Meeting our students where they are at today in a changed educational landscape
I don’t want to speak too soon, but there does seem to be a feeling in the air that the clouds of Covid-19 are finally parting and the sunshine is once again beaming down on our educational landscape.
Though we still have staff and student absences, the majority of our school community joins us each day to learn and be inspired. Yesterday, some of our Japanese students went on their first excursion in many years, what a joyful day it was. Late last term some of our Year 10 and Year 12 English students attended the theatre to watch Bell Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Things are slowly returning to normal.
However, now staff are faced with a new challenge. We cannot simply pick up from where we left off and continue with our programs, that is no longer an option. So much has happened, new experiences have been had and things have been lost. We must now readjust and meet our students where they are at today.
We are finding that an increased number of students require extensions to get their assessment work completed, for a variety of reasons. We are finding that students’ motivation to complete classroom activities has dropped, as they spent so long “running their own race” during online teaching & learning. We are also finding that many students have improved IT capabilities due to increased time spent on their devices during this time.
A recent paper titled, The Changes we need: Education post COVID-19, cites that there are new skills on the rise in our contemporary landscape which include, “creativity, curiosity, critical thinking, entrepreneurship, collaboration, communication, growth mindset, global competence, and a host of skills with different names” (Duckworth and Yeager, 2015; Zhao et al. 2019; Zhao and Watterston, 2021)
These are all changes to our educational landscape that must be addressed. In the English & Languages Faculty we are dedicating a great deal of faculty time to the reassessment of our units and programs. We are working to create pedagogical programs that are more student-centered, personalized and inquiry-based. We are reviewing assessment to ascertain which tasks could be used in a formative manner, rather than summative, thus focusing on the assessment that really matters for student development. We are also looking at areas that require further development due to some educational gaps we are identifying in students due to lost class time.
This will be an ongoing journey for us, and staff and students must work symbiotically to achieve our educational and social goals. We are treating this as an opportunity like no other to create programs that challenge and enrich our students lives, and meet them where they are at today.
Ashleigh Kerin
Head of English and Languages