Students will propel education forward
A conversation with Justin Reich (Feb 9, 2021)
Speaking with us from a snowy small town buried in the New England winter, Justin Reich asks, “What are new values that people are applying to teaching during the Pandemic?” As we continue the conversation, the author of Failure to Disrupt (Harvard Univ Press, 2020), points us to Arundhati Roy’s moving April 2020 ‘‘The pandemic is a portal” essay in Financial Times, which observes that “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew,” as “… a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.” Reflecting on Roy’s admonition to “walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world,” we ask Justin what he is seeing in colleges, universities and the K-12 school sector that he studies today. What do we want to take with us as we work to create the new world ahead? And who will propel us forward in the decade ahead?
As Executive Director Of Teaching Systems Lab and Assistant Professor Of Comparative Media Studies/Writing, Justin Reich and his team have completed three projects to date helping educators respond to extended school closures and remote learning. The first, Remote Learning Guidance from State Education Agencies during COVID-19, collected state remote learning policies to help policymakers from different regions share best practices. The second, Imagining September, developed participatory design principles and protocols for opening schools in fall 2020, creating actionable steps for school communities. The third effort, What’s Lost, What’s Left, What’s Next, interviewed 40 teachers from across the country in public, charter, and private schools, at different grade levels. The researchers found teachers struggling to motivate students, a profound sense of professional loss because teachers have been separated from their students, and dramatic intensification of the societal inequalities that shape students’ lives. Together these three projects have connected teachers and administrators in different systems, helped them work together, and identified the most significant challenges facing them this academic year.
The most striking change found by the Teaching Systems Lab team is empathy for students. Teachers who had a “sink or swim” attitude toward their students prior to Covid-19 have changed their approach. After seeing their students’ homes via Zoom, many felt sympathetic and cut back on class workload to put the school demands in better balance with student lives. Teachers’ new emphasis on finding what will really work for students is not only helpful during the pandemic, but an indicator of many potential future changes.
Moving from student-teacher interaction to institutional posture, Justin notes wryly, “We changed, but we’ve created something similar to before.” While thousands of teachers have changed the delivery format of their classes by teaching online, school systems are offering the same classes covering the same topics with largely the same content and assignments. Emphasizing how different this could have been, Justin points to the example that in April 2020, some K-12 districts scaled back for the spring to half days of regular classes, devoting the other half-day to creativity, exercise, and self expression. Resuscitating elements that have been driven out of the American public school day over recent decades, Justin pointedly asks, “If educators recognize that creativity, exercise, and self expression are important now, why didn’t school systems recognize that before [the pandemic] ?”
“If educators recognize that creativity, exercise, and self expression are important now, why didn’t school systems recognize that before [the pandemic] ?”
Pondering the future ahead, Justin tells us ruefully that at MIT, where he teaches, students want their own “personal versions of lectures,” even though MIT has spent millions of dollars to develop better online learning material as part of their almost decade-long push into global online learning. Apparently, students prefer hastily-devised video class meetings over professionally produced video. We are seeing something similar at other institutions too. While pre-recorded video is popular, students revolt if that replaces all teacher contact. Students value personal connection, encouragement, time tables, and a sense of belonging. Whatever might have been overlooked in the early stages of the 2012–2018 MOOC movement, these factors seem painfully clear now.
“How do we see students as partners in responding to the Pandemic?”
While colleges and universities view peer institutions warily — based on competition for athletes, faculty, and tuition-paying out-of-state students — neighborhood-based K12 school systems often have a more collaborative perspective. During the pandemic, however, K12 teachers who normally rely on professional networks were chaotically left to struggle alone. Justin and his team were the first to connect the Council of Chief State School Officers. Emphasizing the chaos of 2020, Justin tells us, “there is no model district of how people responded to the pandemic.” Across the over 3000 K12 districts in the US, no education leader is pointing to one school/state/group/network as a paradigm example of “successful” response. As Justin put it, “everyone is trying to sand down 1000 rough edges” all at once. Because so many school systems are responding in similar ways to the same crisis, there is every reason to share strategies and best practices to help each other. However, haste seems to have prevented that in K12 systems as well as colleges and universities.
Leaving us with a powerful thought for the restructuring and re-emergence of education in 2021, Justin asks, “How do we see students as partners in responding to the Pandemic?” He continues to argue that this generation of students has a unique experience: “No one else in history has ever learned fully remotely at this scale.” Students — a generation of digital natives that have grown up with digital devices and tools — hold the keys to what learning might look like on the other side of this portal. We are seeing that students do not want to lose the “collective effervescence” of learning with one another. Students and teachers will have to reconnect as we move out of the pandemic as both groups will have to cope with monumental equity challenges amplified by the pandemic. In all of this, student voices will be the best guides for teachers and decision makers.
—John Mitchell and Maxwell Bigman