Reconnecting, Recharging, and Reframing

Kathy Flores • Cahn Fellow 2022

The pandemic had a negative impact on the academic progress of students across the nation. Students in Los Angeles participated in remote learning for more than a full year, impacting instruction, instructional strategies, and the relationships between members of our school community.  

During remote learning Westwood teachers leaned on our foundation of relationships and they continued to go above and beyond to meet the needs of their students. Despite this tremendous effort, we noticed a 10% dip in student achievement upon our return to full-day in-person instruction as measured by the Dynamic Inventory of Basic Early Literacy Skills (DIBELS). Although our overall scores continued to be above the district average, our highs were masking our lows. A deeper dive into our data led us to examine our students in grades 3-5 who were “on grade level and reading fluently” but did not have strong decoding skills when faced with unfamiliar multisyllabic words, indicating a need to reflect on and possibly revise our Tier 1 literacy curriculum. 

As we began to create our plan to address student needs, it became evident that we first needed to address the fatigue of our incredible teachers, who were working to address students’ needs but could not take on “one more thing.” This provided a primary focus for our leadership team to develop a plan to provide space for teachers to reconnect with each other as adult learners and recharge their energy levels which would lay the foundation to develop consensus to commit to reframing our literacy instruction.