Learning Together Again

The educational landscape looks different coming out of the constricted schooling channel that was the 20-21 school year. All the hybridizing and “concurrenting” needed to keep us safe and healthy helped feed and grow the online learning leviathan that lives relatively peacefully among us. However, these approaches also birthed some alternative models of schooling, such as micro-schools and learning pods, that, much like homeschooling, lived outside of the traditional schoolhouse structure. Unlike online learning, which as we know it has been around now for close to two decades, the life expectancy of these latest educational models is to be determined—will they be pandemic response mechanisms, or will they endure in more settled times as well? We will have to wait to see the answer to that question. 

 

While for some students, these schooling innovations are an improvement over the learning experience in the large-classroom, big-school environment—or for others they were a much sought after stopgap measure against a year of potential learning regression (post a spring of lost learning in 2020)—all students experienced the loss that Pedro Noguera points to in the quote above. Math and science, reading and writing, arts and language learning, practice, exploration, and acquisition all definitely took a hit during the past year, but the social-emotional learning that didn’t happen last year may have a longer-lasting impact and be harder to “remediate” than unacquired number skills, laboratory methods, writing mechanics, or second language vocabulary. The short and long-term consequences are hard to predict as well, but Noguera is concerned about the impact on students who, through either online learning models or other outside-the-school-box learning experiences, continue to have diminished in-person contact with fellow students and teachers.

 

So how to address these concerns? Do as much relationship building and rebuilding as possible while remaining safe at school. Reconnect the community through the reinstitution of traditional events and routine processes (particularly the ones that provide stability and comfort). Through the first two weeks of school, we have connected in-person the Lower School teachers with parents for goals meetings; parents and guardians with school and division leaders at school coffees (we’ve hosted three virtual back-to-school night events as well); students with students in academic, PE, and arts classes; teammates and coaches on athletic teams; students and directors in auditions; and students and students, students and faculty, and faculty and faculty in the lunch line, through outdoor activities, in advisory meetings, at recess, in homerooms, at morning meetings and Share, on the playground, in the lab, in the gym, in the hallways…

 

That important social-emotional learning and relationship building is happening everywhere again. This supports our students' health and well-being; this supports our students’ academic growth. This is school not quite at yet, but moving toward its best. Learning to get along with others and understanding social dynamics and how this knowledge can be beneficial to one and all is getting re-implemented in the lives of our students at school, and it feels so good and so right. This is an educational landscape to spend some time in.