Several leaders in education are coming together to “re” how we do school. Steve Hargadon continues to find ways to help us rethink how we do school. I wrote previously about his Learning Revolution website which now has a vodcast series on reinventing school with guests diving deep into various topics. The WISE platform will soon run its second conference on the topic of Education Disrupted, Education Re-imagined. Three heads of schools here in Vietnam recently were interviewed to share their insights about the future of education. I also need to note that obviously, folks have been forever trying to re-imagine schools. The silver lining of the current crisis is the disruption that is making so many wake up to how we need to change how we do school. 😉

I chatted with our instructional coaches over the past week to get their take on what our version of school will look like when we start up again in August. How re-imagined and reinvented we will be they do not know but they have some ideas peculating. What we do know is that our staff and administrators have really handled virtual school, the home lockdown, and the school reopening, and now are now doing their best to cope with the lockdown of not being able to leave Vietnam this summer. Looking to August.  we will come together under very different circumstances than in previous years (see VS – Coming Out the Other Side post).

My take on how to approach the coming school year is to put on our designer caps to first document what the needs of our stakeholders will be with the strong possibility that we might need to be very fluid in moving from regular to virtual and back to regular school. The social and emotional strains must be acknowledged. As we grow our lists of needs we can then begin to work backward to design the systems and protocols that can help us meet those needs.

I would add that this will be a time for limited “well that is the way we always did it!”- TTWWADI thinking. If there ever is a time to support your innovators and problem-solvers to come up with new approaches and pilot them, it will be in the coming school year. While I write that yes, we need systems and protocols to be efficient and productive, we also need to follow the School Retool approach of trying a variety of approaches to see which ones have the most traction.

We also need to be a bit careful to not engineer too much in how we approach a possible hybrid school offering. Too much trying to make things fit a system can take away from the energy that goes with being creative and collaborative. I can say that I saw a great deal of energy from our teachers during the first week of virtual school- especially from our creators and ideators. We then needed a couple reasons to streamline and automatize our delivery. Over time energy levels went down for a variety of reasons but one in my mind was that our teachers were too routinized and missing out on the normal adaptations and creation that come from running daily face-to-face lessons.

Thus we need to find other ways during virtual school to keep the creative juices flowing to keep our energy levels rising. 🙂

Photo by Max Felner on Unsplash