Change is NOT an Option Today

 

Change is NOT an Option Today

Now that schools are returning to some variation of in-person learning  when and where possible, but others are no able to even begin to think about starting again, so many are talking about the almost compulsive necessity to make changes to how we teach and how students learn.  The idea of a school where students came every day of the week for so many hours and worked through levels of subjects and were off for two months of the year in the summer was an invention of the late 19th century.  It was perceived that too many young people on the streets working for peanuts or just getting into problems was a danger sign for society. So, schools evolved to what they were at the end of the last century, more or less. They stayed that way for the rest of the 20th Century. At the end of the century, though, a revolution occurred - the technology revolution. From not long after my entry into the profession until the end of it, Information and Computer Technologies, soon to be called there digital revolution, began to creep into classrooms all over the world.  The longer they hung around and the more central they became to the education of our young people, the more it was realized that they were going to make it necessary to change not only the physical but the pedagogical background of every classroom.  Now that the pandemic has required teachers in every part of the globe to extend the reach of their classrooms into the house of their students and now that the parents of those same students are realizing that they have a role to play in ensuring their children have access to technological tools and to the resources that make online learning possible.  It is not going to be an easy or a cheap process and where we end up and how soon we do is not written in the cards.  But make no mistakes.  The revolution in how technology dominates learning in the third decade of the 21st Century will have as an unintended consequence the way in which education in total is handled.  We know so much more about what effective teaching is and how deep learning occurs.  We know precisely how technology can assist that learning.  What needs to be top of mind is that good education is collaborative learning and there has to be an effective and skilled guide on the side to help students reach their potential.  It has be seen as no different than how we teach and perfect top athletes and what it takes to be good at any skill.  Talent for sure, skill for sure, but effective coaching as well to bring out the best in each and every young person who reaches for that brass ring, for the podium, for the gold medallions.