Here’s What Schools Need To Do in the Years To Come
A reckoning is upon us
The pandemic has forced us to look at public schooling in a new way. The effects of missed schooling and online learning are tangible. Due to closures during this time, one area of focus has crystalized for many educators, and that’s the necessity of actually being in school. With flesh and blood teachers in the classroom, wherever they are needed.
But let’s face facts. Schooling was never perfect before the pandemic. Gaps existed all over the grade levels in terms of learning achievement. A standards-based model of education has ruled since the early nineties, yet in this teacher’s view, its expiration date has come and gone. Trying to cram the same learning into unevenly developing brains at the same pace across the same school year in roughly the same manner needs to be closely examined.
Even with accommodations, does it make sense anymore, knowing what we know about child development, to continue “doing school” the same way as we did in the 1950s? I’d argue no. Something different should be tried.
Let’s start first by looking at time spent in classrooms.
Learning by the clock is an anachronism of an earlier industrial time, when many folks worked assembly line jobs and punched a timeclock every day. There is no need, given the fact that American children already average more time in class than most other children in developed countries, to keep every child in a formal setting for the same amount of time each day. Besides, those extra hours chained to a desk each year haven’t budged the needle on international test performance.
Ask most elementary teachers and I think you’d find agreement. There are many students who could spend a shorter amount of time each day in their classrooms, say three hours, pick up key lessons taught in flexible groupings in math, ELA, writing, science or history, and then spend the rest of the time in a self-directed learning model or academic “clubs” geared toward their particular interests and strengths. Sports, physical education, art and music classes would continue to be provided to all students.
Ultimately, a mixture of in-person, whole group, small group, and on-line learning is in our nation’s future. It’s only a matter of when, not if.
Perhaps you’re wondering, What about the other students, the ones with special needs who require the most help? What are we to do with them?
The others are the ones I teach all day as a special educator. I do not relegate them to a room down the hall, out of sight and out of mind. Instead, I hope for the day of the smallest class sizes possible and the most staff available to help these students close their educational gaps and provide them what they need. Theirs would be a school day much like it is now, only with more flexibility of groupings, more teacher specialization, more time for lessons tailored to both their needs and interests, and more opportunities for the remediation they urgently need.
The elementary school environment needn’t continue to be a rigid, hive-like structure where children are pent up in the same classrooms going through the same routine day in and day out. Standards create standardization, which you’d hope to be the case if you were assembling widgets for a customer. But children are not objects to be custom-made for a buyer. Nor are the round pegs ever going to fit into the square holes.
There are certain language arts and mathematical skills we want all students to have; that will never change. Yet the problems in our schools of misbehavior or indifference toward learning can’t be fixed until we focus on the needs of the whole child, and less on the needs of the standards. We’ll know we’ve arrived when the structure of the school day itself reflects this new understanding.
The point of reckoning is here, and what we do with it now will determine the future of our schools for years to come. Will we be teaching kids the same way we taught their grandparents?
Or will we change course?
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