So much has changed in the blink of an eye.

Just a few weeks ago, most of us were trying to wrap our heads around the sudden closure of schools and being instantly deposited into the “future” of online learning.  Now having become seasoned – if not entirely comfortable – veterans of distance education, teachers everywhere are attending to their Zoom/Google/Blackboard/etc. classrooms with the same vigor as they did their physical classrooms. (thankfully without the threat of lunch room duty)

And what about student learning?  We’ve been talking to the teachers and administrators who are part of Sun Associates’ various projects, and “What about the students?” is a constant theme.  In some cases, the question literally is “Where are the students?” as attendance/participation is becoming a crisis in some districts.  All bets about learning are off if the students don’t even show up.  When students do attend, and work on those Google Classroom (etc.) lessons, what are they learning?  Are they still getting the instruction, and the benefits of the planned curriculum, that they would have in a face-to-face environment?  Or are all of us engaged in, whether we want to admit it or not, a multi-week time-keeping exercise?  Are we going to have to somehow make up the Spring 2020 semester?  What would that actually mean in terms of student learning?  These questions and many similar ones are being asked in schools around the world.

Aside from all else, the current crisis, and education’s response to the crisis, has turned up the heat on long-simmering issues related to curriculum and instruction, assessment, credentialing, and of course the role of technology in supporting everything that students and teachers need to do within the enterprise of education.  Whenever we all “go back” to school, it is guaranteed that we will not be returning to the same systems and the same students that we had in March, 2020.  For some educators, this will unfortunately raise insurmountable personal challenges.  Nevertheless, I assume that won’t be anywhere near a majority opinion in the field.  I trust that I am correct in my assumption because I know that the very essence of education is … change. Education is about the promises and benefits that change brings to individuals, cultures and societies.  By definition, no one is better able to address change than an educator.

Still, no one wants to greet change unprepared.  Daily, this current pandemic shows us the devastating consequences of what it looks like to be thrust into change unprepared or at least insufficiently prepared.  So just in terms of our educational systems – something that all of us reading this have a deeply personal (and likely financial) interest in – what do we need to do to prepare for the changed educational environment that we are going to face between now and at latest next fall?  This is something that every educator – teacher, administrator, policy-maker – should be asking themselves now.

I wouldn’t propose to have at hand any of the specific answers to questions about what schools and districts should do to prepare for a changed, post-pandemic, educational system.  But I do believe that thinking about these new models should fall within the following bins (as we call them at Sun Associates):

• Curriculum – What do students really need to learn?  How can we re-think curriculum to bridge between basic knowledge (aka, “the fundamentals”) and entirely new skills that students will specifically need to survive in a future that increasingly looks less like the past?

• Instruction – The past month has taught us a lot about the downsides of 180-day face-to-face schooling as well as the sometimes ethereal world of completely online learning. Given this knowledge, how can we design learning environments that draw from the positive elements of each of these models?  These new models could offer the best of both worlds, or at very least provide a much more flexible model for teaching and learning than the one most of us went into the 2019-2020 school year with.

• Credentialing – Do all students need to “go to school” in exactly the same way in order to earn exactly the same credential?  Are there different credentials that can better fit students of different needs who may choose to -- or have to -- attend to their education in different ways?  During the current crisis, some of our clients are reporting that up to 50% of students are not showing up in their online classes.  Ultimately, this should inspire educators to ask if those students should be shut out of a school credential just because their family, social, or other personal circumstances preclude their attendance?  The same question could be asked in “normal” times about students who do not graduate from high school.  Do we effectively shut these people out of post-secondary education and/or the workforce, or do we use what we are learning about creating alternative educational models to find ways to offer different educational pathways and credentials that better serve individual needs?

These are just three big (ok, huge) bins to consider.  I am sure that there are many more.  But here’s the thing...If educators don’t spend time now capturing what they are learning in this real life, real time, experiment, then what will we have learned that can prepare us for responding to these challenges that we all know are right around the corner and that will be sitting in our collective laps before we know it.

I expect that we at Sun Associates will have much more to say about all of this in the days and weeks to come.  So I’m going to end this particular essay for the time being by putting just two challenges on the table:

1) Find a way to capture the experiences that your students and teachers are currently having during this grand, unplanned, educational experiment.  We evaluators refer to this as “data collection”.  Do data collection.

2) Find ways to have the discussions within your communities (at whatever level you define community…school, town, city, state, etc.) about what that community wants and needs from its educational institutions.  There is much that the traditional educational establishment can learn from the community development field in this regard.  It’s time to gather information, create ideas together and develop our communities.

Hopefully, this post will find some like-minds and will plant some ideas for ways that you can make the most out of the challenges that the past weeks have brought.  We’ll be here ready to help plan, talk, and build those bridges to a new world.