Perhaps no place in America was more disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic than the classroom.
While we’re still sorting out the full impact of removing 50 million children from American classrooms at the pandemic’s onset, not all of the consequences have been detrimental. In fact, I believe those hard years set the stage for important, urgent reform. Lets’s take an abundance mindset to explore what I mean.
The pandemic acted as a catalyst for reevaluating and reshaping our education system. It proved that the old ways of doing things weren’t set in stone, and more importantly it shined a bright light on educational disparities and put the educational equity debate front and center.
As schools transitioned to remote learning it became harder to look away from the obvious disparities in education access and quality. Students in under resourced communities struggled with reliable internet access, often lacked the technological resources needed to complete their learning, and their at-home support structures were minimal with many parents being forced to choose between work or child care.
The data bears this out too. One study revealed that parents of lower income households were more likely to express concerns about their children falling behind in school due to the transition to online learning.
Remember, back then no one was sure how long the “new normal” would last. There was a real risk of students being left behind forever. Yet, from this uncertainty rose a drum beat heralding the urgent need for systemic change. Policymakers, educators, and communities began acknowledging that disparities could not be allowed to persist. Louder than ever were calls for a reform agenda that would address the root causes of educational differences and create a more equitable learning environment for all.
And few voices were more impactful than teachers.
The Role of Teachers in Education Transformation
Hand-in-hand with a shift in how students were expected to learn was a shift in how those students needed to be taught. Among the frontline workers who kept society moving, it’s perhaps teachers who experienced the most profound changes to their job.
Educators had no choice but to adapt their teaching methods, leverage sometimes unfamiliar technology, find creative new ways to engage students, and face discrepancies head-on by finding novel ways to work around limitations. In many ways, they’ve been involved in the transformation process for years.
It’s helpful then that when it comes to educational transformation, teachers aren’t just passive recipients, but key stakeholders. Not only are they closest to the problems (and working hardest to fix them), they may have already devised scalable solutions out of pure necessity. What we can do—as influencers, leaders, coalitions, etc.—is show these teachers how they can turn their expertise and experience into advocacy.
Start with Professional Development and Support
The way so many teachers handled the demands of the pandemic was inspiring, but the system at-large wasn’t equipped to prepare them for this seismic shift. Teachers who had received significant training for those circumstances were few if any. There was simply no precedent, but there is now.
Training programs that equip educators with the skills to address diverse learning needs, navigate the challenges of remote teaching, and create inclusive classrooms—both on-site and digital—are commonplace today. More than just empowering them to pursue this kind of professional development, we should be facilitating it, making it easier for teachers to get up to speed with new trends and technologies, and be able to adapt solutions to the unique and evolving needs of their classrooms—wherever those may be.
If we can make changes that build strong and ongoing support structures—both in terms of mentorship and resources—teachers will become crucial change agents for educational equity, no matter what challenges the world heaps on them.
Like Any Good Student, Let’s Listen to Our Teachers
The pandemic didn’t change the fact that teachers sit at the nexus of recognizing the system needs reform and having to actively work through it with students each and every day. What the pandemic made apparent is that we need a teacher’s perspective at every level of the education transformation conversation.
Teachers know more poignantly than any other stakeholders how students struggle and why, what needs to be done to lessen their struggles, and the obstacles in the way of needed change. The problem is that many others in this debate don’t have that student-first perspective. Many claim to—even the most well-meaning parents or policymakers—but they are inevitably too detached to give a grounded voice to the reality of educational inequity.
As such, we should be working to give teachers platforms that amplify their voices. Professional networks, conferences, and publications can prove useful, but actively involving them in the policymaking process, and factoring their firsthand perspective into policy decisions is how we can help ensure their voices do the most good for the most children.
An Understanding That We’re In This Together
When we all were on-line, I think everyone was doing the best they could to get our kids through the pandemic. It was something that no one was prepared for, but one of the harder things to stomach was the animosity directed at many teachers. I believe those louder, angrier voices were and still are the minority.
An important idea that the pandemic advanced among many communities is that we’re all in this together.
It’s a mindset that I believe we need to extend to the broader education equity mission. Central to that work will be fostering stronger allyship between parents and teachers. Too often our teachers are turned into sounding boards for parental insecurities or painted as nefarious actors bent on indoctrination. This kind of antagonism does no one any good, and only hurts students—and not just the most vulnerable ones. When parents and teachers get bogged down in petty squabbles, education gets worse for all students.
A September 2020 article from Brookings was imagining the possibilities for reform even in those relatively early days. A core tenet of their vision—and something they already saw emerging at that point—was a broader and more active sense of community that was invested in improving student outcomes, which started with a closer alliance between parents and teachers.
Before the pandemic, parental engagement happened on the periphery of our education system. To truly address educational inequity and create the kind of change our children need, that paradigm needs flipped. “When a respectful relationship among parents, teachers, families, and schools is at the center of engagement activities, powerful support to children’s learning can occur,” the Brookings article states.
What’s more, earnest, easy-to understand, and thorough engagement invitations from schools to parents dispels a harmful myth that entrenched opponents to educational equity have parroted for years: that parents and families who are economically disadvantaged simply aren’t invested enough in their child’s education. More from Brookings makes this crystal clear, stating “Parents around the world are not interested in becoming their child’s teacher, but they are, based on several large-scale surveys, asking to be engaged in a different, more active way in the future.”
Just the Start of a Big Conversation
I like ending Part One of this conversation on a call for unity. The COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone to witness the fault lines in our education system. In many ways, we’re still experiencing the aftershock and for some a true sense of normalcy remains elusive. The role and necessity of technology is only becoming more pronounced, and so the digital divide is in danger of getting wider still.
But, within all change is opportunity, and if we embolden and support our teachers—the only stakeholders who know the frontline realities we’re up against—we can seize the opportunity created by the pandemic to transform our education system to serve all students.
This time around we discussed the importance of supporting, learning from, listening to, and collaborating with teachers to mitigate disparities and help them build an education system that, despite unavoidable setbacks, is poised to deliver quality education regardless of circumstances. If we want to sustain this momentum and end a harmful status quo, a discussion about the ways in which we can support teachers and students not as abstracts in a policy debate but as human beings is critical.
In part two, we’ll be discussing the importance of culturally responsive teaching, teacher diversity, more equitable assessment practices that can map onto remote learning, the risk of teacher burnout, and the role of generational empathy in establishing a more resilient, inclusive, and equitable learning experience for our children. Stay tuned.