Back to School, COVID edition
Friends,
No matter how you’re starting the school year, it’s surely not how you imagined it would be a year ago. As you work with your colleagues, administration, and boards, I thought I would offer you some food for constructive conversations and connection.
COVID Futures
How long will this all last? Even here in the San Francisco Bay Area, K-12 schools are all over the map in what they are telling their communities, and the degree of certainty they claim. Some announced early that they would be remote through 2020. Higher education and industry have similar variety — on the outer edge, Google has announced that its workers can stay remote through July 2021.
In light of all the uncertainly, I think this presentation from Salesforce’s futurist Peter Schwartz is really helpful. He looks at the pandemic in context of all the other simultaneous crises we’re in — political, social, and economic. Take 30 minutes and check it out (or just get the details on the slides here). One quick takeaway is that the level of uncertainty is high, and nobody knows what things will look like in nine months.
Others seem to agree. The innovative head of Arizona State University, Michael Crow, notes that they’re assuming “that the COVID-19 pandemic will not be ‘over’ or substantially mitigated by vaccines, treatments and other public health measures for the foreseeable future.”
So in the short term, we’re all doing the best we can to help our students learn, and to hold our teachers. As Chris Lehmann (CEO of Science Leadership Academy Schools in Philadelphia) tweeted the other day, “If you’re in school administration right now, you have one main job — make it easier for teachers to do their jobs well. I mean… that’s pretty much our jobs all the time, but it’s never been more important or harder to figure out how to do well.”
Holding teachers and students
Just how important is holding teachers? Here are two good pieces. The first is a new paper that explores the importance of teachers’ sense of success — especially during a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. “Teachers who could depend on their district and school-based leadership for strong communication, targeted training, meaningful collaboration, fair expectations, and recognition of their efforts were least likely to experience declines in their sense of success.“ Read and download the full paper here, and to learn why this sense of success is so important. The second is Gianpiero Petriglieri’s article in Harvard Business Review about good crisis leadership and holding.
Then take a few minutes to look at this great article in EdSurge about creating systemic change with a focus on social emotional learning within your school communities, while building better community supports around your schools.
Education’s bigger context
Seeing our schools in their bigger societal context is so important. In a crisis, we might be tempted to narrow our focus, as Sal Kahn seems to do in this interview, where he says districts should just focus on “reading, writing, and math.” Depending on how that’s put into practice, it may well rob our our teachers of agency and our students of opportunity to learn through and about this pandemic — in building relationships, and investigating meaningful issues, and helping improve the communities around them.
In that vein, I’d love to share with you some of the videos we at MakeKnowledge have produced this year that explore education in its larger context. As part of our work exploring the connection between the future of work and the future of education, we’ve been hearing from some amazing people across the country and around the world.
Most recently, Dr. Aki Murata joined us to talk about her new book “Reopening Better Schools: Unexpected Ways COVID-19 can Improve Education.”
You’ll find many other important voices on our Future of Work & Education YouTube playlist.
Need help putting all of this in action in your schools? Feel free to reach out to us: info @ makeknowledge.org to see how we can be helpful.
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