Part 3: “A pale shadow of proper schooling”
On January 20th, 2021, Joseph R. Biden was sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. Just the day before — Donald Trump’s last as president — the coronavirus death toll in the United States surpassed 400,000, a number almost twice that of the country with the second biggest death toll, Brazil. Moreover, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was predicting that the death toll in the U.S. would climb to between 465,000 and 508,000 by February 13.
If circumstances surrounding the Biden inauguration weren’t somber enough, the very stage where Biden took his oath of office — the West Front of the U.S. Capitol — had been overrun by a violent mob just two weeks earlier. The shocking January 6 attack on the Capitol was incited by Trump in an attempt to halt legislators from certifying Biden as the incoming president. The chaos and violence of that day had resulted in five deaths, numerous injuries, and a stunned citizenry.
Biden’s inauguration speech offered hope for a brighter future: “We look ahead in our uniquely American way — restless, bold, optimistic,” Biden proclaimed, “and set our sights on the nation we know we can be and we must be.” Biden’s main theme was unity: “And together, we shall write an American story of hope, not fear.” Biden pledged himself to heal the nation: “My whole soul is in this: Bringing America together. Uniting our people. And uniting our nation.“
Biden’s optimism also extended to schooling. While acknowledging that the U.S. was entering perhaps “the toughest and deadliest period of the virus,” he urged American school children and teachers to go back to the classroom. “We can teach our children in safe schools,” Biden declared in his address, reaffirming an earlier pledge to open schools in his first 100 days in office.
Biden was being joined by numerous politicians — on the left and the right — in calling for a return to in-school instruction. Democratic Governor Roy Cooper of North Carolina soon provided schools in his state with new protocols designed to encourage public K-12 schools to reopen for full-time on-site instruction. Meanwhile, Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called remote learning a “pale shadow of proper schooling,” and added that “the science, all of it” indicated that students should be back in school.
Many medical experts were also calling for a return to in-school instruction and even the CDC began to implicitly advocate for students to return to classrooms. In a report published on the day of Biden’s inauguration, the CDC proclaimed that “the type of rapid spread that was frequently observed in congregate living facilities or high-density worksites has not been reported in education settings in schools.” Our schools are safe was the message being sounded from political and medical quarters.
Other messages also contributed to a sense of urgency around opening schools. A December 23, 2020, New York Times article reported that 48 percent of all American K-12 students were in full-time remote learning environments at the end of 2020. Furthermore, some nine months after the initial COVID-prompted shutdown of schools, nearly half of America’s students were not receiving any in-school instruction.
Seemingly everyone was calling for, or expecting, a return to in-school instruction. But, what kind of instruction would students be returning to?
Both the New York Times piece and a December 2020 article in The Atlantic pointed out that many of the problems of remote schooling were simply exacerbations of existing problems with in-person schooling. Zoom classes, for instance, underscored the extent to which the teachers relied on “flawed” classroom approaches, “like teachers talking too much and kids not enough.” Or, teachers and administrators more focused on covering curriculum topics than fostering student curiosity in such topics. The result? “Students are frequently being subjected to uninspired curriculum and pedagogy,” concluded the New York Times. “Students think much of what they are learning is irrelevant and disconnected from their identities and the world around them.”
Reports of bored students in science class stood in sharp contrast to the intense engagement in the scientific community that resulted in the introduction of the first COVID-19 vaccine. “Operation Warp Speed” helped mobilize scientists and pharmaceutical experts to produce a COVID-19 vaccine in less than a year, an incredible scientific feat considering past vaccines had taken multiple years to fabricate. The success was due, in no small part, to Americans actively leveraging technology for tackling a critical and meaningful problem and developing a creative response.
In an ideal educational redesign, technology is not simply a “pale substitute” for the physical classroom and its notebooks, textbooks, and organizers — it transforms what we prioritize in education. Instead of using technology as a stand-in for lecturing and distributing worksheets, students would be using technology as objects-to-think-with. Students would be leveraging technology to make meaning of their world and to tackle challenges and opportunities in creative and innovative ways. Content would be firmly grounded in student interests and passions. Educators would be preparing students to thrive in a highly digitized and interconnected world.
Consider for a moment this exercise as suggested by Dr. Justin Reich at MIT’s Teaching System Lab: Imagine one day going throughout your school district and looking through all of the homework assignments that have been offered by the teachers. Every worksheet, every textbook assignment, every online assignment. How many of those assignments ask students to solve ill-structured problems? How many of those assignments ask students to communicate ideas in complex ways? How many of these activities further skills not easily replaced by a computer?
In A New Culture of Learning, Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown point out that when people think about learning, they usually think about schools. “And when people think about schools, they usually think about teachers.” Yet, as they clarify, the kind of learning that will define the 21st century “is happening all around us, everywhere, and is as powerful,” they note. They call this phenomenon the new culture of learning. For them, it is reflected in a fundamental question: “What happens to learning when we move from the stable infrastructure of the 20th century to the fluid infrastructure of the 21st century, where technology is constantly creating and responding to change?”
We want learners to create, shape, and mold their own learning space and the learning itself. If learning is happening everywhere, then the physical classroom is no longer paramount to education. So, a debate about in-school versus virtual school is a false dichotomy. Participation is key. You cannot belong without contributing in some meaningful way.
So, what are creative teachers doing collectively with students ? The New York Times cites a few examples: “They are taking some questions that Zoom school has raised, such as whether students should have cameras on or off, and inviting students to codesign these classroom policies. They are connecting learning in the classroom to the major events that have happened outside of it: Covid-19, as an occasion to understand epidemiology or political leadership; George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, as a way to explore institutional racism or the power of organizing.”
Innovation is based on curiosity, the willingness to take risks, and experimenting to test assumptions. Innovation is based on questioning and challenging the status quo. It is also based on recognizing opportunity and taking advantage of it. The silver lining of COVID-19 is this opportunity to question, take risks, and challenge our schooling status quo.
Where schools often fall short is that they don’t develop a galvanizing vision of how learning can be fundamentally different when technology is introduced. To build a vision, every school must begin by examining student learning needs within a societal context and how these needs can be best met within our instructional environments. In the process, educators evaluate pedagogy, consider instructional strategies, and make instructional plans to best meet student needs.
Yet, as February 2021 rolled in, school administrators were focused on other things, understandably preoccupied with COVID-19 safety protocols in the event of students returning to school. Meanwhile, public school teachers were busy consulting with school union leaders regarding negotiations with city or state officials for their safe return to classrooms.
Schools were transfixed by COVID-19's “second wave,” driving the U.S. death toll towards half a million. Yet, looming large behind them was emerging a powerful and ominous, if different, wave that threatened to kill off opportunities for their students in the U.S. workforce.
Part 4: The Robots are Here
