‘You won’t magically become a teacher, contrary to the popular belief’

Armand Doucet on homeschooling during a pandemic

Over 165 countries have announced school closures in an attempt to slow the spread of COVID-19, affecting over 1.5 billion students.

This is very much the right thing to do. In contrast to Prime Minister Morrison’s unhelpful ‘hanging in the balance’ address to teachers, I really welcomed the lens taken by the renowned Canadian practitioner-academic, Armand Doucet, when he spoke on the Fresh Ed podcast recently. With his one-year-old child perched on his knee and sitting in his living room in eastern Canada, he offers a get real / get kind logic to schooling during this global pandemic. He helps more of us appreciate the interconnected nature of our education system and the diverse, critical roles educators have in all of our daily lives. And how wildly ridiculous the saying ‘those who can’t do, teach’ truly is!

In a human-centred, learner-centric way, he emphasises how much more important the most basic needs of our learners are right now — and not the complexity of their learning experience. “Maslow before Bloom”, he says, meaning that we need to focus on providing for a child’s more basic needs (shelter, safety, comfort) before trying to optimise their education. Interestingly, his concern was less for children and more for the resilience of parents and teachers. He believes, for the most part, that learners will be OK once there are some primary supports in place.

For teachers and education leaders, he had these points of wisdom to share:

• Educators are not able to deliver the best that distance learning has to offer right now, but rather the best they can offer within the context of a crisis.
• Learner contexts matter — personalisation and meaningful connection to learners is key, and is lacking in MOOCs (massively open online courses) and ‘low bandwidth’ mediums like radio and television
• Remote or distance learning does not simply mean online learning; be creative with the context and do not inadvertently encourage excessive screen time.
• ‘Office hours’ of educators will need to cater to their learner contexts, e.g. how parents work or what frequency/mode of contact makes sense.
• Curriculum will need to be interpreted for essential and less critical elements (during crisis) and explicit plans made for possible future school closures.
• Social programs and supports will be needed to enable safe return of learners — grief counselling and door-knocks are likely necessary.

His advice for parents was the most heartening of all: “Give yourself a break and take a collective deep breath…this is not home-schooling…this is crisis education and you can’t take all of that onto your plate”. Returning back to the ‘Maslow before Bloom’ logic, he says that if parents focus on these two things they will have done more than enough:

1. Have an open discussion with your family and focus on the social-emotional needs. Make sure they know they are loved and understand what’s going on around them. Read to your children. Tell them when you’re doing something great for others in your community.
2. Reach out to your teachers and create a relationship with them to help work out a way to progress your child’s education. Like all relationships, this is a process and not something that will be achieved on day one. Progress not perfection should be the focus at this time too. It’s ok if you don’t get through all of the learning outcomes or assignments!

He reminds us that education is a process of many moving parts and built not simply on domains of knowledge, curriculum and standardised assessments but on designing learning experiences and formative assessment that’s well timed and conducive to growth and development.

Best of all, he reminds us that it’s alright to let kid’s play. There’s real learning in play.

He actually echoed what Julia Cameron said on another podcast about pandemic living: “right now, we desperately need frivolity”. So on that clear note, let’s play!

Found at Fresh Ed podcast, a weekly educational research podcast. For those who can keep their concentration intact at this time (unlike me), this podcast was timed with the release of Armand’s co-authored report entitled Thinking about pedagogy in an unfolding pandemic: an independent report on approaches to distance learning during Covid 19 School Closures.