OPINION: THE PANDEMIC – A TIME FOR EDUCATIONAL ADVENTURE

• Keep school buildings closed; keep schooling going
• Use technology to individualize and magnify teaching and learning
• Base evaluation on on-going conversation, writing and engaged participation
• Develop a school-community partnership to provide childcare and oversight

In my last Opinion piece I reprinted a commentary I wrote in 1990 describing the three functions of schooling: custodial, accounting, and education. I raised several questions about custodial and accounting practices that we have grown accustomed to and believe to be in the service of education. In this piece I want to ask what schooling would look like if we really focus on education, that is to say, on learning and teaching.

In many ways it is easier to consider this question in 2020 than it was in 1990. The intervening thirty years have seen an extraordinary expansion of technology that has changed both individual and institutional lives. And now, in these past few months, technology has become more central to teaching and learning than ever before. What were once possibilities have suddenly become necessities, and we are not at all sure whether that is a good thing.

Accounting functions are so embedded in schooling that it will be very difficult to imagine education without them. But we must because they are so often vicious. Testing, grading and grouping may be central to schooling, but they are not central to education. The pandemic makes it almost necessary to do without them. It looks like schools will be freed of the cold, clammy hand of MCAS this year, and that is a cause for cheering. Questions about social distancing are also questions about traditional grouping, traditional student-teacher relationships, and traditional ways of assessing educational development. Let’s ask these questions in a spirit of adventure. As schools find answers to these questions that work under conditions of the pandemic they should deliberately consider these answers as long-range possibilities for freeing learning from the tyranny of tests, of age-level grouping, and of conventional grading practices. Not only do these accounting procedures impede learning in general, they also create winners and losers. The storied bell-shaped curve and allied statistical mechanisms assure that 50% of the students will be in the lower half of the class. They allow both students and parents to equate “doing well” with “doing better than”. In other words they provide fodder for gossip. Report cards which use a single figure to characterize the complex character of learning are neither helpful nor accurate. We all know that. Here is a chance to base evaluation on the richness of the learning enterprise rather than the reductive character of tests and grades. How engaged is the student? How good is her work? How can it be improved? Questions like these are at the heart of evaluation. None of them require comparing that student with others.

One of the amazing things about Zoom and other on-line platforms is that they help us imagine teaching and learning without custodial and accounting practices that are embedded in our experience of schooling. Our imaginations are already providing valuable insights. As I write this, at the end of July, there is tremendous anxiety about reopening our schools. I believe that teaching and learning can thrive. I believe that once we put aside our assumptions about class size, school day, school year, and evaluation we can find exciting ways for teachers and students to work together, learn from one another and participate in one another’s growth. Actually, I know that, because many of these ways are already available, and I know that Amherst teachers are working creatively to incorporate on-line and distance learning into their plans. I urge us all not to look at these as stopgap or inferior. I want us to consider how platforms like Zoom can not only convey information but also can allow teachers and students to get closer, know each other better, engage in true conversation. I am in no hurry for our schools to reopen. I want us all to envision this crisis as a challenge to rethink the conventional ways students and teachers have gotten together and learned from each other.

Of childcare, there is too much to be said to include here. The old adage “It takes a village to raise a child” might be our mantra. School and community must work together to provide a solution that has previously been thrust on the school alone. With the ubiquity of technology that allows parent and child to be instantly in touch, solutions are at hand.

When I visited the Dartington Hall School in Devon, England, years ago, I was struck by the words over the doorway: This Place is for Adventure. So I would say of this awful time when we have been forced to abandon educational practices that are ingrown and comfortable, now it is not only possible but necessary to abandon and rethink them. Let us make this a time of adventure!

Michael Greenebaum was principal of Mark’s Meadow School from 1970-1991 and from 1974 taught Organization Studies in the Higher Education Center at the UMass School of Education.  He served in Town Meeting from 1992, was on the first Charter Commission in 1993 and served on several town committees, including Town Commercial Relations Committee and the Long Range Planning Committee.