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. Despite our inventiveness, significant changes to how we educate learners have often been slow to come. Our K12 education system has been like a footprint hardened in concrete: durable and lasting but resistant to change despite prolonged exposure to nature’s elements.
Given the K12 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.
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.
New normal: 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 critical efforts contributed to more significant 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 providing 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 K12’s new normal, 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 online courses during the 2017–2018 school year; yet, by spring 2022, 33% of public schools provided full-time remote instruction—a trend projected to persist through the 2022-2023 school year.
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Edtech has gained popularity at every level of education, partly 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 K12 families, especially Black families, whose children have benefited from more transparency with educators and access to resources. Moreover, using edtech to rethink how learning happens gives students more flexibility and autonomy when completing assignments, which are vital to improving learners’ motivation and results.
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 other important factors are 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 allow students to learn at a convenient time and place.
A new beginning
I have spoken with dedicated, well-meaning educators who told me 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 working for every student?
Educators must press on and implement ambitious, achievable and balanced plans: Schools should continue to use teaching time in diverse ways strategically, 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 education instead of passively sitting in those nice, neat rows of seats.
