5.6 Assignment - Critical Reflection Journal-Blog
Local, National, & International Educational Contexts and Issues
Write a reflective blog post on this week’s readings, Roundtable dialogue, and/or your action research learnings. The blog writing may be your choice, but it must be substantive, including outside scholarly works, etc.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has changed how the world works and learns indefinitely. This is true of both secondary education and higher education. Every level of education, whether primary, secondary, or higher, faced enormous obstacles during the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Many had never even heard of Zoom before March 2020, but now, it is second nature. However, the intense challenges facing our education systems due to the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic brought these challenges into focus and created an opportunity to establish a new path.
As schools attempted to navigate the early days of the pandemic, the priority was and has always been the health and safety of students. With that in mind, the true challenge became delivering an effective, practical, modern, and personalized education without dramatically increasing the risk of COVID-19. Most schools struggled to a certain extent with how to address the issue of remote learning, as this was foreign territory for most. However, they understood that students must be prepared to learn things that haven’t been discovered yet, use technology that hasn’t yet been discovered and invented, and solve big problems. After all, students need to learn how to access information, understand data, evaluate it, and collaborate with others to solve issues and address relevant.
The question for most schools was how do we support kids in how they learn best in a remote environment? This is especially true when research indicates that “social and emotional skills and feelings tightly interact with learning.” Other research suggests that trauma dramatically affects learning and says, “46 million kids in the U.S. every year experience adverse experiences–poverty, hunger, lack of housing, abuse, or neglect.” Add to this a worldwide pandemic where students’ education is disrupted, and we have the “perfect storm.”
The pandemic magnified issues within education, including in the area of equity. As schools grapple with the issue of equity in education, tackling inequity should be the primary goal of all educational institutions. In addition to the financial challenges of equity comes the challenge of addressing the needs of students who have difficulty learning in a virtual space and others who lack the resources to engage with online instruction. However, the pandemic magnified significant inequities, especially for those who suffered the most. Those without options were susceptible to falling behind.
With the pandemic now mostly behind us, educators now perceive that education in a post-pandemic world must include the benefits of online instruction with important pedagogical goals associated with in-person teaching. Options for hybrid pedagogy have rapidly become essential to 21st-century learning. Educators now understand that in-person teaching, which provides opportunities for holistic learning from social interaction, must be maintained and supplemented with online instruction, which provides heightened flexibility, thereby giving students viable opportunities to learn in a setting that best serves their learning abilities.
The biggest takeaway for educators in a post-pandemic world is that we must ensure that students have an on-campus experience enhanced by a facility with technology. The question remains whether American education will return to a “business as usual” mindset focused on traditional instructional norms and pedagogies or adopt innovative and practical methodologies that expand its reach beyond the physical classroom and enhance its effectiveness in a virtual setting.
