I want to pick up on the idea of school on a dial that I introduced in my last blog post – The End of Snow Days?
School for a long time has been something you turn on or off. School is turned off on the weekends, during Christmas, Spring Break and the summer. And it is turned on from 9-3 Monday to Friday from September to June. It is a switch. The day after Labour Day we turn the switch on and across British Columbia hundreds of thousands of students arrive in buildings joined by tens of thousands of teachers and other staff.
Unlike most jurisdictions in the world, British Columbia did not turn off the switch for in-person schooling when the pandemic hit in the middle of March. We changed this switch to a dial and introduced five different settings on this dial. Here is one recent image describing the five stages:
Since spring break, and up until this week we had been in Stage 4. There were a limited number of students attending school – these were largely the children of Essential Service Workers and vulnerable and special needs students. The vast majority of students were learning remotely. This week, we moved to Stage 3 and saw thousands of student returning to schools part-time and on a voluntary basis.
Of course, with it already being June, many are turning their attention to September. We all would hope to be at Stage 1 – and stay in Stage 1 – but we also need to plan for other eventualities. So, back to this notion of school as a dial and not a switch. If we think of it as a dial, if there is a second-wave of Covid-19, we can dial-down the in-person instruction, and if BC continues to plank the curve, we can dial-up the in-person instruction. The challenge for a school system is how do you design learning and schooling that lets you move between the various stages on a dial and not get caught thinking of it as a switch (models are for another post).
This also raises a larger question about the future of education and the idea of in-person instruction being on a dial. Right now, the dial is being controlled by the virus. The virus threat is lower in BC, so the dial for in-person instruction goes up. And this will be the pattern in the short term.
But I have heard from both staff and students that they have found more success with partial remote learning than they were finding in the traditional classroom, particularly at high school. So post-virus, how might we let students control their own dial? Or staff? How could we design structures that allowed some students and staff to attend in-person everyday, some only a few days a week, and maybe others vary rarely? It makes my head hurt – but it is a conversation worth having.
I think of Alan November’s question that has long inspired me when he speaks of the classroom, “Who owns the learning?”, the teacher or the student, in the post virus world, I think as we look at structures, we may want to ask, “Who owns the dial?”
More to come . . .
