This is my last blog post of the 2020 year.  Our students finished their semester this week, and today is the last day for teachers and staff.  It feels good to make it to the end of what will surely be an unforgettable semester of 100% distance learning.  

This was also the first year since I began my blog that I stuck with my initial goal of posting every week.  Perhaps it was working from home that provided that little additional time I needed to put my thoughts to paper on a weekly basis.  Almost without exception, my early morning Monday routine included enough time to gather and share some of my thoughts about what I was seeing happening around me in the world of education.  Of course this week things came off the rails a bit as I find myself scrambling to finish up all my tasks before taking a few weeks off (including from my blog) for vacation – it’s Thursday and I’m still trying to get a post up.  

Rather than an in-depth and sobering reflection on the unprecedented year we are finishing, I thought I would share a few thoughts about those elements of education that I think will be changed significantly as we head into 2021 and continue to emerge from pandemic restrictions over the course of the coming year.

Parent Engagement

Our engagement with parents was perhaps better in 2020 than it had ever been in the past.  Our efforts to gather parental input and perspective were genuine and ongoing.  Our virtual meetings, from open house to parent university to college counseling, were exceptionally well attended.  When we convened parents to share our initial plans for hybrid learning, we had nearly 600 families on the Zoom call.  Schools will have a hard time justifying in-person only gatherings in the future, and why would they when virtual and hybrid options garner such better participation?  At the classroom level, teachers began to see students in their home context.  Siblings, pets, and home surroundings came into clearer focus.  Even when parents were not directly participating, they were listening in on conversations, and asking better and more informed questions about the academic program.  Virtual learning has prompted shifts in patterns of parental participation that will hopefully be with us for the long term.

Essential Workers & Industry

Nobody, that I am aware of, is out protesting that Apple or Google employees come back to the office to work.  Many industries made a hard shift towards tele-commuting without much public attention. In many cases they will stay that way for the foreseeable future.  Schools, on the other hand, found themselves at the center of an intense debate and ongoing struggle.  In many ways, the work teachers and schools do to supervise, educate, and care for students during the regular work day is foundational to economic sustainability.  Frankly put, parents need to work, and schools often make that work possible.  Back in March, the thought of closing schools was unheard of.  Perhaps more than any other aspect of our daily lives, closing schools communicated that indeed, COVID-19 was the crisis of a lifetime.  

As the pandemic wore on, parents too began to recognize for themselves the enormity of the school dilemma.  It turns out that ensuring the learning of your children – consistent instruction, engagement, feedback, and supervision while you are also trying to meet employment responsibilities – is incredibly challenging.  Even for those who can give more time and attention to the task, daily instruction turns out to be a tough assignment.  I’m an education administrator, and yet one of the most difficult aspects of the pandemic was supporting and managing the distance learning of my own children.  Hopefully, the long term outcome for education will be a broader recognition of the formative role that teachers and schools play in sustaining and supporting our economic and social welfare.  

The futurists were perhaps right to predict that education would make a strong pivot towards virtual learning.  But in some important ways, education will be one of the industries to snap back quickly.  In-person schooling is not going away.  In many cases, the appetite to get students to the school campus is stronger than ever.  In my own school, even amongst a relatively cautious community of families, 75% of students are planning to return in-person to campus next semester, while the pandemic still rages on.  Kids want to be at school.  Parents want schools open for in-person learning.  

Hybrid Learning

Despite the strong pull towards in-person learning, hybrid learning will continue to play an important part of our school experience.  Hybrid learning has taken on a specific meaning in the context of the pandemic – some students on campus physically some of the time, while others remain at home to connect virtually. The idea is to lower student numbers in order to meet social distancing and safety protocols.  Of course the concepts and emerging practices of hybrid learning have existed for many years prior to 2020.  Some of the most forward-thinking reformers and innovators have been pushing for increasing access to technology and distance learning tools for years.  While we know that hybrid learning will likely be the primary mode of instruction around the world in the year 2021, I believe it will take on a critical role for much longer into the future.  Snow days may be a thing of the past.  Periodic virtual learning days could very well be built into calendars.   Sick or absent teachers may be leaving asynchronous virtual lessons for students indefinitely.  The entire educational workforce has been forced to learn and adopt the tools of distance learning during the past 9 months, and those skills will undoubtedly be put to use in creative and interesting ways.  

I’ve been making my way through the book “Teaching Entrepreneurship.”  As I mentioned back in November when I began reading, the first section of the book is a theoretical overview of what entrepreneurship is, outlining the broad characteristics of an entrepreneurship mindset.  The authors settle on five key components for entrepreneurial thinking; play, empathy, creativity, experimentation, and reflection.  This 5 pronged approach to teaching entrepreneurship then informs the structure for the rest of the book, which is to provide an overview of instructional strategies associated with the 5 major components.

What is perhpas most refreshing for me is just how practice-oriented the book is.  It is, at its heart, a collection of instructional strategies.  There is a broad variety of activities.  From encouraging students to play by learning improv and building marshmallow towers, to building empathy by practicing and analyzing negotiation simulations and exploring the impact of unfair pay schemes with imaginary monkeys , the examples are varied and most importantly, fun.  

The strategies and activities tend to start from more abstract, and move towards more concretely related to specific skills involved in business creation and venturing.  Exercises designed to build empathy might start with a general activity observing “users” or “clients” engaged in a common practice – like using an ATM machine.  Then they move to more specific cases, like developing a fictional customer persona for the type of person who might use the service or product related to a business plan that the student is currently developing.

What strikes me as a common element of these activities, is the need for students – our would-be entrepreneurs – to develop a truly flexible mindset towards their work and the market or social settings within which they intend to create and venture.  In such uncertain conditions, and with so many shifting variables, it is essential that students don’t get bogged down in too linear of thinking.  It’s as if we need students who take the work very seriously, but don’t take themselves or any specific solution too seriously – they don’t become overcommitted to any one solution.

This type of thinking and practice is in many cases the opposite of what we teach in schools.  Typically, we ask students to apply algorithms and rules to determine a single correct solution.  A commitment to teaching entrepreneurship will help our teachers and classrooms move increasingly away from this type of linear problem solving.  Indeed, the challenges in how we teach math and science are particularly well-documented.  We would do well to encourage play, empathy, creativity, experimentation, and reflection across all of our subject areas.  

Our team is deeply immersed in the design challenge of our lives – hybrid learning that meets the needs of all learners, is cost neutral, and doesn’t require teachers to simultaneously teach distance and in-person students hour after hour.  Ever since the Ministry of Education in Costa Rica outlined steps for a return to school next semester in 2021, we have been meeting regularly to outline out plans and systematically communicate details to our students and families.

I remember when we first moved from in-person to emergency distance learning (aka crisis teaching) back in March.  Back then, as a member of the Executive Cabinet of SAUSD, we moved from a weekly cabinet meeting to a nearly daily huddle to work through the endless decision-points that needed to be addressed.  Everything was unknown, and every 24 hour cycle brought new developments, new news, and changes to our decisions.

Over 8 months and a new job later, we’re quickly approaching an end of our exclusively distance learning model.  We’re making the transition into hybrid learning.  I told my leadership team at the beginning of November that we all needed to embrace the fact that we would again be meeting regularly, if not daily, to work through endless details and decision points that will give our hybrid learning plan its substance.  

This time, the uncertainty and relative panic of last March has become a much more clear-eyed and deliberate design process.  At the very least we have more time to work out the details, despite ongoing uncertainties.  We have the benefit of learning from the decisions, successes and mistakes of other systems who have already been in hybrid learning mode.  From conversations with people in those systems, we’ve come away with a few big learnings:

First, and perhaps most importantly, well over 50% of our students will still be learning remotely on any given day.  That means that while we are working with hybrid learning, our predominant mode of instruction will continue to be distance learning.  With that being the case, we need to continue to prioritize high quality distance learning throughout the spring semester.  Second, the plan needs to be flexible enough to deal with unexpected challenges – quarantines, sick teachers, lack of staff.  We realized early on in our hybrid plan that expecting 100% of our teachers to be available every day would be poor planning.  We needed a plan that assumed 20-30% might not be available in person on any give day.  Third, if we were down adults, we needed a substitute plan and extra professional skill in the building to provide slack to address needs on the fly.  We’re still trying to work those details out, but having a corps of on-call adult staff, as well as ensuring an “all hands on deck” attitude amongst our professional staff is essential.  Fourth, we needed to be careful about handing out special privileges to certain teachers and not others – including permission to work from home.  Teachers and administrators alike from other systems reported on rifts between those teachers who have to report physically to work, and those who continue to work from home.  We want to be united as a staff.  Fifth and finally, we would love to avoid simultaneous in-person and distance teaching to the extent possible.  As many schools have discovered, without a significant increase in the number of teachers available to teach, that last one will be very difficult to manage.  

Of course this is all still hypothetical.  Students don’t come back to campus until late January for us.  We have the next 3 weeks to work with our families to pin down our cohort assignments, make final physical preparations, and communicate our systems and protocols over and over again.  Each time we make good progress in our planning, another wrench gets thrown into the system to cause us to pause to go back into problem solving mode.  It has been one of the most demanding design challenges I have confronted in my time as an educator.