An Open Letter to Educators: We Might be Doing It Wrong

Observing brilliant springtime in the US after evacuating the Middle East amidst COVID-19.

It's been said ad infinitum during the past few weeks, but I will say it again. We are facing unprecedented times. Six months ago, this COVID-19 version of reality was not on the radar for the common man. Folks were looking forward to spring sports and summer vacation trips. Certainly no one expected that an emergency shutdown of society in the face of a pandemic would turn into an entirely new way of life. Yet, here we are. As an instructional coach working in a developing school in the Middle East, I had just recently finished a coaching cycle with an ICT teacher near the end of the fall semester, discussing the possibility of implementing a flipped classroom model to address some of the issues she was seeing in her class. We talked about the pros and cons, I directed her toward some resources for free online quizzing and and screen-casting, and we left for winter break. Little did we know how relevant that conversation would soon become. Enter COVID-19. I watched our school administrators and teachers scramble to move all our learning to an online platform. They did it. They built it as they went. They experimented, adjusted, and found better ways to present material each week. They, like many educators around the world, were faced with an authentic challenge and they rose to the occasion. Isn't this exactly what research in recent years has been preparing us for? For years now, the educational community has been focusing on the need to teach 21st Century and Problem-Based Learning skills like critical thinking and problem-solving. A pandemic strikes and those skills were put to use. Interestingly, however, while our teachers were creatively using 21st Century thinking skills in a real-life problem-based learning scenario, they were also worried: how would they still be able to cover all those yearly academic standards? How would students be able to pass that Almighty Standardized Test? I'm sure they weren't alone. If you are an educator, you probably also had the same thoughts over the past few weeks. And if you've had those thoughts or tried desperately to make adjustments to online lessons to account for those standards, I'd like you to consider something.

You might be doing it wrong.  Before you get defensive, hear me out. We've been conditioned to this point in our careers into thinking that those ASTs are really, in fact, Almighty. Our work performance is likely even based on how well our students score on them. And in a time of crisis, we yearn to revert to the comfortable and familiar: those standards that clearly outline just what students should be about to know, do, and understand. But there's a key word there: should. That "should" was based on a previous reality--a pre-COVID-19 reality. That reality no longer exists.  If our reality has changed, shouldn't our educational approaches also change? A study by Janet Walton in 2014 outlined how standardized testing represented a "misalignment" with the 21st century, PBL approaches that have been implemented over the past years (p.90). It seems that while teachers acknowledge the need for PBL and value its need for "success in the 21st century world," standardized testing has really pushed those efforts lower on the list of priorities (p.90). In fact, Walton purports that successful 21st Century/PBL pedagogical approaches have "important implications for educational policy" (p.90). Dare I say "post-COVID-19" implications for educational policy? Just how Almighty should those standards be when the entire educational community has been forced into recreating learning environments entirely online? What should be valued more: the standards themselves or the real life PBL that is happening in our lives and the lives of our students? In their book Invent to Learn, Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager discuss the Maker Movement and how "business leaders say they are looking for creative, independent problem solvers in every field" (Martinez & Stager, 2013, Location 1088). Our current reality seems to be a recipe to help foster just that type of student.  Interestingly, the authors warn about watering down the potential uses of the technology tools available to us in approaches like the Maker Movement as just another, more expensive way to present the same material in the same ways it has always been presented. They advocate the Maker Movement (and likely, similar PBL and 21-Century methods of learning) as a "bright spot in a world that too often uses computers biased towards the least empowering aspects of formal education" (Martinez & Stager, 2013, Location 537). Turning to online curriculum deployment as just an alternative way to teach the same standards using the same methods--only now via webcam--is a sad waste of potential. Instead, now is a time to redesign curriculum and measurement to empower our students to deal with our new reality. But what about those standards? They represent academic benchmarks that are valuable to student academic development, right? Martinez and Stager argue that those standards are not lost, but are rather accessed by students in a more authentic context in these learning-by-doing approaches, "since students realize that they need that skill or information to continue their projects" (2013, Location 1031). Similarly, PBL is described as engaging students in a problem "with knowledge insufficient to solve [it], requiring that they extend existing knowledge and understanding and apply this enhanced understanding to generating a solution" (Wirkala & Kuhn, 2011, p.1157). So, in a sense, it's not the standards that are the problem, but perhaps how they have historically been measured and used as indicators of student success. So how should student success be measured in the post-COVID-19 era? If we, as educators, emerge from this pandemic crisis and are not working toward adjusting our educational policies, methods, and success measurements, we're wasting valuable time and effort. Although it may feel strange in the midst of crisis to be advocating for progress, educators must view this COVID-19-forced educational situation as an opportunity. A study by Virtue and Hinnant-Crawford, published just prior to the pandemic eerily predicted the following:  "Further, as students, administrators, and governmental leaders continue to question pedagogical choices and demand evidence of positive outcomes, PBL can be a strategy for teachers to demonstrate the value of their curriculum. In particular, the use of PBL to solve 'real-world' problems, or problems influenced by issues in communities or in the national news, provides striking results. Students are engaged, interested in the project, and committed to succeeding." (Virtue & Hinnant-Crawford, 2019, p.9) The Maker Movement, PBL, and other methods that focus on the development of 21st-Century skills have the goal of preparing students for a future that demands very real solutions to very real problems. With these methods, a grasp of academic standards and benchmarks are not the end product, but rather a byproduct of authentic learning experiences where students are grappling with the up-close-and-personal messiness of problems that don't have clear solutions--problems like those we are facing with COVID-19.  Yesterday's instructional methods and measurement instruments are no longer applicable to today's reality. Things have changed and will continue to change. So if we are not using this opportunity to reform our educational practices and policies--making both the curriculum and the measurements of success more authentic for today's reality--we're doing it all wrong. 

References:

Martinez, S. & Stager, G. (2013). Invent to learn: Making, tinkering, and engineering in the classroom. https://www.amazon.com

Virtue, E. E., & Hinnant-Crawford, B. N. (2019). “We’re doing things that are meaningful”: Student perspectives of project-based learning across the disciplines. Interdisciplinary Journal of Problem-Based Learning, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1809 

Walton, J. (2014). Teachers as expert learners and fellow travelers: A review of professional development practices for problem-based learning. Issues in Teacher Education, 22(2), 67-92. (EJ1065195)

Wirkala, C., & Kuhn, D. (2011). Problem-based learning in k-12 education: Is it effective and how does it achieve its effects? American Educational Research Journal, 48(5),1157-1186. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831211419491