Two weeks ago, we graduated 1,500 students and had the good fortune to put together some in-person ceremonies that allowed us to celebrate our graduates. It was wonderful to see our students and faculty together, even if in socially distanced groups of 40 or fewer. It was restorative.
And it reminded me that the world did not stop in 2020–21. We did not stop moving forward with important work.
One that is a step toward a sustainable and diversified education workforce and not just a very expensive band aid.
Even as learners around the country begin to head back to school in person, policymakers and educators are wrapping their minds around the gigantic problem of COVID-induced learning loss.
The pandemic has underscored many longstanding educational inequities we knew about or should have known about. Among the most acute, I think, is the inequity caused by the vast differences in social networks that kids bring to the act of learning.
By both temperament (restless) and job description (dean), my default mode is to do something. I am biased toward action. People who work with me know my favorite words are “let’s go.” However, when time speeds up, as it has during the current pandemic, I find it useful to turn to an historian to help slow things down and gain some perspective.
Back in May, I wrote about the need for systems planning in a crisis. I’ll always champion long-term systemic thinking. But, as the pandemic has stretched from the end of one school year to the beginning of another, and as our college works with P–12 schools to determine how to operate this fall, I have acquired a new appreciation for the value of effective provisional decision making.
Summer is when schools plan for the coming year. A process that is intense even in the best of times is further complicated by COVID-19. The pandemic presents schools with particular challenges around health and safety and around preparing for in-person learning, remote learning or a combination of both. All of these challenges, of course, are compounded by the equity challenges with which most schools are all too familiar.
Times of extreme stress reveal cracks in the normal that have been there all along. As our college has responded to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus, we have lived in and peered through the cracks in the normal. What have we seen? The brittleness of some of our assumptions and current practices in education? Paths to possible and promising learning futures?
We’ve seen the good, the bad and the possible.
In previous posts, I’ve introduced the big argument for the Next Education Workforce, offered some thoughts on the relationship between educator development and personalized learning, and asserted that questions about equity need to live at the heart of our work.
Just before winter break, I was asked to present to a team of people from ASU and a group of Arizona civic and nonprofit leaders representing African American and LatinX community organizations. The group was called together explicitly to address the attainment gap that persists in Arizona schools.
Earlier this month, Education Week published a special report comprising a series of articles that address the challenges and promise of personalized learning. Based on a survey of nearly 600 teachers, the report offers considerable insight into how practitioners feel about their experience with whatever is called “personalized learning” in their schools.