Rebound, Grades K-12: A Playbook for Rebuilding Agency, Accelerating Learning Recovery, and Rethinking Schools

For more than a year now, we educators have been tested and tested again. We've been stretched, we've been pulled, we've been put through the wringer. But now it's time to rebound. It's time to bounce back, come back better, and benefit from the many lessons learned to reignite engagement, accelerate learning, and move forward with fresh optimism and better systems for schooling.

Enter Doug Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie, whose Distance Learning Playbooks have supported more than a half million educators across pandemic teaching and who are here now to advise you on this next, absolutely critical leg of our ongoing journey.

Complete with tools and strategies, prompts and exercises, Rebound: A Playbook for Rebuilding Agency, Accelerating Learning Recovery, and Rethinking Schools will help you

• Address the collective traumas we have experienced during the pandemic and rebuild our sense of agency and self, so that we can attribute student success to both teachers' and students' efforts
• Evaluate what we have learned about remote teaching and learning to determine what to carry forward and what to leave behind
• Shift the narrative from learning loss to learning leaps and implement instructional and assessment practices that ensure our students reclaim lost knowledge, build skills, develop agency, and accelerate gains
• Redefine classrooms, learning experiences, the ways schools operate, and the very idea of schooling itself

The greatest travesty that can arise for schools after 2020/21, Doug, Nancy, Dominique, and John write, is to rush back to the old normal, and learn nothing, or little, about what worked well. That's why this book has focused on rebounding, and taking the opportunity to create an even better schooling system, one that serves even more students, and focuses more on what matters most.

Let′s agree not to reduce the impact that our expectations have on students′ learning. What if we talk about learning leaps instead of learning loss? What if we identify where students are in their learning and identify critical content that they must learn now to accelerate their performance n the future? And what if we raise our expectations for students rather than lower them?

-Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, Dominique Smith, and John Hattie