What Covid Taught Us About How Kids Learn

When the pandemic shuttered school buildings in March 2020, none of us thought it would last long. Maybe two weeks, everyone hoped. Lesson videos were streamed, worksheets FedEx'd to homeschooling students, whole classes hastily squeezed onto video calls, all under the banner of "This too shall pass." Except it didn't pass. Schools came back. Students trickled first, then flooded back through the doors weeks and then months later.

But what didn't return right away, and hasn't entirely since, was zest for the learning we tried to provide them remotely. Teachers felt it the minute students stepped back into classrooms: Bodies perched at the edges of chairs, listening but not quite present. Test anxiety was high, but so was regular old day-to-day panic. The right answer bobbed just below the surface of that hesitant hand raised halfway toward the ceiling, the sweaty palms on the blank piece of paper, the refusal to participate in any way, even if just a little.

To be clear: The pandemic did not cause this uncertainty. It magnified it. Which should serve as evidence enough of what students need now: the real feeling of learning with real consequences.

The Wrong Question

Determining how to reopen schools was always going to be difficult. As it turns out, asking what students lost during the pandemic is the wrong place to start. Yes, they missed opportunities. But they also had an extended snapshot of what learning looks like when it's reduced to its most passive elements: a body in a chair, directed by an authority, threatened with consequences if "learning" doesn't happen immediately.

The right question is this: If students can survive a pandemic with schooling like that, what will inspire them to dig into academically challenging material with full hearts and minds? How do we reengage students who know, now better than most, that all they need to do to get by is sit quietly and wait for someone to give them something to do?

Put another way: Pandemic learning exposed how little many of us ask of students when we settle for something less than experiential education.

How Learning Leaves a Mark

When I say experiential learning, I don't mean chucking kids in a classroom and calling every activity thereafter hands-on. Although that is experiential learning, sort of! I mean education that asks students to engage with real-world problems, make decisions that have real consequences, struggle along with their peers, and learn to produce work that matters.

Sound too optimistic? Remember: Experience without processing is just activity. Instruction without application is abstraction. Neither really teaches. That's what John Dewey tried to tell us over a hundred years ago.

The data since has been convincing. PBL studies regularly show how students working in well-designed PBL programs outperform peers in conventional classrooms on everything from conceptual understanding to motivation to long-term skills retention. The Kolb Learning Cycle illustrates a research-backed learning loop: experience, reflection, thinking, application. That many instructors face directly in their classrooms every day.

The point isn't that any of this is new. Smart educators have been mining this territory for decades. The stakes feel higher now. We've got a generation of kids who know, viscerally, what it feels like to do just enough to get by. Our job is to ask more of them.

Post-Pandemic Student Anxiety

Student health metrics paint a consistent and grim picture. School-aged children entered the pandemic with mental health challenges. Those challenges have persisted beyond multiple years of in-person return, from heightened social-emotional concerns in teens to spikes in childhood anxiety levels that teachers report feeling "typical" rather than dire.

But underneath those metrics is something less measurable, but every bit as apparent to a classroom teacher: Students lost their sense of agency.

There is a particular felt experience that comes with being in charge of your own learning. Of knowing, truly knowing, that the work you put out into the world matters, has consequences, and will be held up to scrutiny by other people. Remote learning afforded few opportunities to develop that confidence. Students sat alone at desks. Joined video meetings as avatars. Couldn't collaborate, struggle together, pick each other up. Couldn't see classmates rolling their eyes during a presentation or spot boredom creeping across someone's face.

These aren't nice-to-haves. These are foundational experiences of childhood.

That time students delegated chart members for the class aquarium? Real stakes. The coach who pushed them to practice even when no one was looking? Higher stakes. Learning how to learn isn't just a cute phrase. Children need to learn how to care about real work, not just do work that approximates real things.

Experiential learning teaches the very thing pandemic learning depleted so deeply: agency. Students working toward a genuinely open-ended outcome with real-world constraints and stakes report less anxiety, not because the work is easier, but because the meaning is clear. They know why they're doing it; they can feel it scraping its way through their bloodstream. That alone can be enough to push through a hard problem.

The Opportunity to Choose

Opting into an experiential philosophy isn't simply a "what how students learn" decision. It's a set of beliefs about why we school children at all and what we owe young people in our care.

Schools can be designed around students filling buckets of information, testing on that information, and leaving. Schools can also ask students to encounter and interpret the world around them: To investigate, to create, to collaborate, to present, to fail productively, and to grow a thick skin along with their intellects. Learning research supports the latter model. So does just about every student who's ever had the opportunity to learn by doing.

Post-pandemic students have had more than enough information ladled into their mouths. They need opportunities to choose how they'll ingest it. To practice trial and error. To learn what happens when they fall short. How to meet those challenges. How to rise.

That's the true loss of learning from home. But it's also the incredible opportunity afforded by offering students real stakes in their education. Schools that choose experiential learning aren't just choosing how students will learn. They're doubling down on the belief that children who make things, investigate real phenomena, help real people, and debate real issues will be better for the experience than children who spend their formative years learning how to...sit still.

Schools that choose kids won't regret it.