Five Education Shifts That Could Enable a Better Future

As many schools in the Northern Hemisphere reopen for a new school year, while anticipating ongoing disruptions given the coronavirus and its variants, many in the Global South remain closed due to lack of access to vaccines. What unites us, however, is worry about the lasting effects of this pandemic for the rising generation of young people — well-placed concerns given stark projections about how many students will never return to school in low-income communities around the world, and about how much learning and social development has been lost. And yet, there are reasons to hold out hope — the lessons learned over the last two years can light the path to long-term shifts which can benefit the world’s young people.

We’ve seen significant mindset shifts among educators around the world — originally born of necessity as teachers, parents, and students scrambled to adapt to the circumstances at hand — that could bode well for this generation and future ones. Across Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations that develop teachers and education leaders in 60 countries in every region of the world, we’ve seen evidence of five shifts that could create a more effective and equitable approach to education.

Shift 1: Teachers have embraced students as partners in shaping the learning experience.

Oindrila Sanyal, who teaches 10th grade English and social studies to 73 girls in Delhi, said she realized during the pandemic that her students need to be equal partners in their education, because they asked so many questions that revealed their engagement and critical thinking skills, and they also knew more about how to use the technology that was enabling their learning than she did! Now she has a routine where she co-teaches classes with her students on Thursdays, puts them in charge of teaching on Fridays, and wraps up each week by reflecting with the class on the week’s lessons and what could have been done more effectively. We’ve heard about a similar shift from teachers in every part of the world, who are consulting students about what works best for them and are adapting their approaches accordingly. This bodes very well — if teachers enlist all the diverse perspectives in their classrooms, they’re bound to devise better ways of teaching and learning, while at the same time providing students with ownership of their education, as well as agency and skills for lifelong learning, all crucial for this generation’s future.

Shift 2: Teachers have prioritized and developed new means of fostering the social-emotional development and well-being of their students.

Lim Kai Syn, who is teaching 13- and 15-year-olds in the only secondary school on an island in Malaysia, had only two months in person with her students before moving to months of online teaching. As she took stock of all the pressures on her students and herself, she realized she needed to increase her focus on emotional health. And yet in the culture of the community where she teaches, “it is considered a taboo to even speak about one’s emotional state, especially if it is anything on a less than positive note,” Kai Syn says. “Rarely do conversations about emotional wellbeing occur even between family members and among peers.” Her initial attempts at connecting with her students online during remote lessons were met with silence from her students, with videos turned off. She did a lesson on student wellbeing which she describes as a turning point for her, because it provided step-by-step guidance on learning about emotions. She began checking in with her students each day about their well-being, asking them to choose images from a mood chart that represented how they felt, and she found this helped them to open up. Students gradually became comfortable enough to acknowledge their less positive emotions, no longer feeling that they had to put up a facade of being happy all the time. One student mustered the courage to talk about her mental illness and how it can affect her performance in class. “For us, the journey of changing taboos surrounding mental health and wellbeing has only just begun and it is my wish to see it continue to foster in this community,” Kai Syn shares.

Shift 3: Teachers have engaged parents more deeply in supporting students’ education.

Before the pandemic forced schools throughout Morocco to close, Karima Aarab was teaching in a new center for students with special needs in the village of Benissar. When schools across Morocco closed in March 2020, Karima’s first reaction was fear about how the disruption would impact her students and the progress they’d made. “When autistic kids learn a skill, if we don’t regularly work with them, they might forget,” Karima explains. In Benissar, where access to technology and reliable internet is scarce, Karima and her colleagues found themselves limited to reaching students and families primarily by phones, though many of her young students struggled to use them. “So I connected with the mothers, giving them advice, having them take videos so I could monitor the work with their children,” Karima says. Karima found that the emotional support and coaching she was able to give the mothers, about how to support their children’s sensory integration and learning, enabled her students to continue making developmental and academic progress. Later, when Karima moved into her second year of teaching, she created a WhatsApp group with the mothers from the start, even though school was in person, because she’d come to see that having a continuous relationship with parents is key to understanding her students’ circumstances, addressing their special needs, and supporting parents to reinforce learning at home.

Shift 4: Teachers have leveraged the available technology and realized that it can make teaching and learning easier and more accessible.

Yelena Ghukasyan is a science teacher in the small Armenian border town of Sarigyugh. When her school closed at the beginning of the pandemic, she wanted to ensure that her students could continue to see science experiments as part of their online learning. Unable to find good quality educational videos in Armenian, she set out first to translate, voice over and edit the foreign videos she was able to find on YouTube, adding in quizzes and adapting the content to the local curriculum and context. Soon, Yelena began filming her own videos for her students, and as school reopened, she even opened up her laboratory to allow students from other schools without a laboratory to come and film their own videos to share back with their peers. Students are teaching other students, and their experiments are reaching many students who have no other access to a science lab, even when their schools are open. Yelena shared that in Armenia, with such a shortage in STEM teachers, and many existing science teachers having never done or seen the experiments themselves, she is hoping her contextualized science videos will enrich the science education of students in the most under-resourced and remote communities, and in turn inspire a new generation of young Armenian scientists.

Shift 5: Teachers have enlisted students in solving today’s problems, and have seen just how much they can do.

José Luna, who teaches math and physics to 100 students in grades 5–10 in Bogota, worked to foster his students’ empathy and their understanding of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals. His students researched the challenges in rural Colombia, where one third of families don’t have water or gas, and began studying how to address this. Over this last year, the students developed methods for collecting rainwater through filters to purify it, and for using organic waste to create gas to address the shortage. We’ve seen teachers all over the world like José, who are engaging students in gaining awareness of the challenges facing their communities, deepening empathy for others, and devising and implementing solutions. This is another positive development — young people are learning leadership skills they’ll need in the future by leading real change today.

Though these shifts came about as emergency responses to the pandemic, they hold a great deal of long-term promise for evolving our education system towards one that prepares students for an era that requires the leadership to navigate uncertainty and solve increasingly complex problems. The shifts value students as whole people and embrace their humanity as well as that of their parents and teachers. They enable young people to live into their potential rather than forcing them to move lockstep through a rigid system, build empathy among students for each other as well as awareness of the challenges facing their communities and the world, and leverage all of the tools now available. If we can sustain these shifts as we move ahead, and resist the temptation to snap back into old habits and routines from before the pandemic, we’ll enable this generation and subsequent ones to shape a better future.