 at work that's going on around the world. I teach a course at Harvard University Extension School. It's called the Neuroscience of Learning. And we are also doing a special issue in the Nature Partner Journal on the science of learning, looking at the lasting impact that COVID has had on the changing educational landscape. And so in the short time that I have to try to keep within the time frame of just a few minutes, I wanted to use maybe three or four concepts from the learning sciences and then offer five or six examples concretely from Ecuador and from the United States. Basically, observations that we've had of what has happened during these times of COVID. So first and foremost, in order to address COVID or any other problem situation as a teacher or a policymaker, you first have to define the terms. And the main problem that many of us had at the beginning of COVID almost two years ago is that nobody had a prior experience to use to be able to plan and to look ahead and what needed to happen because we'd never lived through that before. Since all new learning passes through this filter of prior experience, we looked for what we already knew about the problem and we didn't really have a lot of information. And so that made us go to a tier two kind of an intervention, which is to when you don't have something that's necessarily easy to associate with a problem, what is COVID? We don't know how to respond to this in education. You should probably use an analogy. Analogies are a good second best option when you don't have prior knowledge of something. Can we use metaphorical thinking or analogies? And in the case of COVID, rather than think of COVID as a problem, a lot of teachers that we worked with began to look at this as a catalyst. And if we use an analogy, COVID began to be seen as more like a spotlight or a magnifying glass or the volume dial on a speaker, which sort of amplified and magnified our understanding of already existing problems. I think Cecilia really put her finger on the pulse of things when she pointed out that none of these things that we began to now dig deeper into are new. In fact, they're old problems. But thanks to COVID, and I know it's horrible to attribute something positive to something that was so negative, but we've now begun to really see the origins of many of the problems in education that have always existed. And so basically this gets to maybe six examples I'd like to call out from Ecuador and from the United States, which happened simultaneously. And to put this into context as far as numbers are concerned, right now I'm living in New York and Ecuador, they have about the same rate of vaccination, believe it or not, both the city of New York and the country of Ecuador have about 70% of the population vaccinated. And that permits people to go back to school. They actually started to go back to school, but with a very new lens on things. So teachers in the classrooms, as well as policymakers, we're thinking about different issues. And the six issues I wanna highlight to sort of put into play another idea from the Learning Sciences, which is that a good diagnosis is half of the cure to the problems that we might face. And so we realized, I'm gonna name a couple of problems and then maybe point out the some of the things that we realized were at the roots of that, which are now pointing to very promising areas for policy decision making. The first is that many kids were going without education. We knew this before COVID even hit, but it really called out the inequities that exist around the world. And it also did something that Cecilia pointed out. It highlighted that the internet, which the United Nations is now labeled as a human right, it's not just a luxury, but this is something that everybody should have access to. It also sped up this acceptance of technology as a support system for education. And so what are some of the things we gain from this? And some of the research, I think that Marcello was so good in her details, but I'm going to talk in more global terms just for time, we now know where these populations are that were not being attended. It was really glaring that the inequities in many rural areas of Ecuador, as well as in the rural parts of the United States, people who didn't have access to internet, people who didn't have tablets on hand, people who had to share one computer device for the whole family and they were working from home, but also maybe the parent was even a teacher and having to teach and learn and the father was having to use the computer for his work. All of these things pointed out really specific populations and really more precise interventions. A second problem that we faced or that we saw is that many, many teachers have left the profession. COVID was the last straw. And this really brought to light and made society really value the teaching profession as a whole and appreciate all of the things that teachers really did and realized that it's something that we depend on but we'd taken for granted. And this also made us look, see this idea that society has finally, I believe, accepted that teachers are really the linchpin in development and this called attention to this new professional development that's needed for teachers to be able to function in the current world. It also accelerated this concept when teachers started to leave of more an international schoolhouse. For those systems that did have internet but didn't have teachers who were good at teaching, we saw many creative insights. For example, a great math teacher in Ecuador ended up teaching in Florida and in Spain when those places didn't have teachers. And so we saw a very different role for teachers on an international scale. A third problem that we encountered and everybody has seen is that parents had to support their kids in their home learning which was interesting but we've always known. It takes a village to raise a child but the appreciation of this home and school partnership was really thrown into the forefront and it's something that we presume will not be lost when we go back to regular schooling. As Bob pointed out, the OECD really threw a magnifying glass onto the issues of the haves and have nots. It's really clear that school systems that were already good weathered this fine and school systems that were bad really, some of them lost more than an entire year of schooling. And so this showed though how we need more international cooperation. It forced almost a global response in terms of vaccines and technology and education onto the scene which helps us now actually celebrate this kind of a concept of one plus one is three. You have a good system. I have a good system but if we share it we may have a better response to the problem than if we try to go it alone. So isolated interventions are not necessarily as impacting as ones that are used in a global sense. A fifth problem that we had was that we showed how people are totally vulnerable in this huge issue of social emotional learning. It made social emotional learning within schools mainstream. It was only even 10 years ago you would never think that schools were responsible for the emotional well-being of a child. But we realized that that was huge and that was a big part of learning and so that became incorporated. But we also found that speaking with the school district, the public schools in Hawaii, the superintendent has pointed out that between 25 and 30% of students and teachers don't wanna go back. And when you try to look at well what are the root causes of this, there's many different reasons. Some have to do with kids who experienced bullying beforehand or just the distance to get to school or that the pace of learning was better for them when they were at home. So this was really throwing a monkey wrench into their system of everybody has to go back because there are some people we see and this is even happening in the workplace, right? Some people don't want to go back now. So what do we do about that and how will that create a presence for technology and education from here on out, okay? It also brought attention to this idea that it's okay not to be okay and that people need people and whether or not that be and looking at our faces in Zoom or going to a mass classroom, people need to be with each other. And the last point I'll make here is that we saw how many of us had to move everything to a Zoom format like we're in right now. And for one thing, we realized there's a lot of stuff you can do without having to go into the office which was really kind of interesting, right? But it's also added a very interesting flavor to meetings and maybe Roberto will even say that this has happened with this particular meeting for Brazil, but almost all meetings now and especially conferences like this one now consider international participation. And this has moved a new agenda of international transdisciplinary thinking that hopes to generate this kind of translational science that brings this to the average person. So in summary, I just to say that we need to have clear definitions of what we're focused on that all in learning passes through this filter of prior experience and we're just now coming to grips of what it means to deal with a pandemic but we have to use the analogies that are in front of us to be able to laser focus in on what real problems are and using a good diagnosis is gonna be half the cure. So I'd like to just reiterate this terribly worn out idea that every problem is an opportunity but I think that this one has allowed us to focus on problems and education that have been around for a long time which we now finally have a very precise way that we can create policies around responses to them. So thank you very much. And I look forward to also hearing the rest of the speakers and gaining more knowledge from you all. Thank you. Thank you, Tracy. I always appreciate a lot of points in a short period of time and much to think about.