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Educating For Our New Normal: Rethinking The Time, Place And Means Of K-12 Learning

Forbes Technology Council

Richard Carranza is Chief of Strategy and Global Development at IXL Learning.

The United States is one of the most innovative nations in history. The U.S. has had more Nobel Prize winners than any other nation by a wide margin. American astronauts were the first humans to walk on the lunar surface. This country’s scientists created the internet’s foundation that later connected the world and shaped the economy.

Despite our inventiveness, major changes to how we educate learners have often been slow to come. Our K-12 education system has been like a footprint hardened in concrete: durable and lasting but resistant to change despite prolonged exposure to nature’s elements.

Consider the evolution of airplane, car and classroom designs over the last century. In the early 1900s, airplanes were basically a collection of brittle sticks, the dominant car was a two-speed Ford Model T and the classroom was made up of nice, neat rows of students. In the 1960s, crude planes morphed into soaring jets, and Ford Mustangs were ingrained in American iconography, yet our students were still sitting in classrooms in straight rows. Later, the country invented supersonic jets and near-self-driving cars, but our learners remained sitting in straight lines at their assigned desks in traditional classrooms until very recently.

Given the K-12 system’s historical resistance to change, it could have broken beyond repair in the face of pandemic-induced adversities. Instead, educators, students and parents—employing great tenacity and ingenuity—became the architects of a new normal,” using innovative educational technologies to redefine the time, space, and means of learning.

Leaving A World Behind

Even before the pandemic, many school districts concentrated on expanding internet connectivity and device usage to enable more access to academic resources. These important efforts contributed to greater equity in education. Still, our system lacked a widespread, strategic focus on expanding the boundaries of teaching and learning, efficiently meeting unique academic needs within classrooms and creating student-centered environments.

But recent shocks to the system have unearthed a surprising silver lining: the mainstreaming of personalized edtech is helping schools become more flexible, differentiate learning and empower students to succeed independently. This shift could be a lasting outgrowth of K-12’s new normal, one where schools can better adapt to changing circumstances and create engaging educational experiences through personalized learning.

A Classroom Without Walls

Educators and school districts now know that education doesn’t always need to happen in the classroom, and schools are making notable progress toward providing more learning options. Consider that only about 21% of public schools offered any courses entirely online during the 2017–2018 school year; yet, by spring 2022, 33% of public schools provided full-time remote instruction—a trend that is projected to persist through the 2022-2023 school year.

Edtech has gained in popularity at every level of education, in part because it enhances teachers’ ability to communicate with students and facilitate instruction across environments. In fact, 94% of respondents to a 2021 survey on edtech adoption reported that teachers were using technology to “communicate with students electronically.” Additionally, 98% used learning management systems, such as Google Classroom, to more seamlessly communicate with students and deliver educational courses.

Deploying these tools has important implications for K-12 families, especially Black families, whose children have benefited from clearer communication with educators and more access to resources. Moreover, using edtech to rethink how learning happens gives students more flexibility and autonomy when completing assignments, which are key to improving learners’ motivation and results.

By expanding the time and place of learning, school districts can work to reverse declining trends in attendance and enrollment, keeping students in school and critical funding levels steady. Additionally, edtech can also become an increasingly useful disaster planning tool, helping district leaders nimbly adapt to unforeseen circumstances and ensure continuity of learning. While the worst of the pandemic appears to be behind us, schools are not guaranteed a smooth transition through the school year—whether navigating a “tripledemic” winter or a major natural disaster. We will likely see more examples of contingency planning with edtech, similar to what New York City announced, where the scrapping of snow days and shift to online learning during emergencies will become the norm.

However, it is important to emphasize that while learning can be done remotely and digitally, not all learning should be done that way. The optimal setting for a student will likely always be in a classroom with a personal connection to a caring and trained teacher. Students strongly favor in-person learning overall, although preferences for a mixture of online and in-person learning vary across racial groups. While some children thrive in virtual environments, the majority do not because there are other important factors at play, like the need for socialization and the fact that some students only get a hot meal or medical attention at school.

With that said, schools with the ability should strive to give students the opportunity to learn at a convenient time and place.

A New Beginning

I have spoken with dedicated, well-meaning educators who have told me that they couldn’t wait to “get back to normal.” But if “normal” wasn’t optimal for all students, why go back? Was a system that resulted in academic stagnation—with average reading and math scores remaining flat for a decade—a world that was working for every student?

Educators must press on and implement ambitious, achievable and balanced plans: Schools should continue to strategically use teaching time in diverse ways, aim to create flexible learning environments that take students’ needs outside of school into account and adopt personalized learning tools as a means to supplement instruction across time and space.

The time has come to chart a new path through our new normal so that progress isn’t just transitory but typical. Hopefully, more students will feel empowered to take an active role in their own education—instead of passively sitting in those nice, neat rows of seats.


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