Educators sometimes use an instructional tactic they describe as think, pair, share. The idea is to get everyone to think about a topic, describe it to a partner, and after discussion share the combination of insights with everyone. The benefits of this approach are individual engagement and processing and eventually global awareness.
Collect, gather, share is my disease-based model of these same core elements. This is also what schools enable. Each student goes into the community and collects germs, viruses, etc and then returns to a school to share what they have collected with everyone else. Like the model for assuring everyone is involved and influenced in terms of learning it works the same way with illness. Collect and share with each other and then back to the environment outside of school.
I think we have to think very carefully about opening up schools and what the consequences will likely be. We can’t delay education indefinitely as students begin to lose what they have learned making students advancing more difficult. What students learn in school is essential and serves multiple functions in society – shared culture and values, lifelong skills (reading, writing, basic math, information location, self-guided learning, etc.) and vocational exploration. Realistically, education also involves caring for children. In many cases, this care and supervision allows parents to be employed. In some cases, this care provides things some children don’t always receive at home – nutrition, safety, supervision.
We are expecting the educational system to do a lot and I hope our expectations are not unrealistic. Schools everywhere are cutting back in personnel and resources at a time when demands for attention, supervision, and safety are increasing. All of this on top of the educational expectations. At some point doing more with less is just not realistic. Simple observation should indicate that students struggle with the expectations of personal safety. I walk though a local park daily and I see adolescents playing basketball and hanging out around the courts. Taking the requirements for safe interaction seriously simply does not work for those who believe they are impervious to risk and who are too impulsive to maintain what simply isn’t cool under peer pressure. Do we also assume that your average second-grader understands disease transmission and related safety protocols? What will they touch in the lunch room and the rest room? Will they also remain in their assigned desk and not touch other things in the room?
I don’t see a model yet for face to face instruction. What I can imagine would require a reduction in how frequently students spend time in school to allow space in classrooms, buses, and lunchrooms. Those rotating through face to face experiences would also be required to interact with educators and with each other online at other times. This might work, but it would require more educators. I would assume additional personal would be required to clean surfaces more frequently – I mean constantly in lunch rooms, classrooms, and other settings that students inhabit. This is what restaurants must do and it would seem this would be even more important with younger children. What I imagine seems impractical without additional and not fewer resources.
I started thinking about this yesterday after listening to Rand Paul’s frustration with Anthony Fauci’s go slow position on opening the economy and schools. Paul’s concerns with the lagging economy and the multiple roles face to face education play seems a simple matter of stating the obvious. What is not obvious is how the real challenges will be addressed.