Newbies to Education Post Pandemic
Last March, when the world was forced to make rapid changes due to COVID, my mentor and O.M. or Original Mastermind I call him, Daniel Bauer from the Better Leaders Better Schools network said,
“Never let a good pandemic go to waste.”
I immediately thought he was crazy, yet begun to digest what he meant, only to realize that he was really on to something. Testing, which is a hindrance to all states and all schools, was cancelled. Restrictions were lowered and postponed that in every other year would prevent advancement of new ideas, new educational concepts, and shot down trends before they took off because of “red tape” and bureaucracies which annually prevent education progress when they feel they are advancing it.
Educators should make decisions on education — not lawyers or politicians.
Nonetheless, we all found ourselves in situations at our schools which were flat out up-side-down from what it was just a few weeks ago, and this lasted in some states for a calendar year in the United States. In my state, we are just beginning to go hybrid now depending on if where you live you actually care about other people and not just yourselves.
(That’s a whole different article.)
Here is a collection of changes and additions to education, that are currently in place and will hopefully remain post the pandemic.
- We value engagement and participation as if the grade is equal to assessments.
This one is gigantic. This means that formative assessments are proving valuable again, and we don’t need to give kids quizzes to figure out if they’ve learned because we asked them if they did. This means that teachers have to harness the ability to foster levels of curiosity within what they teach and how they teach it, so students want to become a part of the learning in that class.
This brings a shift in delivery of instruction and begs to challenge teachers to change up what they’ve always taught to reteach it in a way that students will want to learn. The learning equation of teaching + assessment = learning devalues assessment as a part of the process and not the end result of it to determine learning.
Assessment should not be the end result, it should guide.
2. Technology is not the key to education reform, is a part of it.
If we learned anything during this time, it’s that 1:1 environments are awesome, but can not sustain learning over a long period of time for anywhere near the majority of students. Like the old ridiculous restriction to MOST grants available in the US, technology is to supplement not supplant. The difference is that one does away completely and replaces, while the other simply builds upon and makes better. If we supplement technology use into our learning, we rather focus back on our first addition of making learning about the process, not the product.
Sub it on and off with programs like Organized Binder to really produce holistic learning.
Since we’ve been forced to substitute it or supplant it into our learning cycle voiding almost all other means of pedagogy due to a virtual environment, we now realize that parents, kids, and teachers are all sick of chromebooks and computers.
3. Online meeting platforms are not going away.
Since we now all know how to zoom, imagine if we started using this for integrating schools across the country to see how they are learning similar topics? Imagine how many more outlets to professional development that don’t require travel, budget expenses, and time away that are now possible to incorporate into learning?
Imagine how the learning can continue to enhance due to exposure to best practices across the globe at the fingertips of your staff and your students.
4. Funding is finally here for everyone.
In the US, it’s funny that when something impacts everyone — money is available. In education, when something impacts a state or county or district with a major issue, the struggle is usually due to lack of funding — and yet money is still not made available.
In my area, some of the schools that have complained of building issues such as airconditioning — are now able to put in new units so kids and staff don’t melt all day. It took a pandemic for that to happen. TWO new schools were built in the same district in the last 5 years, yet one of the existing ones didn’t have air conditioning.
Schools can finally afford new furniture, new facility changes, and new means to provide safe, contemporary, and inviting learning environments to students because we were finally issued a ton of cash to reopen in any way that we can. Schools were issued more money than we know what to do with in my state, and I’m hopeful that it will be properly spent on the obvious that was never affordable prior to — which happen to be fundamental to successful learning.
What kid can take a stupid state test, sweating their ass off sitting in a classroom — and perform to their ability nonetheless? Most do — I have news for you.
5. Collaboration is here to stay.
Schools across the US were able to redo their bell schedules to adhere to changes in education at their sites. Collaboration was one of the additions that schools found were necessary to achieving success, and was dubbed, “Autonomous Learning” or “Asynchronous Learning” unfortunately, so it can happen without people being up in arms over teachers not teaching during the school day.
What people should realize is, most of the good ideas for teachers are harnessed right there inside of their school building — they just don’t have time to go find it.
Giving teachers the ability to meet, speak, share, discuss, conduct inquiry, and be human — is crucial to the recipe of successful learning at any school. Without it, we’d never know the impact.
It’s a school’s job now to figure out how to keep a component of it when going back to whatever that will look like.
We can all capitalize on the above additions that are here due to the pandemic in education — and finally, we can really have momentum to make real education reform.
