Students' Social/Emotional Development

 

I was recently reading an article from the New York Times that was called "This School Year has been Unlike Any Other". When I was scrolling through my NY Times app on my phone and reading headlines, I thought to myself "man, isn't that the truth" and clicked. Upon reading, the article brought up some really good points about how our typical school year is drastically different in this new post-pandemic era. 

One thing that really stood out to me was the discussion of students and their mental health. From my experience, there has been a huge push over the past few years to focus on children's social and emotional learning while also prioritizing academic subjects like math and reading. For so many children, their lives were uprooted in March of 2020 when schools shut down for a period of time due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Fast forward, it would turn out that schools would be closed for an entire year, in which students engaged in some form of virtual learning in replace of in-person instruction. While I give major props to the students for being so resilient and adjusting as we all needed, many students had an extremely tough time not being around friends, teachers, and in a classroom setting. In the article, it stated that "schools, after all, do more than deliver an education: they are a source of food, socialization and internet connections to the rest of the world — along with child care providers for working parents." (Tugend, et al, 2020). 

Schools are such an important aspect of young children's lives. We often forget that students are not only learning academics when they are in school, they also are exposed to great social skills that they need in their adult life. At school, children are able to learn how to have conversation with friends, how to resolve conflict, how to have relationships with adults, and many other basic social skills. So what happens during the use of virtual learning when children are not able to access this type of practice in a typical classroom setting? For many students, they are left having a tough time creating friendships, expressing feelings, knowing boundaries and being independent upon their arrival back in the school building. 

This article brought up the fact that by having students virtually attend school, some of those students who need social/emotional or academic support may have been missed. Instead of being able to informally check in or observe a students behavior in the classroom, teachers were forced to "rely on other data, other red flags" (Tugend, et al, 2020) to know when to intervene. 

While we are adjusting to being back in person, it is important for us to remember that for many of these children, their world was rocked in 2020. As adults, we have coping skills and already developed ways to express ourselves in healthy ways that many students of young ages had yet to grasp. When we think of a difficult student we may have in our classes (there is always one :)), it is a good reminded to remember that the lack of developed social/emotional skills may be to blame for behavior arising in the classroom. 

Tugend, A., Jordan, P. W., & Stein, M. A. (2020, October 14). This school year has been         unlike any other.   The New York Times. Retrieved October 1, 2022, from                                https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/education/learning/pandemic-school-remote-learning.html