Going into the Covid-19 shutdown, US schools probably couldn’t have been more unprepared to deliver online, remote, or blended instruction. Look at what we did.
Teachers taught through “classroom management” and assessed through tests that are easy to grade but which do not test the things that we care about the most.
We rewarded students for, and punished them for not, complying and following instructions rather than inspiring them through intrinsic motivation.
And then we closed the schools and told the teachers to deal with it and cover the same material for the rest of the school year while 20-50% of their students do not have access to online classes or materials and none are used to having to learn on their own without a teacher hovering over them.
And then we let the teachers know that next year they may or may not be teaching in classrooms, may or may not have a similar class schedule as they have in the past, their students may or may not have access to technology, their students will probably not have learned as much in the previous year as they have in the past, but that they are still responsible for teaching all next year’s content.
And yet, somehow, it just may be possible that, at the end of next school year, students could even be ahead of where they would normally be. Sancha Gray, Superintendent of Asbury Park, NJ calls this a probletunity. That’s what we have now, a probletunity.
We’ve known for years that the way we educate was suboptimal, but there has been no impetus to make the gut wrenching changes needed. Now the “opportunity” has been thrust upon us. We all know we want personalization, student agency, better ways to assess learning, more authentic learning experiences, attention to the whole child and cultivate foundational skills and competencies such as the 4C’s (collaboration, communication, creative thinking, critical reasoning).
It’s time to invent the future.