Let’s end January with a look to the future. What are we learning as a result of the pandemic? What ideas do we need to carry forward to make our schools more effective communities of learning. Sarah Tambucci offers some important insights. Please add your thoughts.

When Push Comes to Shove: A New Vision for Schooling Prompted by the Pandemic of 2020

Sarah Tambucci

Change in education arrives ever so slowly!  That is, of course, unless a pandemic provides the impetus to implement new structures and routines to safeguard learning even as the world struggles with the very survival of humanity.

“We can’t” and “we won’t” have become “we need to” and “we must.” New attitudes regarding what is possible were transformed by teachers, administrators, school boards, parents, and students. As a teacher, administrator, and educational consultant, I have witnessed over 50 years of research that supports exactly what we did not do by choice, but managed creatively to do when under duress of a pandemic.

Long standing research is slow to make its way to informing educational practice. We know that class size, learning styles, brain development, and numerous other research initiatives have been available for well over 40 years.  Why then has research failed, in many ways, to inform practice as we train educators, administer schools, and accommodate individual student differences?  Perhaps we lack the will, the creativity, or merely, the urgency.

In one year we responded to an ever-changing environment to do what could or should have been done years before.  How did it happen?

Medical guidelines nearly immediately forced us to shut down, clean up, and rethink what, how, and where schooling occurs. Overnight we ventilated and did “deep cleaning” in classrooms, installed technology in schools where computers and internet access were only a dream, and considered how we could adhere to federal guidelines while redesigning a healthy learning environment.  We provided options for parents as they modified their full-time work schedules to work remotely and, in many cases, ultimately abandoned jobs.  Parents became serious partners in the education of their children as websites, Zoom, and Skype seeped into our shared experience.  Teachers, some lacking the training, technical skill, and/or equipment, emerged as skillful, knowledgeable, creative designers of instruction in a virtual environment with little preparation and no warning.

As we sheltered in place, stayed in our bubble, and worked in pods, we developed a new lexicon. Medical guidelines needed to be translated into new structures and routines to accommodate student learning. Suddenly half the class attended in person every other day and teachers prepared, studied, and did their own learning one full day a week.

Lessons learned—we can reduce class size and need to find time for teacher professional development related to new models of delivery including virtual learning.

Recent accounts report students and their parents vary in their preference for in-school or virtual learning.  School boards working with administrators developed, considered and adopted creative delivery and scheduling alternatives overnight. Options for students and parents to meet ever-changing needs helped us to imagine what might be, rather than “we could never do that.”

Lessons learned—options for delivery models may help accommodate individual student learning needs and provide options for parents as well.

Sports were cancelled, practice sessions eliminated, and students became bored.  No physical education, art or music classes.  It took a pandemic to show us how creative movement, both physical and mental, is crucial to human development. When provided the time and opportunity, students nurtured their own creativity.  Parents soon learned the value of the arts in providing opportunities for self-expression.  Stories, music, games, and the visual arts provided a balance to “on-screen” learning.

Lessons learned—a well-balanced curriculum offers students layers of opportunities to explore many facets of their humanity.

As medical guidelines changed, delivery models morphed, and learning pods emerged.  First in neighborhoods, then in classrooms, the value of cooperative learning in multiage settings had new value. For some students learning is better together.  Multi- age groups of children with varying interests, strengths, and abilities were a regular occurrence rather than an anomaly. These new learning communities, while born out of pandemic-driven necessity, have long been a model adapted in many countries around the world. Here in the U.S., it has been slow to gain popularity regardless of the benefits including higher self-esteem, more positive self-concepts, less anti-social behavior, and better attitudes toward school.

Lesson learned—new questionable models may suddenly make sense for some students.

It is clear that we need to unpack our individual and collaborative learning experiences and reflect on lessons learned during the pandemic.  Those lessons include, but are not limited to, integrating research into our practice as an on-going strategy.  The pandemic has taught us that “same as, same as” does not prepare us for a world where adapting to change is a life skill.