One thing that the Covid-19 pandemic will eventually offer educators is an opportunity to rethink what we are doing in schools, and why.
I say “eventually” because the current focus is on delivery triage. Educators across the land are hustling to figure out how to transpose what they do in the classroom into learning experiences that can be delivered by way of a digital platform. Some schools were well-placed to make the transition -- particularly those who were already using online learning management systems like Google Classroom, Canvas, Moodle, Kiddom, or Edmodo or discrete content providers like Math IXL, Duolingo, or the Khan Academy. (At least one middle school in British Columbia was also prescient enough to send its students home with school-issued Chromebooks before spring break.) Others schools, however, are overwhelmed. Making the shift from teacher-intensive, participatory learning in a classroom to digital delivery is, for some, a bridge too far.
It undoubtedly will be the case that post-covid education will incorporate proportionally more online learning elements into its total mix. (Indeed, depending on how things play out, that proportion may be significant.) Our forced adoption of a new way of doing things might enable us to better understand which parts of the total educational package are best suited to online delivery and which parts are not.
But this is not the most important lesson we might eventually take away. Those educators who permit themselves the luxury of taking a few steps back might begin to ask themselves larger questions. It is, after all, one thing to attempt to replicate what we are currently doing in schools, only this time via digital delivery. It is quite another thing to ask ourselves if there might be a window of opportunity here to actually change what we do in schools.
Take, for example, the completely bizarre purpose and structure of most North American high schools. As presently configured, they are little more than a laughably ill-conceived sorting mechanism for post-secondary destinations -- be these prestigious universities or the stockroom floor of a local supermarket. It is as though we can’t imagine what a high school education could be in and of itself. There is no underlying imperative that would see education as a distinctly human catalyst that enables people to see how their particular interests and abilities might contribute to a greater good.
And we have created a ridiculous educational infrastructure to underwrite our feeble purposes. We have our students complete a requisite number of instructional units called “courses”, which yield a socially-constructed artefact called “marks”, which are then used as a hopelessly imperfect proxy to define oneself and, in no small measure, the course of one’s life. Most students dutifully adhere to the rules within this artificial universe not because they have become “passionate about learning”, but instead because they -- and their parents -- have learned to accept the coin of the realm. While we might marvel at our ability to subdue and control the aspirations and potential of our youth, no one should mistake this for a genuine education.
It doesn’t have to be this way. There are already plenty of educators, parents and students who know that there is something fundamentally distorted about the way we understand and conduct secondary education. We know that the point of education is to help students discover and develop their unique abilities and interests against a backdrop of broader responsibilities and contributions. We know that our current infrastructure makes it difficult to deliver on these purposes, and that contemporary student assessment practices, in particular, do not even come close to capturing the interests, ability and potential of our students.
Paradoxically enough, perhaps this current upheaval of our educational practices -- absent, of course, the reasons for the upheaval -- is just the thing we need to reimagine what we are doing in schools, and why. Once we get through the immediate challenge of instructional delivery, there might be breathing space to start asking ourselves why we got into education in the first place. If we give ourselves the permission to follow our deepest intuitions, I am betting that the answers we come up with will lay the foundation for a post-covid education that is different and better than anything we have seen to date.
Ted Spear has over 25 years of teaching and administrative experience in public and independent schools. In July, 2019 he published a book about the future of education entitled, Education Reimagined: The Schools Our Children Need. He is an engaging speaker who invites parents and educators to change the way we think about schools.