting relationships with our students and/or colleagues. We might want to do more personal professional development and learn about new pedagogies along the way, or we might just want to learn how to do that one cool thing that you wanted to try as a teacher. And during this past 18 months, there’s a chance it just didn’t and couldn’t happen.

We may have missed out on leadership opportunities, or some cool extracurricular activities that you’ve been enthused about for the past few years. For me, it was finally an opportunity to work in a special education inclusive and integrated program, and it just didn’t go the way it was supposed to. Perhaps there was a chance to try some new evolving content in your classroom that just couldn’t get off the ground. Teacher Loss felt very real this year. 

I’d love to be able to say it didn’t happen, but this sense of loss is a personalized experience. Many of us have felt this, and it can be very hard to stay positive when we are battling with time, a changing or culminating career, or anxiety and depression with the Covid experience. The way that I look at it is that we have an opportunity to make some changes and adaptations in the coming new year. We have had an opportunity, albeit a difficult one, to grow from, and a chance to let go of the past once we have taken our learning moments from it. 

I made great connections with teachers and students, although they were different from the connections I expected to make. The leadership opportunities I sought after prior to the pandemic morphed into new leadership opportunities that I didn’t even have available to me. My professional development became highly personalized and I became much better at many things because of the new learning that was made available to me by an incredible global educational PLN. This new learning included interesting pedagogies that were new to me, and I am looking forward to testing them in my evolving teaching practice, the evolution of this practice now including teaching during a global pandemic. And lastly, during this past year, I grew a passion for a new extra-curricular activity that I’m so excited about starting. I’m actually really looking forward to giving this a go with students, who I think will really dig it. 

In what ways did Teaching Loss affect me?

1. Making Connections with Teachers and Students

This year was marked with new beginnings, which often are positive experiences. Part of the joy of starting over is having the opportunity to do things over, right the mistakes that might have been made in the past. I was excited for this opportunity to start fresh, but this new beginning had its challenges. Being in isolated cohorts, teaching out of a large gymnasium in order to maintain physical distancing, and not having contact with other teachers didn’t really have the beginning that I was anticipating nor used to. It was very lonely finding my new in a completely new environment when those connections with peers and other parts of the school were lacking. 

2. Leadership opportunities 

Although administration wasn’t a very strict focus for me, it wasn’t a door that was completely closed. This year, the challenge of getting to know the staff and administration closely hindered my ability to know and understand the process of either entering the administration route, or entering in other routes of leadership. Many people were able to persevere, work their way through to achieve this goal, but for me, the isolation combined with not knowing anyone, nor being able to get to know individuals, didn’t allow me to walk through that path. Plus, all the interruptions to the school year, going virtual twice, truly marred my motivation for continuing down that particular path. There were many other doors, however, that were opened up as a result of that, which we can dive deeper into in a follow-up post. 

3. Professional development 

Almost the entire Professional Development budget for the school year went unspent over the past 18 months. The disruptions to the school year really left many administrators and leadership teams wondering how to deliver PD to teachers, and what to provide PD in. The traditional forms of learning and development just didn’t quite feel relevant, and there were added challenges of trying to figure out how to disseminate information or hold sessions where all teachers were present and engaged in the learning. This was a challenge that left many teachers out of the loop with new pedagogies, especially if teachers didn’t engage in their own personal professional development over the course of the pandemic. 

4. Testing New pedagogies 

Part of the professional development that teachers encounter during the school year is having the opportunity to test out their new learning with their students. Engaging in professional learning communities within the school environment is very helpful because there are test subjects available for us the very next day, so that we can continue our learning with the students we teach on a daily basis. This was something we really missed out on - the lack of consistency with our school year truly hindered the process, and the lack of professional development opportunities just didn’t allow for this kind of teaching to occur. 

5. Teaching evolving content 

Part of my teaching evolution has been evolving the things that I teach year-to-year. Never do I use the same project twice in exactly the same way. I’m always able to tinker and change my content in order to meet the needs of the students. In many ways, this just didn’t happen this year. I couldn’t deliver so much of the great content I have my students participate in every year, and the work that I was able to use was altered so much that it almost didn’t have the same feel. The constant changes between face-to-face also created a real disconnect when certain projects were being worked on and then suddenly we changed our learning environment and format. It was the kind of loss that I really lamented because it created a lack of connection between myself and the students throughout the year. They just didn’t get a chance to dive deep into the content, and after a certain amount of time, they just stopped trying to. 

6. Extracurricular Activities

Each year, I work on a few different extracurricular clubs and activities that I try to get students involved with as much as possible. One of these is a robotics, coding and programming club which also involves lots of student leadership. I also like to participate in student council, help out with some coaching and work on some mentoring activities with students. All of these activities are not only fun for the students, opportunities that they would not otherwise have, but they are also lots of fun for me, as we get to know students in a slightly different capacity during these times. It’s also a great chance for students to become more proficient with their non-academic skills, their leadership qualities, entrepreneurial abilities, and their ability to be great mentors to one another and their younger peers. They are such important character-building activities that were just completely lacking, and we all felt the burn on that one. Students were striving for things to do outside of the classroom, and teachers really wanted to be there for students as well, but the pandemic just didn’t allow for that kind of thing to happen in fear of mixing cohorts, rightly so. This was an area that I personally felt great loss with. 

Is teaching loss a thing? Probably. Is it something that we can adapt in order to make our learning environment more complete? Maybe. As I said earlier, this is going to affect different teachers in a variety of ways. We will likely need to look within us to see what parts of this loss we can grieve and move on from, and which ones we will need to adapt and change with in order to make it our best experience possible. 

Agree or Disagree? Leave a comment below and let us know!