Teachers to focus on accelerated learning

Physically, Denver schools aren’t likely to look too different in the coming year from how they were before the pandemic. Everything else is a different story.

Teachers will have to recap old material more than before, as well as help their students regain social skills and handle difficult emotions, officials with Denver’s public, private and charter schools say. Even the way schools structure their 2021-2022 academic year might change.

Schools quickly and continually evolved during the pandemic, a trend that’ll continue for some time. Accelerated learning and social and emotional care are already emerging as top priorities for Denver teachers.

“We really are re-envisioning education,” said Tamara Acevedo, Denver Public Schools’ deputy superintendent of academics.

One of the first challenges schools must consider is how to catch students up, Acevedo said. Many missed things they were supposed to learn last year — particularly in math and literacy — and Denver Public School teachers plan to use accelerated learning to make up the difference.

Accelerated learning doesn’t speed up or condense a teacher’s curriculum, the Colorado Department of Education said. Rather, it’s a way for teachers to include missing concepts and skills into their lessons instead of sending students to a tutor or remedial classroom. For example, if an 11th grade student doesn’t understand a 10th grade math principle, then the teacher would go over the missing principle while in class so everyone is up to speed.

“We want to ensure that they don’t fall further behind,” Acevedo said.

The gap is so pronounced among students at Rocky Mountain Prep’s four charter schools that CEO Tricia Noyola said they’re adding a daily intervention program to help third, fourth and fifth graders who are reading two years or more below their grade level. Noyola said an assessment last year showed that up to 40% of students in those grades require reading intervention.

“That is objectively not good,” Noyola said. “I think these are the sorts of things that are going to be studied in the years to come about the disproportional impact that the pandemic had on children.”

And if online or hybrid learning affected how many students learned since March 2020, even more suffered from increased stress and anxiety levels alongside a lack of social interaction during the pandemic, school leaders acknowledged. Colorado health officials declared a mental health state of emergency for children in May.

Denver Public Schools has a concerted effort planned to assess students’ mental health and teach them more about social and emotional well-being, Acevedo said. Each school will be required to set aside about 20 or 30 minutes each day for the task.

“It’s really to help our children understand their emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships and make decisions,” Acevedo said.

Individual schools will decide how best to handle the social/emotional component, Acevedo said. Similarly, DPS officials have worked to give each school autonomy within their budgets so administrators can determine whether they need to hire more counselors or mental health professionals. Noyola said her student body of about 1,800 is well-stocked with social workers and other professionals to help students recover from the pandemic.

The private Colorado Academy also has enough mental health counselors for its 1,000 students, Head of School Mike Davis said. He added that the academy will hold a town-hall meeting to reintroduce students to the school, its staff and the values they’re expected to uphold.

“They’re going to bounce back from this, but I also think we have to be really attentive to what was lost in the past year and a half,” Davis said. Another way to help students readjust is to lighten their daily workload, Acevedo said, so some of Denver Public Schools’ secondary schools — she couldn’t immediately say which ones or how many — will shift away from semesters and toward a quarterly schedule.

“That will help them complete the same number of courses but to chunk it out in a manageable way,” Acevedo said.