These are ideas curated from a survey and interviews with educators and administrators about what are the likely ramifications of the Coronavirus shutdown on education starting in the 2020-21 school year. First let’s go through some of the obstacles schools and society face, and then some of the likely accommodations schools will make.
Some obstacles
Here are the obstacles that were voiced in the survey and interviews.
We can’t change a whole way of teaching on a dime, and probably not even in a year or two
No district has had a seamless transition from school-based to remote-based instruction. That’s understandable, it was sudden, one week we were teaching students in our classrooms, and one or two weeks later, we had to transform our teaching to reach students at home.
There are certain things we already know were lacking that are prerequisites to flexible remote learning, and it’s going to take some time to set these up
- We need the infrastructure, which includes devices, bandwidth, systems, and support and repair systems.
- We need the content that can be accessed remotely.
Not to minimize these, but these are things we can plan for because we understand the gaps and there are models we can follow.
There are certain things we are going to have to learn, like
- What works for what types of students
- What implementation procedures need to be in place
- How do we reach all students
- What changes in teaching methodologies do we need so that all student learn
- What obstacles are we going to encounter that we don’t even know about
These aren’t likely problems where we can just analyze and plan, we can’t expect that whatever is tried is going to be right the first time, and we will have to devise our potential solutions with a plat to iterate and improve. We are going to have to give these problems time for solutions to emerge from what we are trying.
Equity
This doesn’t just apply to children in poverty, many parents have other commitments like careers or multiple jobs of family care. But it applies even more to children growing up without access or children whose parents do not have time to supervise and instruct or families who can’t afford private services.
What about students lacking hardware, connections, software, or parental support? What about where a family shares a computer, or where multiple siblings share the only room where they sleep and study?
What about students who are learning English, or families who do not speak English? How do you communicate to families and students in Arabic, French, Hindu, Spanish, Chinese; or across any of the hundreds of languages spoken in homes in many districts? What if one or more in the household is not a documented resident? What if the family is struggling for their next meal?
We can’t let online or remote learning privilege those who have parents who have the skills and time to do home schooling.
Old paradigms not working in new media; Blended and online require different teaching and learning skills
Teachers and students will need to learn how to teach and learn in new ways, both in terms of technology and in terms of not being in the same place at the same time.
First forays into a new technology are often to take what we did in the past and just do something similar using the new technology. Pre-recorded lectures, online equivalents of worksheets and busywork, and punishments and rewards are less likely to work when the students and teachers aren’t proximal.
In fact, kids are kids. They don’t have the ability to completely self regulate; that’s part of what we are teaching them.
While we can make the process easier by providing children with engaging choices, we still need to provide a means of enforcing some structure. This is going to have to be some combination of tech solutions, personal involvement, and partnerships with parents.
Any change is hard
Change is always hard to implement, especially in an inflexible bureaucratic system that’s behind the time, like education. Education has powerful groups that make change even harder than most sectors, and which often accommodate those with power rather than those who most need help.
We already know that schools often purchase products or services that end up not working. Why do they persist? In school systems there is no incentive to raise your hand and say “this is not working”; people who push for change are generally punished rather than rewarded. And yet, especially in times of change and experimentation, we need to learn what’s not working and how to improve it. Schools need to go beyond formal hierarchical organization structures to ones that facilitate conversations within and outside of the system to transfer experiences and improve learning rather than using information primarily to punish or reward.
Catchup
We usually have 9+ months of schooling and then about 2 months of vacation. We’ve just had about 6 months of formal schooling. There are going to be a lot of kids who did not learn what they needed to and forgot a lot of what they did learn, while there will also be a relatively small percentage who have zoomed past what they would have learned because of their home environment.
This is especially pronounced in subjects like Math, where one concept builds directly on the previous one. For example, you can’t grasp simple addition and subtraction unless you know numbers, you can’t learn algebra unless you understand fractions. How are children going to learn Algebra when they only completed 2/3 of their pre-Algebra course?
Teachers and systems need to be prepared to deal with students who are not at the same level they have been in past years. It may take a month just to re-acquaint children with school, and it may take another two months to get them to the point they were supposed to be at the beginning of the year. We will need to adjust curricular expectations and understand that the schools job is not to cover material, it’s for students to learn; it may take two school years to catch up.
Corporations and profits
There is a widespread fear from teachers and parents that corporate interests will profiteer at the children’s expense. The fear is that some large companies, through lobbying and high pressure sales tactics will convince districts to purchase solutions that make it look like the district is addressing a problem, but that really don’t solve anything.
We’ve all seen examples, has education improved significantly after the huge increases in testing? Why was the first product approved for the federal What Works Clearinghouse in the early 2000’s one that hadn’t even been to market but happened to be run by people connected to the Bush family?
But a lot of innovation takes place in the private sector, and there really are a lot of innovators who want to make a mark on education while building sustainable organizations, which means that they need to show revenues and profits.
Can we develop the right balance of innovation, scalability, control, and results?
Finding the right content, materials, curricula, and activities
What we lack is a good way to share experiences to understand what works for whom, when, and what needs to take place in order for it to work. Why should 14,000 districts all be doing a mediocre job evaluating different solutions to the same problems?
We don’t know why some product or service works for one group of students or teachers but not for another. The research community is incentivized the wrong way to help districts make choices. Nobody is documenting, sharing, or reporting their experiences in a way that makes sense for others.
Budgets will decrease
States are being hit hard with increased costs and decreased revenues. With federal help, one can expect school budgets to decrease 10-15%, but without federal help, schools can expect 30-40% decreases, and the budgets are going to take years to bounce back.
How do you enact major changes while cutting costs? Not easy.
New waves of Coronavirus
Even if we reduce the incidence of infection over the summer, the virus will bounce back in the Fall. Generally, viruses that come back are more contagious in the second wave. Will teachers be willing to work under conditions where they put their health and their families’ health at risk? Will districts or states risk the threats of lawsuits in keeping the schools open? How will we deal with children who are immuno-compromised, or who live with family members who are? What does immunity look like; who is protected, how long are they protected, and are they protected from whatever mutations will occur?
The next one
This one caught us by surprise, but will we be ready if the next one hits in four years?
The Coronavirus is contagious with a 1% mortality rate. What if the next one is more contagious with a 5% mortality rate? We need to build in a rapid response system, and not just in schools, so we can isolate, triage, test, and protect while we learn to eradicate the disease.
What is Education going to look like?
Here are some of the predictions of what schools and district will implement.
Many schools are unlikely to fully open in the Fall
Can you imagine a better breeding ground than students in close proximity shuffling into different classes every 40 minutes?
There will be tremendous pressure to close schools; for example, how can a district risk staying open after a student or two have died from Covid-19? Even if the children are immune or relatively unaffected, what about students living with grandparents or immunocompromised family members?
Since schools expose so many students closely with each other, schools will build plans over the summer on how to teach remotely in the Fall. While some districts will open fully, there will be others that consider keeping their buildings closed until January 2021. Even schools that do open will have backup plans for when individual students cannot be in class or when schools or classes are shut down because the area became a hot spot.
Probably the safest course would be to keep most district buildings closed until there is a tested vaccine, especially in highly populated urban areas, but we’d probably need federal support for this to happen, and it would be very disruptive. More likely, schools will look to maintain some sort of social distancing and reduced exposure for students while also accommodating students who cannot attend classes in person.
Students will get a greater mixture of learning and teaching methods
In the past a district or even a state would determine, this is the material we are going to use. And while it was never true that one-size-fits-all resulted in optimal student learning, it becomes even more obvious when students are remote that one product isn’t going to teach all 7th graders Algebra, or any other course for that matter.
Moving forward, schools are likely to utilize blended, online, face-to-face, and hybrid channels to offer multiple ways to learn, including live and recorded lectures, games or simulations, offline activities, 1:1 coaching, virtual field trips, guest appearances with outside experts, social benefit projects, to be able to reach students who have different skills, learning styles, resources, and interests.
It is unlikely that schools will go back to one-style-fits-all, and so teachers are going to have to acquire the skills to instruct different students using different channels and materials to learn somewhat different lessons and even meeting different standards. This means schools will also need more flexible ways to acquire learning resources.
Parents take on a role in their children’s learning
We can’t expect that students will have the self-discipline to keep up with their learning; but we will get better at learning how to coach and coax students to stay on task, and students will get better at becoming auto-didactics over time.
Over the next year, though, parents will be pressed into some home schooling duties, especially for children 11 and under, even if schools are not totally closed. This bumps right in the equity question: what about children who do not have parents who have the time or skills to shepherd their children through assignments?
Some schools will try volunteer programs with either retired people or local businesses, but the big mover in this area would be a national initiative so that parents could spend time with their children without sacrificing their financial status or taking the risk of under-employment. Wouldn’t it be great to have national employment legislation to allow parents to spend more time with their children?
Less grading and more competency-based
Because students will be learning in so many different ways, grades will be even more meaningless than they are now. Instead of number or letter grades, students will increasingly demonstrate competency and mastery by meeting challenges. Schools will be relying more on teachers’ professional judgement for assessing student learning along with some work products from students that indicate competency.
More student directed learning
There’s strong evidence that engagement is a prerequisite to learning, and a prerequisite for engagement is agency. When students, and when we all, shift from I have to do this to I choose to (or I get to) do this we are more motivated, more engaged, and we accomplish more.
Students gravitate toward projects (especially ones that benefit their community), play (especially play that requires them to advance skills they care about), creation (like the Maker movement), exploration (like virtual field trips), and video (creating and watching), and away from routine worksheets, boring reading, and problems that do not seem to have relevance.
Learning to take control over their own learning, and their lives, will be a valuable skill. This will be supported by increasing the diversity in learning options for students, and over time will yield significant student learning gains.
More student/student interactions
Learning is social, we learn best from and with each other. This will take many forms. Schools will initiate some programs where older students will help younger students, others where students will work in groups, and others where students will share accomplishments and offer encouragement and feedback to other students.
Micro courses that are based on interest or subject and less based on age, and which go deeper into topics
Instead of a period of each subject, a micro course would last some period of time, perhaps a week, and would focus on one topic. Ideally, that topic could be multidisciplinary. The students would go deeply into that topic, and perhaps work in groups on subtopics or strands and then share their findings with a larger group (class) of students. If students were given the chance to opt-in, the courses might be open to multiple ages.
Micro courses could be game based, project or problem-based, and much of the “work” could be accomplished outside of school. The culmination of the course might not be a test, report, or formal assessment; it might be a performance, a piece of work, some impact on the community, or teaching others.
More parents looking for options outside of public school
Changes almost always spark people to look for different options, and changes in the way schools operate will open more parents to look for more or different options for their children.
Some parents might take exception to the methods of public schools and move their children to other schools, but this is even more about providing additional resources for their children: enrichment programs, tutoring, coaching, counseling. Some parents will just need options for childcare while their children are not in school but they are working.
Perhaps adults who are not at jobs can find ways to participate and help. Perhaps an active Federal Government can encourage options, especially for families who cannot afford it; for example the federal government could defray healthcare costs or supplement social security payments for adults who volunteer to tutor.
More use of Virtual environments
Not just Zoom, Meet, or Teams, but more like World of Warcraft, Second Life, Minecraft, or Amazon Sumerian, where students are “together” in a virtual environment where they have to solve problems to advance. These environments can provide agency and peer-to-peer interaction. Quests or challenges in these environments could be their own micro courses, or lessons within longer courses.
The 60-70% of teachers who were reluctant to use online resources will either be using them or will be leaving teaching
So many tech coordinators have been frustrated by teachers who just would not make the effort to try new technology. Now, those teachers have no choice; teachers will need to increase the use of online tools in their practice.
Even teachers who use tech tools, most have been using the tools to augment instruction; now they will be a primary vehicle for instruction. Virtually all will need more training (on how to use the tools) professional development (on how to teach in a versatile learning environment), curricular help (in finding or creating content and lesson plans), and support.
This is going to drive some teachers from the profession. Because of budgetary requirements, some of those positions will not be filled, which will put more pressure on technology coaches and teachers to cover those gaps.
Growing understanding that sometimes online is actually a better media for instruction
There are some things that can just be done better online. You cannot rewrite historical events, but you can replay them online based on different variables and choices. You cannot blow up a classroom, or at least not twice, in a chemistry experiment, but you can make virtual explosions online. You cannot ask a teacher to repeat an explanation three times in a class, but you can replay a video as many times as you need, and at different speeds, and with or without subtitles in English or other languages.
Some of the online activities that will be expanded:
- Virtual field trips
- Interactions with experts
- Simulations and games
- Virtual labs
- Online quests
- Projects performed by groups that are geographically dispersed
There will be a growing sophistication of when, where, and for whom to, and when and where not to, use different environments to teach and for students to learn. Probably the only way to share and learn from experiences is to allocate time and money for teachers to document, and learn to document, their results, and some organizations and districts will provide stipends for teachers to experiment, document, and share their experiences.
We are already starting to see some innovative solutions, like Jefferson Education Exchange, a nonprofit that compiles data and enables communication about what is and is not working for schools and improving how schools deploy technology.
Possibly school in shifts/re-envision school day
Putting 30 children and a teacher in a room, and then having them switch out and mingle with others every 45-50 minutes is asking for trouble.
We will see some reshuffling, some districts will schedule different groups of students in the building at some time and others at different times: say 1st and 2nd graders Monday and Wednesday morning, 3rd and 4th graders Monday and Wednesday afternoon, or, to better accommodate parents, all students from certain neighborhoods, or with certain last names attending at different times. Some schools will adopt the European practice, and instead of the students getting up and moving, the teachers will change classrooms while the students stay in place.
Schools will be trying different solutions with smaller chances of exposure in order to reduce class size and increase the distance between students who are in the school.
Recognition that Remote is not the same as online
These two terms have been used interchangeably in Spring 2020. There are a lot of remote learning activities that do not take place online, and there are a lot of online tools that facilitate in-class instruction.
What’s next?
Is there good in this ill wind? Covid has extracted heart wrenching trauma in schools and society in general.
Let’s hope that the stresses to our education system from Covid-19 allow us to redesign one that works for everyone: equity, access, engagement, student and teacher agency, all preparing kids to live good lives.
We’d love to hear from you. Do you have solutions? Questions? Suggestions? Objections?
Contact me, Mitch Weisburgh, and let’s discuss.