Today in the newspaper (yes I am still old-school and receive the physical newspaper delivered to my house daily!), an article caught my attention and produced a visceral reaction. The article was on “COVID-loss” in children during the pandemic and it has been playing around in my head all morning.
The idea that children are behind or need to catch-up seems very strange to me. We are in the middle of a world-wide pandemic, the likes of which we have never seen. We can not predict the impact this will have on children or what changes will be made to the education system when we are in the post-pandemic world. What we do know, is this pandemic has made us evaluate our goals, outcomes and expectations, which might actually have been antiquated. 2021 calls for new rules, new processes and new expectations. The negative press surrounding education and the loss of learning in children, might be measuring the wrong things. Schools are still using standardized testing as a benchmark for success. However, we know that success in life has very little to do with success in school. Rather than comparing success from our pre-pandemic life, maybe we should start thinking about different measures or skills for post-pandemic success.
Looking at the top 10 job skills of tomorrow from the World Economic Forum ( https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/top-10-work-skills-of-tomorrow-how-long-it-takes-to-learn-them), we see the following sets of skills that will be needed for future success:
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Creativity, originality and initiative
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring and control
- Technology design and programming
- Resilience, stress-tolerance and flexibility
- Reasoning, problem-solving and ideation
During this pandemic, teachers might not be able to fully impart the subject matter content but success in future jobs, is not dependent on subject curriculum but rather adaptable skills. Looking at the list above, I can see the direct correlation of online learning to each of these skill sets. Our children are building skills that will be needed in the workforce in 5, 10 and even 20 years from now…subject matter curriculum can be looked up on Google.
Yesterday, we marked a momentous occasion with the NASA Perseverance Mars rover landing. This project was 10-years in the making. We are closer to 2030 than to when this idea of the rover began. The scientists who pursued this project, have had to adjust their learning as new technology has been invented and have continued to move forward despite the pandemic. The curriculum taught to these scientists, when they were in school, is already obsolete and so the 2020 curriculum that we are measuring our students against, will be obsolete in the year 2030. We can look at the list of skill-sets above and agree that these 10 concepts helped drive the success of the Mars rover, not the subject they learned in school.
Rather than focusing on the ‘COVID-loss’ in education, maybe we should be looking at the skill-set gain. Maybe the silver-lining in COVID is that we have had to re-imagine education and move away from focusing on teachers imparting subject matter curriculum but moving toward building skills in the students. Maybe at the end of the pandemic, our children will be better prepared to lead the world and correct all the mistakes we have made.
