Is This Enough?

Take a look at the image in the banner of this post.

Is this experience enough?

Will this experience be enough in September?

Will this experience be what you are looking for when you return to school?

If given the opportunity, would you say yes to this?  Right now, if you are a teacher, student, or parent, would you be willing to return to the experience represented by this image?

This is known.  This is comfortable.  You know what to do. So do the kids.  The parents are familiar.

So, why not?  Perhaps returning to the trusted, expected, and known experience is necessary to get back to normal.

But, there is somewhat of a problem with that.

No one knows what normal will be.  Maybe there won’t be a normal.

The disruption to education caused by the pandemic makes everything in education vulnerable. Education has been fighting standardized testing for decades and as of March 31, 2020, the United States Department of Education has granted “all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Bureau of Indian Education” a waiver to all spring statewide tests (Gewertz 2020).  Just like that.  Yeah, it’s a waiver, but when has that been done before?  We’ll see if the tests return.

There’s the vulnerability and the opportunity. We’ll see if education takes advantage of it and says no thanks to standardized testing. We’ve got other plans.

Of course, educators will need to have something to assess kids.  If you demand that standardized testing ends, you’d better have an answer for evaluating the progress of students.

And, if you need to have that, perhaps you need to rethink what you are assessing.  And if you do that, perhaps you need to rethink the experience that you are providing. Doing that can lead to a different assessment that can lead to a different way to understand performance and growth.

At this moment, there is an opportunity to rethink everything. I believe that. But doing so is not easy or timely.

Certainly, there is getting through the end of the school year.  The next step will be a focus on trying to get school open in the fall, whatever that looks like.  This response is focused on the immediate and what’s near. That’s real. And appropriate and necessary.  September will be here before anyone realizes it and no one knows what the world will be like.

But…in my opinion, progressive and forward-thinking schools will soon begin to think beyond September and use the disruption to disrupt what they do.  If you are an educator, you’ll most likely never see another opportunity like this in your lifetime to rethink everything about the school experience. I hesitate using the word opportunity given the tragedy of the pandemic, but I’ll do it because that’s what this horrible event has created. 

The danger is that that many schools will run back to the safety and the comfort of the known experience.  The problem: the world won’t be doing that, it can’t. There will be massive shifts in how we live our daily lives, there is no doubt about that.  And to meet these challenges, I’m guessing that we will go through a time of unprecedented innovation to meet the challenges of living post-pandemic.  I’m worried for the school systems that choose to go back and not do things differently. The gap between what happens in school and what happens beyond school will grow even more wide.

As you might expect, social media channels are now filled with advice, predictions, blog posts (like this one), and Twitter threads about the future.  Bold claims of what’s coming next for education are not hard to find.

But the most important thing that these posts, articles, and Twitter threads miss is that these assumptions, these predictions, fail to take something very important into account.

The specific identity and needs of your school.

Moving forward will only be possible if you take the time, sometime, whenever, to understand what represents the reality and needs of your school. It also means addressing and understanding all of the new knowledge about teaching and learning that exists in your school and community. Moving forward won’t require a keynote speaker and some professional development. But it will take a strategic process that is community inclusive that asks the right questions to the right people to get the right information that can establish the right direction and next steps, whatever they may be. 

Much of what awaits is unknown.  My 34 years of experience in or working with schools tells me that re-establishing school will be hard enough, let alone grow school into something new.  But that’s the challenge and that is the opportunity in front of education.

Gewertz, Catherine. “See Which States Have Cancelled Spring Tests Because of Coronavirus.” Education Week - Teaching Now, 1 Apr. 2020, blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2020/03/which_states_have_cancelled_spring_tests_because_of_coronavirus.html.