At her charter school, Strive Prep — RISE,
students have been learning remotely all
year. Where Espinoza once had students for
90 minutes at a time, she now has about
20 minutes of direct instruction daily after
accounting for a modified schedule and
the time it takes students to settle.
“It doesn’t leave time for a student for it not to
click the first time. And that’s just not realistic,”
she said.
One recent Monday, she began class by
returning to a segment from the previous Friday
on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale
Heart.” The students’ written assignments were
missing the mark, and she felt it was important
to double down on the task of writing strong
paragraphs to support their ideas.
“It’s always like, what is highest leverage?” she
said. “What are you going to be able to take to
the classroom next year that’s going to actually
help you become a better reader, writer,
thinker, scholar?”
Peter Madsen’s U.S. history students in
Española, New Mexico, are learning as
usual about natural rights written into the
Constitution. But they’re not learning about
the progenitors of that philosophy, like John
Locke, or how he wrote about those rights in a
different way from his contemporaries.
“We’ve managed to cover every topic. There’s
just some components that are a little cursory,”
he said.
The skill his eighth grade students at Carlos F.
Vigil Middle School miss out on in that exercise,
Madsen said, is comparing and contrasting text.
Image: David Zalubowski