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.