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.
What’s my job?
As dean of a college of education committed to producing top-tier scholarship and to operating a large teacher-preparation program, what, when all is said in done, is my job? What makes a good dean of a college of education? What would success look like?