Abstract:

Indian students have resumed their physical classrooms almost after two years of physical closure of schools due to COVID-19 pandemic-induced disruptions. During the closure, formal learning was disrupted due to several reasons across the diverse set of students, teachers, school administrations, and educational boards. Disruption of formal learning caused by long-term breaks has been previously studied in the context of summer and winter breaks, and other pandemics and epidemics. Most of these studies report learning loss, and issues in settling down students in physical classrooms once students resume. Intrigued by this, this study also explores whether the disruptions caused in the last two years have any impact on students’ learning approaches once they came back to the physical schools. We qualitatively studied this issue by interviewing ten teachers from three Indian states by asking for their reflections after teaching students for two to three weeks after the reopening of schools. Most of the teachers report severe issues like learning loss ranging from losing some crucial competencies to expected learning outcomes of certain grades, and lack of motivation and focus in a classroom session. On the question of what should be done to tackle these issues along with ongoing actions, they report that current actions are ad-hoc and we need a systematic action plan. Further, they highlight that such an action plan should include the crowdsourced opinions of all the stakeholders involved in formal education by following a bottom-up and top-down approach. This paper contributes such an envisioned preliminary model based on their reflections.

Keywords:

Learning loss, assessment, reopened schools, digital divide, parent's educational level.