Katrina’s lessons on disrupted education
I was teaching at Louisiana State University and providing professional development in K-12 settings in 2005 when Hurricane Katrina devastated school communities in my home state. Students and families were displaced, schools were closed and infrastructure was destroyed. Learning was put on the back burner for weeks, and many students had to be enrolled in different classrooms in Houston and other communities outside Louisiana. When we emerged from the crisis, helping students overcome learning gaps was a huge challenge.
As an educator, I think the lessons of Katrina 16 years ago provide great insight for handling disruptions we experience today, whether from COVID, last winter’s ice storm or hurricanes. I know one of the biggest concerns classroom teachers face is ensuring all their students are meeting grade-level expectations. We’ve made tremendous strides as a country in ensuring learning can continue remotely, but it doesn’t always work for all students and is seldom as effective as in-person learning.
Curriculum resources
Teachers generally had to ask themselves three big questions: What were the key ideas students needed to learn in their current grade? What was the essential prior knowledge they needed to succeed? And what did they know in the moment? Those questions remain relevant today.
Even in a routine school year, there is barely enough time to get through expected content. After Katrina, that was magnified. In such unexpected situations, teachers have to tackle teaching and learning tasks with unprecedented focus and need highquality resources to guide them. Texas has made such an investment in strong K-12 curriculum resources this year, and it’s laudable that those can be used during in-person, hybrid or virtual instruction.
Teachers need avenues to fill essential gaps in student knowledge and continue ongoing gradelevel instruction. For example, Daniel, an adorable second grade student whose eyes twinkled when he smiled, offering a glimpse of his mischievous side, enabled me to understand what students need in times of educational disruptions. I helped Daniel
when his family evacuated from New Orleans. He was on track in math but unexpectedly developed trouble with subtraction when his schooling was interrupted.
Figuring out what’s missing
An astute assessment identified that when doing problems with two or three regroupings (also known as borrowing), Daniel had a knowledge and skills gap. He missed the connection to place value and using a single regrouping in subtraction, causing him to stumble when it occurred multiple times in a problem. Instead of re-covering all beginning subtraction, a quick review of that targeted concept quickly put him back on the grade-level path.
Setting learning goals is essential. It’s vital to consider what the major work of the grade and unit is and what students must be able to do. Will those concepts be revisited this year, or is this your only chance to teach them? Those are particularly vital questions in math, where concepts progress along learning trajectories.
Before teaching a unit, educators should identify learning gaps by administering an assessment focused on foundational material for that unit. Where are students in that part of the trajectory? Some curricula, including resources available through Texas Home Learning, build this feature into their materials. Teachers can then use informal, formative assessments to adjust lessons.
Just-in-time instruction
Rather than trying to anticipate, guess about, or preemptively set out to close gaps just in case they exist, it’s far more efficient and effective to diagnose gaps through assessment and then pinpoint them with targeted lessons.
Teachers in a given school or district should work together, across grades, to come up with strategies for doing this. Colleagues can help recognize patterns of learning, identify common misconceptions and suggest how to sequence lessons. Digital tools that became popular this past year may still bolster teaching and learning going forward. If a curriculum has aligned digital resources, for example, they can be a layer of instruction that can reinforce concepts and enrich students’ learning at home.
Unfortunately major disruptions such as Katrina, COVID and Winter Storm Uri will continue, but there are effective ways to help kids progress. I have seen it happen with Daniel and many others. It’s not easy. But it’s what we must do to ensure students don’t fall so far behind that catching up feels insurmountable.
McAnelly has taught mathematics at the high school and university levels for more than 30 years. She also served as co-director of the Louisiana State University Cain Center for STEM Literacy, where she directed projects requiring expertise in the design and implementation of standards-based professional development and curriculum instruction for K–12 teachers.