Every significant historical and cultural event provides us with words and language that immediately bring that event to mind. Even though human memory ultimately is short-term and we quickly move on forgetting as we go, these words will connect our future with this present time. Think of 9/11 and World Trade Center. This pandemic provides us with these references. The word “COVID 19” moved from an acronym used by epidemiologists to the word pair that names a worldwide pandemic. “Social isolation” seemed to be an oxymoron, but it defines the most widely used strategy for mitigating COVID. “Peak” and “flattening the curve” give graphic words to understand the transition of the epidemic over time. Old words, like quarantine, found new usage.
In the field of education, “remote education” combines practices of school-provided instruction, home schooling and alternative delivery systems. In the design of distanced learning, educators and educational leaders are finding the word “essential” to be the optimal and simplest word for refining and redefining curriculum and instruction, student assignments, and post-learning assessments. As we transist from school closures back toward our traditional concepts of schooling, the word “essential” will prove to be the new Occam Razor used to reassemble post-COVID education.
Let’s combine essential with other constructs for reassembling school to imagine an “essential” education that will be the beginning for evolving into a healthier time.
Essential and social re-integration.
- School may not immediately be the ringing of a bell and all children reporting to class as they did pre-COVID. In the transition and foreseeable future, children may assemble in shifts. A shift allowing for distancing between individual people. Perhaps, some children may attend school in the morning and other children in the afternoon.
- School bus routing may be modified. Children may not be seated three-to-a-seat, but one child per seat. It may take several bus runs to get all children in a shift delivered from home to school and then school to home.
- Class sizes may be smaller or sized according to the area of a classroom. Student desks or seats may be distributed around the classroom instead of massed in rows. This may mean more classes or a schedule in which only a given number of children may be in school at a time.
- Children may be scheduled to be in the hallways and at their lockers and entering and exiting the school. Passing from one classroom to another may be orchestrated one classroom at a time.
- More lunch shifts. Children may not pack around cafeteria tables to eat and be with friends. They may not queue in lines to receive their lunch. Perhaps, students may eat lunch in their classrooms where personal space has been defined or in other places in the school.
- Physical education, athletics, and the dramatic arts may be reconstituted. It is hard to consider team sports, especially contact sports, as immediately comporting with personal space. They may begin with virtual competitions and performances viewed without spectators.
Essential and curriculum and instruction.
- Because instructional time in school may need to be abbreviated, curriculum and teaching may be simplified. Remote education forces teachers to refine assignments to the essential knowledge, understandings, skills and dispositions that children must learn. While a regular curriculum lays out all the things we want children to learn, an essential educational program clears away much of the “extra”.
- Remote delivery refines our selection of curriculum to the things children must learn so that they are prepared for next and future learning. Essential learning when school re-opens may continue to be “most” efficient and effective. It may be very sequential and aligned with “next”.
- In distanced education, directions must be clear because there is not the immediacy of question asking and clarifying answers. Personal contact is limited to what teachers and students can write in an e-mail or text. Elaboration gives way to simplicity. If remote children do not understand the directions they did not do the assignment. The need for clarity and simplicity may transfer to new classrooms with limited daily time for each class.
- Sponge and filler activities are not needed when children are remote. They are able to go or not go to the next assignment without waiting for classmates. Timing is controlled by the student not the teacher. Many children may appreciate this in their new classrooms – eliminate the waiting.
When schools re-open, there will be a new assessment of the essential school. After the March, April, May and June closure this spring and the months of summer vacation, school programs that are missed the most will be valued the most. There will be an urgency about these. School programs that are mandated by state statute will get attention, because school boards are accountable for these programs. What was not missed may be slow for renewal or not renewed at all.
While we hustle to reinstitute what was missed, what is mandated, and what is urgent, safety will insist that mitigation and social distancing will be the essential word as we re-open schools to teaching and learning.
In the Time of Post-COVID, new, essential schools will emerge.