According to LeiLani Cauthen, CEO & Publisher of the Learning Counsel News Media & Research, “The new normal isn't going to be normal, is what most leaders are saying. And they're going to have to look at a different schedule and use of space. What's happening is some parents are still afraid and they don't want to come back. And then you have this other set of parents, it's about a 50, 50 split, who want normal and they're fighting for normal to come back. So we're in the middle of it, the space and time revision of the structure of how schools execute on their delivery of teaching and learning. So, on the space side, schools are sectioning their buildings. They're having kids go in only certain entrances when they come back so that they can limit spread to different, uh, larger groups, maybe by grades, they're alternating by building use by grade, sometimes sanitizing the whole building overnight for a next group to come in the next day, and they're using this new concept called house rooms, which is sort of the old giant homeroom concept where it's all asynchronous learning, overseen by a paraprofessional or a rotation of teachers.
“We also saw a lot of districts planning to do staggered starts as they came back in the fall,” said Cauthen. “Most school districts have altered daily block schedule, larger blocks rather than smaller, with breaks in between because kids are mostly on video conferencing. And then there's this new thing emerging called auto-cohorting and calendaring by pace, which has first come into market through companies like Scholastic that I just showed you, that are doing this as a performance, a mechanism within the software itself, but that concept is now coming up to how you would manage individualized pathways without getting rid of the intersection for whole group or small groups. So you still want live teaching? Everyone agrees, teachers are important, but you don't necessarily need the teacher to do all the classroom management. They just need to swoop in at the moment of teaching, and then spread out the rest of their time, doing more direct instruction, catching kids up, that kind of thing.”
Schools are rethinking everything, especially the way they now use time and space. The old norms are falling away, and smart educators are finding better ways to accomplish learning within the school day. It’s a fascinating discussion, and you will want to be a part of it.
