How COVID-19 Might Change Education for the Better
By: Jeanne Mccarty
Tags: Project Based Learning, Covid 19, Self Directed Learning, Teachers, Education

COVID-19 is shaking the foundations of public education as we’ve known it. Though we may never get back to normal, perhaps that’s a good thing. Every year, that old “normal” was failing to prepare millions of students for future success.

The pandemic has led to a surge of innovations, from “learning pods” to online learning systems, many of which are out of reach for some communities. At such a critical time, our innovations should focus on long-term solutions that support all students, no matter their resources. That means investing in teachers and fundamentally changing the way schools educate.

By forcing us to rebuild public education from the ground up, this pandemic may motivate educators to seize the daunting, but golden opportunity to re-imagine and re-engineer teaching and learning into something fundamentally more effective and equitable for all students. From this brutal new baseline, we should take the best ideas in education and build systems around them that work for all, instead of trying to squeeze new thinking into outmoded frameworks and structures.

The other day, I had a teacher tell me “I used to feel like if I wasn’t talking, I wasn’t teaching.” Now that educators have been forced to reengineer the school day to accommodate virtual learning, this teacher-centered “sit-n-get” pedagogy may be the first traditional educational pillar to crumble after this pandemic wrecking-ball strikes. The “sage on the stage” method no longer meets the needs of our evolving workforce. I’m not sure it ever did.

For years, employers — particularly in STEM fields — have said that they need schools to help students be curious, think critically, work collaboratively, and come up with creative solutions to the difficult problems before them. Now that raw information, basic calculations, and simple solutions are just a click away, it’s more important that students come out of school being able to solve problems, organize and interpret data, and communicate well with their teammates. They also need to learn how to learn.

To achieve these outcomes, teachers need to move away from traditional “teaching,” and become facilitators of active, student-driven learning, directing their students’ attention toward the learning objective, and then inspiring their students to take control.

In student-driven learning, students strengthen the skills they’ll need in the future workforce by becoming more responsible for their actions. Instead of constantly looking to the teacher for the right answer or the next step, students learn to rely on themselves to make pertinent observations, gather meaningful evidence, thoughtfully analyze the data, collaborate with their peers, and present their findings in effective formats.

This is where the remote, blended, and flipped learning scenarios necessitated by COVID-19 force the adoption of these new practices. When teachers aren’t with their students all day and all week, they lose the ability to monitor student progress every step of the way. Now, in their limited time with their classes, which is still mostly remote, teachers must inspire and empower students to take control of their learning and meet objectives themselves. This sets the stage for students to become responsible for finding and consuming information, leaving teachers to use their precious synchronous and in-person time to validate what students have learned and push it further.

The results of this approach are well-documented. Improving teacher effectiveness has been shown to be the single-greatest in-school factor for student success. Investing in positive shifts towards student-driven, real-world learning improves teacher effectiveness and long-term student achievement regardless of whether instruction is in-person, blended, or virtual. These fundamental changes in how teachers facilitate learning give us an opportunity to realign learning with 21st century needs and build an inclusive workforce attainable for all.

Make no mistake. This is a seismic shift. To make it successfully requires us to invest in teachers. And though this notion upends years of institutionalized education, many good teachers already do this and those who make the shift recognize the benefits instantly. The same teacher I mentioned earlier went on to tell me, “The days my students learn the most are the days I’m not telling them what to do. I can be a facilitator, I can be a guard-rail, I can be a sounding board, but the best days are the ones where the students are doing all the heavy lifting.”

Though nothing will ever justify the human cost of this global tragedy, I do hope that these struggles will help unify education leaders across the country to join together, invest in teachers, and take the leap to re-imagine learning for the long-term.