Rethinking Education: Using the Pandemic as Inspiration for Innovation

5/23/2021

by Heather M. F. Lyke

I had the pleasure this week of working with a third-grade teacher when our conversation turned to the distance learning we did this year. She shared a powerful takeaway. For her, the gem she honed in on was that she now had a better understanding of what students’ lives are like at home, seeing as she bore witness to certain at-home distractions, had to work more closely with parents as they worked together to keep students engaged, and as she became a sounding board for some guardians to share frustrations regarding discipline issues and learning struggles. Moving forward, this teacher shared that she wants to maintain that better understanding of the complex layers that students and families are navigating outside of school, as they have a direct impact on students’ engagement, behaviors, and learning abilities within school walls.

This got me thinking. There have been many discussion lately about the ‘learning loss’ that has occurred during the past year as we’ve been navigating ever-changing educational structures. Simply do a search for ‘learning loss’ and one will quickly discover that there has become an obsession with how Coronavirus has supposedly created a dip in our youths’ knowledge and skill growth.

While there may be truth to the idea that some of the types of skills that typical students may have typically attained in a previously typical school year could have been lost, have we not learned from the atypical nature of this past school year?

How might we celebrate what has been gained rather than simply mourn what has been lost?
As we move forward, might we use the atypical nature of 2020/2021 to redefine what schools could and should look like?

Looking for answers, the Third Eye Education team and I took to social media—asking educators and parents to share their thoughts on what we learned during this past year that we want to be sure not to devalue. In this online conversation, the following clear themes emerged.

The Learnings from Teaching During Covid-19 That Many Wish to Maintain

Inequity Awareness & Efforts to Create Balance

In many ways, teaching during a Coronavirus outbreak brought forth inequities (or at least an awareness of them) and, in some cases, fast-tracked solutions.

Access
As students started to need to learn from home, it became clear who did not have access to computers and/or at-home-internet. Many of these students had likely been negatively impacted by these truths in past academic years, specifically in regards homework expectations, but as students shifted to all schoolwork being done at home, suddenly districts strove to provide laptops and Wi-Fi hotspots, along with other creative solutions. As we find ourselves seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, let’s be sure to maintain this awareness and continue to adjust as needed to support our students. Returning to in-building school doesn’t instantly place all students on an equal level—we need to maintain this awareness even as we come back together.

External Lives
This year we’ve had a window into students’ home lives in ways we have not in the past, which has increased empathy and allowed for adjustments. Some students have learning environments full of distractions while others have a quiet place to study and focus. Some students have parents who can help them with their homework, while others (due to the time constraints or the specific skill ability of those living in the home) may not. Some students have responsibilities, such as taking care of siblings, while others do not. This imbalance is one teachers are able to continue to adjust for, as long as we maintain the awareness.

Other such discrepancies uncovered this past year to which adjustments were made in some schools included:

Inequitable access to nutritious foods — providing food for students and families at no cost. Perhaps we will finally get the universal meals programs to launch?
Inequitable access to tutoring due to transportation restrictions — embedding more supports into the school day.
Struggles with attendance being more about home life than apathy — acknowledgement that sitting and attending doesn’t mean learning is happening; therefore, shifting focus away from attendance and onto skill acquisition.
Inequitable access to caring adults — being certain that students who come into school the most disconnected are able to find someone who will step into that role.

Flexibility, Autonomy, & Focus on Individual Need

Covid-19 created a constant need to adjust. Systems had to keep shifting as we learned more, as the virus morphed, as vaccines became available. So did the methodology used in many classrooms.

Flexible Environments
Particularly in the spring of 2020, asynchronous opportunities for learning became a must for many learners as their schools and families adjusted to spending most of their time indoors and at home. While not always ideal, and certainly not best for all learners, it did become clear that some students learned better this way, at least on occasion, in certain contexts, or in specific content areas. Therefore, we need to maintain this as an option when possible: when it makes sense to, consider utilizing a flipped classroom approach, experimenting with outdoor learning spaces, and supporting online/hybrid courses. (In fact, last year I taught Creative Writing in a hybrid structure: in-person three days a week, writing and one-on-one conferencing twice a week—a perfect balance for such a course.)

Other flexible environment suggestions emerged as well. Due to safety concerns, buildings got creative in what classrooms and shared spaces looked like:

For many, smaller class sizes resulted due to some students learning from home while others were in-building, which “decreased behavior issues” according to teacher Tricia Adams and allowed for more one-on-one conversations and check-ins (at least for our staff here in Dover-Eyota).
Structures for lunch distribution were altered: in some buildings, Adams shared, lunches were “in classrooms with a lunch aid,” where in some other schools fewer students were in the cafeteria at a time due to an altered lunch schedule—both of which caused fewer behavior issues, and the latter of which made it easier to maintain health code requirements.
Teachers change rooms rather than students moving in the hallways between classes, also according to Adam, which decreased hallway behavior issues and increased learning time due to less time lost due transitioning into and out of classrooms.

Differentiation
Similarly, the realities that learning doesn’t always happen at the same pace and in the same order for students was highlighted during this past school year. As we have the opportunity to adjust back into more traditional educational structures, educators will want to maintain this realization. One way to do this moving forward is to consider creating more of a ROWE (results only work environment) or adjusting the focal points of what we teach.

Skills Focused
Amber Henry, a teacher in Rochester, Minnesota, noted that this malleability has helped students grow skills in the areas of “resilience, grit, flexibility, and technology independence.” These may not be skills we see on a traditional academic report card, but they are exactly the skills we want them to grow none-the-less. Such skills will surely help them grow academically in the years to come.

Other new flexibility, autonomy, and individualization made this year include:

Tutoring supports, one-on-ones, and staff meetings held online, allowing for more plasticity in the time of day and the location of those in attendance.
Upon returning to the classroom, many staff added more “class management things, like class jobs,” according to Kate Ahern, a special education teacher for AAC Voices. Students were able to take on jobs as a way to help with cleaning, social distancing, the flow of the learning day, etc., and by doing so students felt empowered, it grew community, and behavioral issues decreased.
It’s been easier for staff to bring experts into classroom via video formats—feats that would have been tricky pre-pandemic when video conferencing was less of a norm. In fact, in just the past few months we here at Dover-Eyota have had a few teachers connect students with content-area experts: the author of Flight of the Puffins met with Jill Magnuson’s fourth grade classes, and some engineers from Amazon met with Tami Rhea’s middle school coding classes.
An increase in the awareness that students need a voice has surfaced—they often were the ones who helped point out or fix the issues in newly created systems.

Humanity

In such a complex year, everyone has been navigating life differently than they likely did in years past. What that looked like, or how it impacted each individual, varied. This led to an increase in empathy in schools in ways that many had never seen before. Students and staff were often reminded to “be proactive about spending time with people [they] care about,” district leaders and teachers exuded more patience, teachers wove more coping and planning skills into their teaching rather than simply making one-size-fits all structures for students to follow.

Moving Forward

In Think Again, Adam Grant’s newest book, he notes that “we live in a rapidly changing world, where we need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.” If nothing else, Coronavirus has illustrated how rapidly changing our world really is, and has forced educators to rethink certain aspects of how we run our schools and support our learners. As the concern around the virus subsides, let’s not lose the power that rethinking can have.

Grant goes on to state that, “questioning ourselves makes the world more unpredictable. It requires us to admit that the facts may have changed, that what was once right may now be wrong.” This is not an easy feat, as “we’re mental misers: we often prefer the ease of hanging on to old views over the difficulty of grappling with new ones,” but there is no denying that it’s the new views that are the ones often helping us move forward into a world we don’t yet understand.

Is ‘learning loss’ really the concern we should be having? Or, should we be concerned that we may lose the learning we’ve gained from such an atypical school year?

Heather M. F. Lyke is the Teaching & Learning Specialist for Dover-Eyota Schools and author of numerous articles focusing on quality education.