When it comes to schooling everything is essential. At least that is what we are made to believe. While I often hear about what should be added to schools, I never hear any arguments about what should be removed to make space for new content. One of the most prolific of these debate is handwriting – which I waded into a decade ago (and won’t again here). One lesson from the handwriting debate is as much as we want schools to be doing more and different things, we are pained to think that our kids could miss out by not having everything required in school that we had mandated for us. We generally seem to wish our kids to have all the same experiences we had, just more and better.
COVID has really forced us to have these conversation around what is essential, in ways that we were unable or unwilling to do outside of a pandemic. No longer could we keep doing things because we had always done it, or everyone else was doing it in their classes. We have had to truly adopt the Marcus Aurelius quote, “Ask yourself at every moment, is this necessary.”
I have written before about the particular impact of COVID on high schools. HERE is a recent post on COVID edu-trends that will stick and HERE is a link to a recent white paper that Dean Shareski produced working with over 200 educators from our region examining scheduling, blended learning, assessment and wellness in our secondary schools in COVID and beyond.
More than anything else, COVID has really made us rethink the use of time in schools. In the pre-COVID era, we had neatly organized blocks, all of the same length, with each course the same number of blocks over the year. Some teachers had this planned down to the minute. While jurisdictions across North America have faced different realities, the last year has seen shifts from “regular” blocks, to virtual, to hybrid to new models. In our district, there is now more flexible time for students, and blocks are of different lengths on different days. The traditional block model has been disrupted. And while we can’t ignore that these efforts are occurring in a pandemic – the new models are working for many students.
This year has been both utterly exhausting and invigorating for many colleagues. They have had to reinvent their courses from the ground-up. And in doing so they have cut out a bunch of stuff that now no longer is as necessary as it seemed, but they have also been able to give renewed energy to other materials – content and competencies that are truly essential and ones which bring out the passion of the students and teachers.
Asking ourselves, Is this essential? is always a good question to ask. But of course, we often don’t – not just in schools, but in many parts of our lives and society. COVID is making us take a hard look at content and competencies and the results are showing that we are building back a schooling system that is different than the one we had just a couple of years ago.
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