E-Book: Education Disrupted, Education Reimagined

In her contribution, Darleen Opfer contends that, despite substantial consensus and evidence surrounding the failure of remote learning in the United States over the past six months, “some schools, even those serving large populations of low-income students, were able to provide high-quality instruction.” According to Opfer, key to a school’s success is what she calls “the four Cs”: coherent instructional systems, collaboration, continuous improvement, and communication. All of these characteristics, she notes, are largely reliant on a school’s culture. For instance, schools that “had preexisting high levels of collaboration” among teachers prior to the pandemic more effectively delivered remote learning. The same holds true for communication, coherent instructional systems, and continuous improvement. What will be essential going forward is to ensure that these characteristics are injected into schools and professional training programs for educators and leaders, to ensure that the schools and systems that emerge are more prepared and resilient for the next crisis.

Similarly, Beckley writes that, in Sierra Leone, delivering successful remote education during the Ebola crisis, and also during COVID-19, meant being able to mobilize teachers in cohesive teams. With the announcement of school closures on March 31, “armed with past knowledge and experience of the education response to the Ebola epidemic, teams of subject teachers had been quickly mobilized, and infrastructural requirements assessed” to implement the nationwide strategy for remote education delivery.

Beyond COVID-19: Towards Restoring Face-to-Face Human Interaction This crisis has created an opportunity to reassess many aspects of the education system we may have taken for granted. While it is essential to identify successful strides in migrating our education to the digital space, leaders need to continue pushing for a safe and timely recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Ensuring the restoration of the economy is, of course, a critical imperative. Still, a report by McKinsey suggested that the quality of well-being around the world had dropped to the lowest level since 1980 in April 2020. Human beings are social creatures by design, and losing the ability to communicate beyond the screen may be a much more severe casualty in learning than we have yet to realize. We must ask ourselves when would be the right time to return to school?

As Gordon Brown puts it, “the suspension of education is not a temporary setback, with schooling and learning returning to normal once the pandemic subsides. For many, it is a permanent loss of potential.” Olli-Pekka echoes this concern and stresses that “school must 182 |