Last month, I published Neema Avashia’s guest post at my Ed Week column, Students Respond to Adults’ Fixation on ‘Learning Loss.’

In it, she shared several powerful responses to questions she posed to them about this pandemic year and the future.

Just last week, I borrowed several of her questions and did a similar activity with several of my classes.  You can read the results at Reflections From My Students On What They’ve Lost & Learned, & What They Need.

Now, Neema, Justin Reich (MIT Teaching Systems Lab), and Jal Mehta (Harvard Graduate School of Education) have organized The Imagining September Project: Learning from Students about COVID-19 Schooling to Plan for a Better Future.

They’ve basically refined Neema’s questions, created slideshows for elementary and secondary students introducing them, and invited teachers to share the answers they get with them.   They’ll then do an analysis of the results.

The questions and slide decks are great, and are a ready-make excellent reflection activity that any teacher can use as a lesson.  The report form that Neema, Justin and Jal are requesting teachers to use seem to me to provide a good outline for an analysis most teacher would want to do anyway with the results, so I don’t think that’s any extra work.  Of course, if you didn’t want to do the analysis, you could just use the slide decks, but then that would remove the extra incentive students would have in writing for an “authentic audience” (see The Best Places Where Students Can Write For An “Authentic Audience”).

You might also be interested in Trying To Bring Research, Sanity, Teacher Expertise & Student Voice To The “Learning Loss” Discussion.