Back-to-School [Pt. 3 of 3] Ready to Reset: With Pandemic Protocols in Place, Can we Now Focus on Revamping National Standards?
What does back-to-school, day-to-day operations look like for teachers during a pandemic? Do we have an opportunity for some kind of an educational reset?
This is a pivotal time in the way that academics are taught and learned in our country, an opportunity to challenge and reimagine the status quo. We consulted expert middle and high school educators for insight into up-leveling the teaching game to create meaningful learning environments for our students that better prepare them for life in the real world, rather than for fulfilling required marks on standardized testing.
“The education world is slow to change. It’s not impossible, there have been innovative ideas that have emerged but we’ve had very little impactful change in my lifetime – we’re still teaching standards that are rooted around the cold war, for example,” Mara Morrison, Curvd head of curriculum design said. “How many generations will go through this same process before they adapt to the world that is constantly changing? We are teaching our kids an assembly line approach.”
Day-to-Day Masks, Temperature Checks & Social Distancing in Our Future
It’s important to remember that we’re dealing with a community of individuals, where everyone has their own comfort level with COVID-19. We need to be clear with communications and setting clear norms. It doesn’t matter what your family’s comfort levels are, these rules are clear and we adhere to them to do good for others and for the broader community while at school.
“None of it’s fun but it’s designed to keep everyone safe,” Morrison said of maintaining COVID-19 protocols in the classroom. “We’re factoring things like basic desk space – we are very collaborative in nature, so don’t have regular desks. We’re having conversations around distance for kids, having empathy for students who don’t have risk but realizing that not all humans are in that situation, so some people need more stringent protocols to keep everyone safe. We’re having masked teachers moving around with grades being dedicated to a specific place, temperature checks, health screenings, limited visitors on campus…”
The more the school can communicate clearly about why they have the policies they do and the ramifications the better it is for teachers, regardless of different feelings that families bring to the table. Communication is a powerful tool and one that Laura Quarin, Curvd curriculum designer, has leveraged to create her classroom’s new normal.
“I’ve been reaching out to kids a lot to get their feedback and see what their experience is,” she said. “I have a handful of kids on Zoom and a classroom in front of me, so I’ve been doing check-ins with my virtual kids and passing that feedback on to staff, and telling them that’s what I’m doing, so they feel valued and heard as the only two or three virtual kids.”
A Word from the Teachers: What to Keep vs. What to Lose from the “Old” Ways of Pre-Covid Teaching
Thanks to the virtual format of teaching during the height of the pandemic, teachers were forced to be incredibly clear in their instructions and to differentiate materials and make them available in a number of modalities. According to our experts, this was “best practice on steroids” and allowed students to go back and access materials in a way that made sense to them.
“Because we had to audit what we were doing and determine what was most important we were forced to reflect and examine the ‘why’ do we do this, which I think was great. Any time you have to look at what you’re doing differently and creatively problem solve it pushes your practice and the possibilities,” Quarin said.
Unfortunately, there is a fear right now that our students across the country have lost significant academic rigor. The reality is that academics look different based on varied access to engage in a digital format. What our kids have developed is the ability to adapt, persevere through challenges and problem solve. They’ve developed other social emotional skills that typically take adults a lifetime to learn. Where they may be behind in a traditional format they are leaps and bounds ahead in navigating the world because of the challenges they’ve had.
The Pandemic Has Shone a Light on Cracks in the System
What we’ve seen is marginalized populations being further marginalized health-wise, education-wise; it highlighted that not everything we do as teachers is relevant to the real-world and necessary. Choosing not to acknowledge those cracks and not to make progressive change means those gaps will widen further.
“The pandemic has brought to the surface what we haven’t seen because of our privilege: what is happening at home, the resources they have, what might be taking their attention. We need to meet our baseline needs in order to engage with higher level needs. Some people have been able to ignore the challenges. I would hope that we don’t brush that under the rug but instead say that students are experiencing a variety of things and don’t have the same experience,” Morrison said.
Standardized testing research, for example, shows that those from more affluent communities do better on standardized tests because they can afford tools to navigate that world.
“How can we assess knowledge more holistically to provide equity beyond high school? How are we assessing our teachers, too? If we assess them on these standardized tests, they will go back to just teaching the test and we will lose the approach that we have been building through the pandemic,” Morrison said.
If we continue to press play on an archaic system designed in a different age, kids are going to come out with guidelines that were outlined for kids of a different system. So, what are the skills that kids need to enter the world in 2021 with? How can we make sure those things are taught through project-based learning, iterating, failing and taking a non-linear path? Below are some insights from educators on the things they’d like to keep from switching up their teaching styles to accommodate pandemic parameters, versus things they’d like to erase from our country’s current educational practices.
What to Keep from Pandemic-Style Teaching:
Keep meeting kids where they are and differentiate based on their interests to provide exciting and engaging material for them.
Personalize projects, so they can learn about topics they find interesting and give them more voice and choice to keep them engaged.
Think about the flipped-classroom model, where you’re considering what kids should be spending their class time on. That should be the most engaging opportunity to grapple with concepts and engage in robust discussions. They don’t necessarily need to read all the things in class – how can you preload and redesign what homework is?
Technological access – now that we’re quite familiar with the Zoom platform it increases the access kids have. We could Zoom kids in where normally they would miss the whole day. We can have really wide, authentic audiences made up of people who don’t have to be in our space. We could interact with and learn from experts across the country or around the world.
What our Country’s Education System Should Lose:
Standardized testing. There are more holistic ways of assessing a child’s knowledge than standardized tests. Seniors [at TEA] have been able to demonstrate their knowledge through projects and display a more holistic understanding of who they are rather than taking a multiple-choice test.
Doing homework for homework’s sake and repurposing the same curriculum year after year. Instead, let’s model lesson plans around real-life experiences and have students apply their knowledge to solving real-world problems.
Assignments with limited details made available in a digital format. We have students who miss school for activities, athletics, volunteering, family vacations, etc. In the past, it was challenging to give enough detail to students to follow along online. We’ve since created a more robust agenda for the day, which makes it so a kid can more easily follow along and we can provide more independence.
(Bring on the magic wand) and let’s examine our national standards through the lens of relevance to kids and real-world application. If neither of those are true, we can’t answer yes to either of those things, why is it something we’ve determined as a critical standard?