New Year? 4 “Essentials” We Need for Education

On the last day of 2020, I am struggling to meet my goal of publishing my 200th blog post. I have 77 partial posts in the queue but it has been so hard to string my thoughts together during this year that it felt impossible to complete any one of them.  There are just so many things that I feel befuddled by and have been contemplating and processing. I know that I am not alone. We all have had to put one foot in front of the other, but wondering if we are going in the right direction with so much uncertainty. 

In the past month, here in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, the courts have been arguing if education is an “essential service”, as people seek to define what education is and get approval for reopening schools. Since March of 2020, schools have been closed in our area, and to get a ruling on this is an important precedent. 

That is an interesting topic to debate: is school an “essential service” to our society? And if it is, to whom? To businesses? To our governments? To the families? To the students themselves? 

Are schools factories? Do we mean to provide nationalistic pride and values? Or are we glorified baby sitters? Or instead, are we levers and fulcrums to opening up an individual’s potential and creativity? 

What IS our “essential service”? 

My 11-year old daughter told me it is to “learn” (not to “teach”, interestingly) and I think that no matter the stakeholder, they might agree with her. But to learn WHAT (content, skills, values) is exactly where definitions would diverge and split into self-interests. 

Throughout this year, I have had 4 concepts that I have been grappling with, going right into the heart of this idea about “essential service”. 

Power and Influence

I cannot speak for every country, but it is widely accepted that the purpose of public education in America was to spread Christianity and its values. Later “progressives” recognized that education was the key to democracy and hence “standards” were created in order to provide a fairly educated mass of citizens in order to make informed decisions. However, content knowledge was curated by those in power, and morals reflected those interests so that the narrative continued to benefit those of influence. It has only really been until Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that we are opening up to new conversations around how information is shared and differing perspectives have been censored. 

White supremacy isn’t just a bunch of white-hooded men spewing hate speech, it has been a prerogative of so many power dynamics today and has hurt so many people; from the emotionally wounded parents of the Sandy Hook mass shooting massacre (because we value guns over our children) to the Chinese factory workers who live under polluted skies in order to manufacture consumer goods for the western economies. To deny that this willful greed isn’t at the heart of all this violence and environmental degradation is to deny reality itself. Thus, as educators, we cannot be merely sympathetic but actively engaged in raising our sociopolitical consciousness in order to involve our students in lively discussions about why things are the way they are and encourage students to see themselves as agents of social change and transformation. 

I believe that post-pandemic, providing learning experiences that challenge students to question structures, beliefs, and norms of power and influence is an “essential service”, in order for the history of inequity and oppression to not become our global future. 

Standards

You can’t expect standards from over 20 years ago to remain relevant and meaningful for today. We have to really be looking carefully at our national standards and be asking bigger questions. Even the Common Core standards are a decade old–think about how much has changed in this year alone!–isn’t it time to re-examine the whole concept of a “standard” and if we are trying to use these “standards” to create “widgets” or compassionate humans? I’ve written before about the Post Pandemic: “New Normals” Worth Developing and looking at what we want students to achieve at certain ages needs to go beyond simple knowledge and skills. Benchmarks need to include our hearts along with our heads ad hands.

Recently I heard Jan Mills speak at the IB Global Conference about the initiative in the PYP to reform our scope and sequence documents. As I leaned in to listen, I felt a spark of energy for this project, not only because it called attention that curriculum documents need a constant revisiting but also because she spoke about learning progressions based on the Approaches to Learning (Atls), in which knowledge alone no longer takes the center stage. 

In my mind, this is an important transition into not just focusing on what students know and can do, but to really grasp what it means to be thinking and communicating through the lens of a mathematician or writer or historian, or musician. I think this could be an exciting change in how learning happens in our classrooms.

I believe that post-pandemic, providing an expanded definition of “standards” is an “essential service”, in order for students to grow into creative thinkers and compassionate humans. 

Truth (and Media)

There was a time in which we believed that facts were facts. Information was reported and information could also be censored. However, now we talk about “disinformation”. Where did this concept come from?

During all my binge-watching on Netflix, I came across The Social Dilemma. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. In my mind, it is a call to arms to us educators. 

I have never before felt so adamant about ensuring that our students can actually understand what is real and not real information. Moreover, they have to understand the algorithms that create these personalized realities and the echo chambers that exist within them. Students need to recognize when they have limited their access to alternative viewpoints and sources of information.

I believe that post-pandemic, providing authentic and relevant digital literacy is an “essential service” in order for our digital natives to become discriminating consumers and competent with discerning information.

Technology

There is really so much I want to say about this. Over the course of my years, I have grown weary of reading books about how technology is rotting our intellect and dissipating our attention. Technology is not at fault, just like a car cannot be blamed for more accidents just because it replaced the horse and buggy. It’s always been the misuse of something, not the thing itself, that is the culprit. This is the year in which we have finally learned how to embrace it as a necessity and begin to appreciate that not all screen time can be considered equal. 

This is completely accurate when it has come to online and distance learning. Teachers who attempted to replicate their traditional methods realized how ineffective it was with boredom and student disengagement becoming so glaringly obvious, not to mention the worry of low student achievement and critical parents providing their opinions.

So any teacher who still debates whether technology should be infused into our lessons and is recalcitrant to use blended learning structures in this classroom after this pandemic, cannot remain in education. Pining for the “good ole days” of traditional teaching would be an absolute affront to all the professional development that has transpired over the last year. Moreover, we have to improve our methodology and effectiveness in order to release control of learning to our students.

I believe that post-pandemic, improving our use of technology in instruction is an “essential service”, in order to democratize our classrooms and engage digital natives at higher levels of learning. 

So, there you have it–my 4 “essentials” that I think we need to change. Although I know that my list is actually longer and will continue to grow, as I move into 2021, I wonder if this will truly be a “new year” for us in education. I pray that it’s not just another go at the ideas and approaches to learning pre-pandemic (likely circa 2000). If we, as educators, are a genuine “essential service” to our society, then let’s embrace innovation and be committed to developing the personal best, not only from our students but of our humanity.