About three weeks into the lockdowns of 2020, I saw it for the first time. It was a tweet that said, "Before we reopen schools, we have to reimagine them." I remember reading that tweet and thinking, "Oh, crud, here it comes. A lot of agendas are about to get pushed." A couple of weeks later, a video was made for teachers to watch, purporting itself to be about best practices for assessment in remote learning. The first two minutes of this video mentioned remote learning, but after that, it was clear that this man had a decades-long beef with grades and had given this lecture a hundred times. He took advantage of the fear of educators when it came to uncertainty about assessment during the pandemic to make money pushing an agenda he had clearly always had. This is reprehensible.
A year later, most of what I saw online was a desire just to "go back to normal." A spring of remote learning and a year of either remote or masked hybrid learning had exhausted people, and we were feeling nostalgic for "precedented times" again. The next year was supposed to be better, but the Delta and Omicron variants ensured otherwise, resulting in tired educators being even more exhausted than before. Few people have had the energy to reimagine anything. We just wanted this to be over and to return to something familiar.
As with most things, the views on the extremes are not ideal. They might even be damaging. To turn education upside down, throwing out everything from the past in the name of change is a terrible idea. It would be bad for both teachers and students, experimenting with kids on a large scale, not knowing what the results would be for a decade or more is reckless and wrong. In the same way, pulling out our 2018 lesson plans and moving on as though we have not learned anything in the past three years is equally irresponsible. Teachers have learned to use tools in ways we had not before, and we should continue to use them (even if we use them in different ways).
Prior to the pandemic, I had taught for 20 years. I know which things were working. I will continue to do those things. One of the things remote and hybrid teaching confirmed for me is that paper tests are superior to digital tests. I used digital platforms from March 2020 to May 2021 because it was necessary. While it made grading easier, it was not good for kids. Since they couldn't write on the tests, they couldn't do the things we have always advised them to do, like underlining keywords, crossing out answers they know to be wrong, and skipping questions to return to them later. I was using GoFormative for tests. It is a great tool, and I will use it in other ways, but I hope it is never my testing platform again. Digital labs have some value, in that it is programmed to work correctly, but it is hardly the same as doing a lab. Since it does work correctly every time, there is no troubleshooting involved, which is one of the soft skills taught by lab experiments. Direct instruction by me as the expert in the room works. I'm sorry for those of you that believe it isn't learning if the kids aren't discovering it for themselves, but the research doesn't support that. I believe in labs and projects and group work and all of those things, but only after I have taught them a concept and before I follow up with reflective practices about what they have observed. I knew that was true prior to the pandemic, and it is still true.
As important as knowing what was working pre-pandemic, I also know what wasn't working. I wasn't doing nearly enough formative assessment and had just begun engaging in regular retrieval practice. Finding a tool like GoFormative during hybrid learning will now help me to solve that problem. This year, my students will use it daily to retrieve something from the last lesson, the last week, and the last chapter (interleaved and spaced retrieval). I used FlipGrid for open-ended questions during remote and hybrid learning. My students used it creatively and well, and they showed me things in ways they could not have on paper because they could demonstrate things live. I will use that for more homework assignments than I did before so students could make their learning visible. These tools were used one way during the pandemic, but as I evaluate the ongoing practice of teaching, I will use them in a different way this year.
Are we going "back to normal"? In most ways, thank God, yes we are. We will be seeing each other's faces this year rather than masks or screen icons, and I am grateful for that. I can return to well-established tried and true practices this year, and I am grateful for that. But should I just return to those things and make no changes? Of course not. Any good teacher should be self-reflective all the time. We should always be examining what worked and what didn't in the lesson we just taught, separating the wheat from the chaff, and finding new ways to improve on what we did. This year provides the opportunity to evaluate it with more potential tools than we have had before. So, as we get back to normal, we can keep moving forward.
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