Many children have been experiencing learning slides due to the Covid-19 pandemic, and a recent webinar offered helpful information on why this is happening and how to handle it.
Schneps Media, the parent company of Long Island Press, recently held a webinar called “Reversing The Covid Learning Slide,” which explained the causes of the Covid learning slide and possible solutions.
The webinar featured expert guest Kimberly Berens, Ph.D., a scientist-educator, FIT Learning founder, and author of the highly acclaimed new book Blind Spots: Why Students Fail and the Science That Can Save Them.
“Behavioral science is actually the science behind how learning occurs, and it’s not how schools are designed and unfortunately it’s not how most teachers are trained, and as a result schools can be vastly ineffective for most kids” Dr. Berens said.
She discusses why summer school is not the solution to the Covid learning slide and how kids were already below proficiency levels before the pandemic due to the way the education system is designed.
“The establishment believes in the way that they’ve designed schools … they believe in the way they train their teachers, and even though these beliefs clearly don’t lead to effective practices … they don’t want to let go of their practices because those practices match what they believe they should be doing,” Berens explained.
Direct instruction, which is born from behavioral science, coupled with repeated reinforcement of behavior, is what children need in order to learn effectively, she added. FIT learning’s system of instruction produces one year’s growth in only 40 hours of training and targets all kinds of skills like reading fluency, basic classroom readiness, comprehension and more.
“It takes a breakdown to achieve a breakthrough … maybe this pandemic is the breakdown that is required to have the educational establishment actually realize that they are not producing reliable outcomes with kids … and that they aren’t competent to produce rapid acceleration of skills,” Berens said.
For more information on the Covid learning slide and how to improve your child’s education, view the entire webinar here.
To learn more about Fit Learning and Dr. Kim Berens you can email admin@fitlearners.com, call 516-801-4817 or visit fitlearning.com.
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