Last week I was reflecting with some colleagues about how life has changed since March. Without traveling I have been able to slow down, create new routines, and it has allowed me to enjoy the little things that I may have missed had the year gone according to plan. I have enjoyed spending time with my family and more connection. As I was sharing, my colleague asked, ‘What will you choose as your new normal going forward?’ The emphasis on choice and the intentionality of it really resonated with me. Although none of us chose the pandemic and it has wreaked havoc on so much, I can take the lessons that I have learned in all of this chaos and choose to prioritize what matters and make choices about what my new normal will be moving forward.
As I have been reflecting on this question personally, it prompted me to ask myself and other educators, ‘What will we choose as our new normal?” Whether we realize it or not, education has shifted more in the last 8 months than in the last hundred years. Schools have been shuttered and reopened adopting new schedules, technology, and approaches. There have been many models tried and I have seen educators working harder than ever to meet students where they are, build relationships, and connect on a personal level to achieve social, emotional, and academic outcomes.
There has been a realization of the importance of social-emotional health and a realization of the contexts in which our students live. There has been more empathy, more innovation, and more learning. In the midst of chaos, we have the opportunity to evolve.
Pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.
Arundhati Roy
If we see this pandemic as a portal and use this opportunity to create a new way forward, What if we choose to leave behind the parts that no longer fit the future we want to create? I hope that we can leave behind inequitable opportunity and access, standardization, isolated content, compliance, seat time, and the focus on narrow metrics of success like math and reading scores because that’s what we test to name a few.
I asked on Twitter “Given what we have learned about education through Covid19, what would you change about education?”
Here are the biggest themes and some examples of how educators are tackling them:
We need to address the whole child
This begins with an awareness that if we truly want to develop knowledge in students, we have to know them, love them and help them see the full beauty of who they are and what they can become. And if we have this awareness, we must set our expectations high and align the accountability systems that hold us all accountable for creating systems that develop the knowledge, skills, and mindsets that matter most in each and every one of our students. The CASEL Framework emphasizes the importance of establishing equitable learning environments explicitly, teaching, practicing, and monitoring the skills across settings of classrooms, schools, families, and communities to enhance all students’ social, emotional, and academic learning.
More authentic work including internships and projects that go beyond “school”
In the Big Picture Learning Network, “leaving to Learn” is one of their core principles and instead of narrowing the curriculum like some have they have chosen to double down on this commitment. Co-founder Elliot Washor shared, “We have many students who have continued their community-based internships remotely because they have close ties with their mentors and Advisors. Four of our students who have had an internship with a newspaper recently published their coronavirus experiences in their city newspaper. A student with a Harbor Freight Fellowship in the skilled trades is continuing to build a Tiny House with online mentor and advisor support.”
Others are using gardens to learn, do, and enjoy learning (and eating) outdoors and in the community.
Less busywork, more meaning
As a parent and educator, I am a big fan of this one! I find myself often asking, wouldn’t we be better off if we just spent time exploring big (or small) problems and learning, collaborating and taking action to solve them? Well, we can! The UN Sustainable Goals provides a framework with 17 challenges that are relevant to each and every one of us and provide authentic and meaningful topics to learn more about, delve deeper into and most importantly take action to make an impact locally and globally. Jennifer Williams, author, activist, and educator and all around awesome person, shared a few great projects at ISTE this week and lots of inspiration too. The first is the Writing for Change prompts from Adobe Spark and Wakalet. Each challenge addresses one or more of the UN Sustainability Goals with a provocation, some resources and writing prompts for students to share their ideas. This is a great way to start small and have students start to investigate ideas. The second is to engage in a worldwide Goals Project. You can learn more and sign up here.
Different models work for different students
First, I want to acknowledge the many students who are struggling for a variety of reasons (some for lack of the experiences noted above) but there are also students who are flourishing in a hybrid model or pure virtual model. We are seeing a number of families and districts recognizing that there will likely always be a need and demand for more options that include flexibility for how students access school and the learning community that goes beyond the typical 5 day a week school day to meet the diverse needs of students.
I spent last week with my friends from Logan County Public Schools in Kentucky and we developed core principles for their learning model, regardless of where students learn. There are 8 schools and variations in each model but they are seeing the value and importance of providing a continuum of support for students to meet the learning goals, not just be in class or a zoom call. Across the district, each student has a mentor or people designated to check in on them and they have created a range of supports from virtual courses and class meetings on Zoom, small community pods that meet at churches, Boys and Girls clubs or in the neighborhood of where the students live and a hybrid model where students come to school for guidance, support and connection. The teachers can focus on helping students reach their learning goals, not spend their time teaching students at the same time in all different places.
The constant is the learning, the variable is the location, time, and place.
As we enter into what is promised to be the most challenging part of the pandemic where numbers will be at an all-time high, we also can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is an opportunity to look to our learners and focus on what really matters most now and what skills, mindsets, and dispositions we want to ensure as we move forward. Let’s continue to have conversations about what is working, what is not, and what is now possible for learning and learners that we couldn’t imagine before when school. As we continue to learn what is possible, I encourage you to explore, learn, and consider, ‘What will you choose as the new normal?’
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