A Very Exciting Time

A Very Exciting Time

The last few days, as I have been reading about all the challenges that are confronting the business of Education in the days and weeks and months ahead of me, I have thought back to the early days of using computers in the classroom especially in the elementary schools.,  As I struggled to master the skills of using computers somehow in my classroom in a rooms where desks were configured in rows and there was hardly any space along the walls for anything approaching a desktop, I very quickly realized that classrooms would have to change to adapt to the technology, not the other way around. I worked with a principal who was chosen to open up the first new school being built after computers began to be used widely and she took me, among others on a tour of the shell of the building. I remember very clearly commenting on the fact that absolutely NO allowances had been made for any computers in any of the classrooms. We were on the verge of creating a board wide Wide Area Network and were already using Local Area Networks in every school, run by servers in each school.  Yet, there had been absolutely no plan in the design for computers and in fact, the plugs for the rooms were all under the chalk boards which would mean the desktops would be subjected to all that chalk dust.  Nothing was thought through and it hasn't changed much since then.  There were other administrators in other school districts who were already designing schools for the computer age.  We actually went on a tour of one in Toronto and it was miles ahead of most other schools I knew. But, from the beginning, we knew computers would only come into their own as tools of learning when we grasped how they would change our business. Now, as schools  are thinking about the fall and what it will mean to be safe in the age of Covid-19, the list of accommodations goes on and on.  However, for myself, what I find myself thinking about is how exciting it would be to be involved in that future planning.  Everything I know to be required for those teachers and their classrooms at home and at school will need to be taught and so many educators will need to be coached on how to implement those changes. Michael Fullan, at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education has made a career out of writing about the change process in education, in schools and school boards specifically and he has known and advocated all along that the changes will require much forethought and planning and phases of implementation. Not many listened to his words of caution and now I am sure there are many who wish they had.  The pandemic has been the springboard for much that has already begun to happen but fifty years from now, it will be the subject of much study on  what its unintended consequences were and I guarantee, one of those consequences will be the transformation of the business of education.  I would love to be studying and documenting that change.