The Missing Component

The  Missing Component

There is a huge debate going on right now about what school will be like in September, in the midst of a raging pandemic.  Canada is very different from the United States but the issues are essentially the same thing.  Schools are hotbeds of viruses and illnesses.  No one has to tell a teacher that kids bring everything from home into there classroom. They might not bet sick themselves, but they can either bring an infection from home to the classroom or from the classroom and fellow students home.  That is not a huge problem when everyone has colds or the flue, but it is when the infection is the measles or now, even worse, Covid - 19.  Kids might not ever get as sick as the adults in their world, but that doesn't mean that they can't infect the adults they live with who might end up sick and in danger of losing their lives, as it were, with the current pandemic.  So, the solution has been to commit to a full term of online learning and many school boards and universities are suggesting that there will be only online learning.  Now, as a former pioneer in the use of online communications and online learning, it is one thing to believe in the potency of this method of teaching and learning, and it is another thing entirely to ready teachers to be successful at the processes.  I speak from many years of experience with staff development and teaching Teacher Education, there are huge numbers of in class teachers who are afraid to using online learning or have absolutely no ability to communicate online to their students.  What is not being even talked about in this push to online learning is whether or not Teachers will be able to fulfil the needs of their students. Can they learn how to effectively mount their courses online? Can they use the technology to encourage  their students to complete tasks?  Can they effectively communicate in real time or offline with their students so that students understand what is expected of them? There are many further major and minor questions but the whole thing adds up to a task for staff development.  This, of course, opens up another can of worms.  Will school boards pay for teacher time to learn the skills necessary or to learn that which they still don't know how to do?  Theoretically, every teacher should be in school now, this summer, learning how to teach online and  how best to encourage their students to learn online.  It is much harder than one thinks and unless it is done properly, not only is there no learning, there is there acquisition of dispositions AGAINST the online  learning because of the bad experiences.  If I tell a group of teachers in the summer that it is not as hard as it sounds and then they run into trouble because they have not really yet mastered the skills, they will be turned off from trying again.  Teachers are like that.  So, unless each jurisdiction puts major bucks into professional development for the next six months and trains staff into what they need to be able to think and do, another school year will be wasted.  It is as simple as that.