Lessons learned — will teaching ever be the same?

If social media feeds are to be believed, the recent lockdown has gone by in a blur of baking, cocktail making and home work-outs for many Australians, with the occasional work-related Zoom call thrown in for good measure.

Not so for the nation’s teachers, charged with quickly developing suitable ways to ensure continuity of education in an environment that threatened to — and did — change on a daily basis. Add in the uncertainty caused by federal and state government ideological differences and it’s been a wild couple of months.

Now that things are slowly transitioning back to a more familiar environment, what — if anything — will change for the education sector and for teachers?

Well, that depends on who you ask.

Short term — the parents

While whiteboards were flying off the shelves at Officeworks as harassed parents tried to bring a sense of order to home schooling efforts, for every avid timetabler there were another 10 mums, dads and carers struggling with the lesson requirements of their kids to ensure they remained on top of their studies. For the technologically challenged, it was even more demanding. That group will tell you “the sooner things get back to normal, the better”. They’ve no doubt discovered a new-found respect for teachers and the complexities of their role and will gladly welcome a return to face-to-face learning in a classroom environment. Business as usual will be fine, thank you very much.

Beyond next week — the think tank

The World Economic Forum (WEC) sees it in a slightly different light — and looks a little further ahead than next Monday, unlike many parents keen to see the kids back at school. The WEC suggests that COVID-19 will give us four key changes in education for future generations, including a complete redefinition of the role of teachers and the inevitable ongoing use of technology in a sector not widely acknowledged as heavy users until this point — particularly in years K–12.

The pandemic has clearly been a catalyst for innovation and the WEC posits that the centuries-old modality of lecture-based teaching is ripe for change, suggesting that “the notion of an educator as the knowledge-holder who imparts wisdom to their pupils is no longer fit for the purpose of a 21st-century education”. Where students have direct access to the world’s combined knowledge (along with methods by which to gain technical skills) literally in the palm of their hands, the WEC wonders how the role of teacher could be redefined to better develop young minds in the future.

One suggestion would see teachers tasked with facilitating development of young people towards becoming functioning members of society, complete with the skillset that future employers will seek. This incorporates soft skills like resilience, flexibility and adaptability, creativity and critical thinking, communication and collaboration, empathy, and emotional intelligence.

Of course, this is a long-term view projecting way beyond the current cohort’s education lifespan, but it does posit an interesting shift in a profession that has maintained a fairly unwavering path since it began.

In the shorter term, the Forum sees public-private partnerships as becoming more prominent, citing the recent collaboration between governments, publishers, education professionals, technology providers and network operators to deliver solutions to a global problem as evidence of a more collective approach to education.

Somewhere in the middle — the frontline

The NSW Government is backing online learning as a revolutionary force in education, with its website featuring a story on one school’s response to COVID-19.

Camden High School, located 65 km south-west of Sydney, was as prepared as any school could be to deal with the pandemic. It already had a learning management system in place and staff were trained in its use. The school had class sets of hardware available and had recently expanded its computer labs from two to six rooms.

One week after the switch to remote learning, Camden High was delivering all lessons online. Principal Melinda Brady said it was a steep learning curve, but student engagement and teacher satisfaction immediately indicated success.

She said the focus moved from content delivery in classes to providing a way for students to consume content while teach staff developed skills in application, analysis and evaluation. The school decided to use the situation as an opportunity for teachers to revolutionise the way they teach.

An early decision was to forget the old timetable and move to a weekly package of lessons, activities and challenges, with teachers available online during school hours to answer questions, provide feedback and mark work.

That focus on flexibility permitted students to plan their own progression and teachers to focus on the creation of weekly work along with monitoring and assessment. According to Brady, it brought to light how much ‘busy work’ had previously gone in to lesson development, something that became apparent once the focus shifted to outcomes required and how best to achieve them.

Lessons have definitely been learned at Camden High, with Brady quoted as saying it would be “unwise to go back to the usual ‘chalk and talk’” method of teaching. As usual, the ideal situation takes a little from both sides, with the school’s preferred approach likely to sit somewhere in the middle of its pre- and mid-pandemic approaches.

Too soon to determine

In reality, it’s too soon to identify the true impact this remarkable time will have on our lives — we don’t even know what next month looks like. That doesn’t mean we haven’t learned anything, though. We know we are resilient and resourceful and can pull together in times of need. We know we can just get on and do what we have to do when required. Not such a bad lesson to learn, really.

Image credit: stock.adobe.com/au/Tierney