 So now that we've framed this big problem and now that we have looked at the structure of the book and where the information comes from, we promise to look at four selected topics today. Assessment Evaluation and Feedback, Curriculum, the use of time and space, and the changing student profile. So we're going to have a few slides on each of these points. What we want to do is plant some seeds about each of these ideas and we'd like you to jot down some thoughts or questions or comments related to each of these pieces and send them in so that we can focus on that in our live encounter. So the very first idea looks at assessment and evaluation and feedback and how they're so different, but they are absolutely related. And we know that assessment, if we're thinking in terms of diagnosis, there are a lot of new tools out there to look at the baseline. Where are students actually starting from? COVID really pointed the spotlight on a lot of different problems here as far as where students at any grade level were really starting. The traditional methods of actually finding that baseline, perhaps through a standardized test, might not be the best ways to actually assess where a student might be starting from so that we can actually gauge that gap and figure out where he needs to be. There are some new tools out there, intelligent or cognitive tutors. It's kind of questionable whether or not those are really ready to facilitate teachers through learning analytics. And learning analytics are quite interesting, but they can really also be a little bit dangerous. There's been cases of certain analytics kind of redlining students because they don't follow the typical pattern. We also know that assessment is very different from feedback. And one of the most positive things, I think, to come out of COVID was a real big shift in evaluation and the way we are looking towards maybe feed forward. In the past we can lament a lot and we can point out to students how poorly they might have done in some area or what they need to improve on. But what's really very interesting is that attitudinal shifts rather than content-based feedback. So basically getting the kid to think about what will you do better the next time has a much bigger impact than just simply pointing out errors that are from the past. So a future-oriented perspective may very well change these learning outcomes by helping students really embrace and actually own a change in processes that would improve their learning rather than simply a checklist of all the things that they need to fix from the past. And assessment and feedback are complemented by this concept of evaluation. And the questions you always hover around, do we do more formative evaluation or what's the point of summative evaluation? And what we found during COVID is that many groups stepped back and looked at their entire curriculum and really doubted a lot. What is the goal of fourth grade or how do we know a person really passed their senior year and deserved to go to college? So this revisiting of mastery learning goals versus just performance goals or standardized tests really came into question and this was really driven by the testing change. We know that our kids take a lot of standardized tests and the average is 112 tests, K-12, and it tells you how much time that the kids actually spend preparing for those tests or days of learning in class that are taken to actually do those tests. But the big problem is that multiple choice, you know, do not always evaluate all the competencies we want. So if we've broken this down and said we have certain knowledge we want people to know, dates, facts, formulas, concepts, right, skills, things that we want them to be able to do, and attitudinal changes, well, you use different tools. Multiple choice tests don't reach a lot of those different competencies. And so the inadequacies of standardized states test was really put into the spotlight during COVID. We also know that evaluation for so long had been used to sort of rank students, you know, the top five percent or whatever it is, right, as opposed to really embracing evaluation as a teaching tool, which is to say that we use evaluation to see how far away we are from the objective, right? And so that we can adjust our teaching methods. And while most great teachers do that intuitively, it's not naturally the way many of evaluation. In fact, many of the teachers we work with in 40 different countries around the world really don't like evaluation. You know, they just don't have a good feeling about it because they don't see it as their ally. They don't see it as part of learning. They see it as a judgment call about their worth, which goes so strongly against reaching many of those objectives that we have for education. And we know that in the past, in a kindergarten through 12, a defense of continuing to use standardized testing was because of university. If the ultimate goal is to get into university, we have to. Even if we don't like the whole idea of the testing method, we have to do this because this is how you get into university. But with COVID came the decline of the SAT, which was really fascinating. More than 40% of the students were not able to take the SATs they'd signed up with. So now almost 60% of universities have said it will be optional or faded out within their own systems over time. So this has really changed and challenged the way we think overall, not just in how to get into universities, but the way that K-12 also judges successful completion of different grade levels. And what's so very interesting is that many universities for years have actually already been open to the idea of using a different kind of assessment. The 3D transcript consortium, for example, of rather well-off private high schools made an appeal to the very best universities to say, you know, let's get away from this testing and let's look at something else. And the universities were actually open to that, but they just said, sure, but tell us what else we could possibly use. And so the impact of other tools, they've been around for a while. For example, e-portfolios have been around for a while. But all of a sudden they exploded in use when kids were unable to take those final examinations. And the universities actually liked that. They said it's better to see how this child has evolved as an artist or as a potential engineer or as a writer or whatever over time than to have a one-off multiple-choice test that actually determined their futures. And many universities have already complimented their assessment with e-portfolios, but now they're prioritizing this. And so digitally, all learning management systems, all NLMSs in all structures, Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, everybody has e-portfolios available and they're free. Many, many teachers intuitively have been collecting information on their students through informal e-portfolios or even through Facebook pages. Now there's a whole new push to try to formalize this and to make this the way that we look at humans. How do they evolve over time? What are their highs and lows? How do they react to setbacks over time? As opposed to just being a one-off multiple-choice test that would determine their future work or study. So that's the first of our topics. Please take the time to write down any questions or comments you might have so that we might be able to use those for a synchronous encounter. So moving on to the second topic, it's curriculum. And fascinating that we got the chance to really ask, what is worth teaching? This is something that David Perkins at Harvard would just love and which he's always questioned, what are we really doing here when we silo off thinking into language, math, science, art, physical education, instead of actually having a more integrated system? And so many of these big questions, why do we educate when we're just trying to produce cogs in a wheel, are we trying to produce innovative thinkers? Some of these big questions were actually the starting point for many schools as they began to think about how do they prioritize what they were going to be able to teach in the smaller amount of time that they had with the students. And so many of these questions came up, they were great. There is no full on consensus about what it is we actually should be doing in K-12 education or whether or not we should continue to have specializations in university or whether or not we're going to be going towards micro certifications in smaller areas. All of that is still open to debate. What is really interesting, though, is that the time shortages that were produced by teachers needing to be upskilled in different things, as well as the conditions that students returned to school under, really made a couple of things clear. And that was that, number one, schools had to prioritize mental health. They had to see if everybody's doing well. And this was huge because it really grounded itself in this idea that there is no cognition without emotion and that we knew that the emotional or the fragile emotional states of students would prevent many of them from being successful academically. It's really hard to do higher order thinking if you're just worrying about where your next meal will come from or if dad just got fired. Or if you have an abusive uncle who's living next door and you're having to stay home all day long. And so a lot of these issues really put into question, what is the role of school in society? And how much responsibility do individual teachers have for caring for the mental health of their own students? And how is that possible to prioritize? And so many of these things led to this idea that if the teachers felt that they had a good enough relationship that mental health was under control, that the students were in a good place to learn, even then curriculum wasn't the priority. After that, it was to let's get them to think. Let's get them, let's work on thinking skills. Critical thinking was much more important than content area memorization. And so what we found with the schools that we worked with in Florida and in Australia and Hawaii and Missouri was that they really did a big shift towards teacher collaboration across subject areas. So they had this multidisciplinary approach and project-based learning, which was sort of killing three flies with one stone. They were able to integrate science and art and math classes into a single project, for example. And they realized that they could be equally, or if not more, successful in actually shifting the way that they prioritized more macro-level goals within their course as opposed to some of the standards-based learning that they'd been held account to through the standardized testing. So that's the second topic of curriculum. I'm sure that there's a lot of controversy there and a lot of things to bring up. Many people just wonder, well, we're just going to go back to how it was. We will never go back to exactly how it was. And many people realized a lot of things about the deficiency in our curriculum, why certain subjects got more hours than others, for example, came up a lot within the schools that we were working with, and a greater appreciation for things like the humanities, the arts, physical education that we had just taken for granted or given a second-tier ranking within some schools actually was changed drastically by COVID. So if you want to talk about any of those issues, please send them in as well. The third topic is really pretty fascinating. And when you hear about it, you think, well, that's obvious. But it was something that many schools are still trying to figure out. In education, we used to heavily prioritize space. And one of the main problems that we found with trying to help teachers figure out how to do this online is that they thought that if they were not in their class, wounds, and the same thing with parents, if the kids weren't going to school, then no learning was taking place. As opposed to leveraging this concept of time, there are some things that we do in real time together synchronously, and then there's other things that you need time to do by yourself, like, for example, a rehearsal of a handwriting all by yourself. You need to get better at it. Or different people have different starting points at maybe learning addition. So some people need to shore up prerequisite knowledge and other people need to be able to advance at a different level. So is everybody getting the right amount of rehearsal so that they can meet the same goals in the classroom? So this idea of dividing time and space was a very, it's a huge one, but we've always considered education a space-grounded concept, as opposed to looking at it in time. Now, time was changed in many, many ways. There were at least four ways that time was changed. The first has to do with looking at the school calendar. Many schools are now predicting summer vacation, what for? But before we had summer vacation, because we needed all hands on deck to collect the harvest and work in the fields. And less than 1% of Americans work on farms. So the need for summer vacation to be that long has actually changed. And now the need for teachers and students to be in school to fill in many of their gaps is noticeable. And also the understanding that the summer gap is real. Having too much time between learning moments creates this necessity to rehash things multiple times. And so a better, evenly spaced type of calendar would be more attractive. Similarly, this understanding between synchronous and asynchronous time, the time for communication and the time for evaluation, all of those were put into question because teachers really realized the moments that they missed the most was that connection with a student. When you get that twinkle in their eye and they understood something or you can see them further of their brows and they're confused, right? This time to be able to connect with students was something that teachers mentioned multiple times was what they missed about being in the same space. Many of them realized, however, that in Zoom they were actually able to see the faces better than when they had that same group of kids that had to be, that came face to face to school that all had masks and were sitting so far apart. And so they realized that there were some benefits and drawbacks to these situations of being online or in being face to face. So if we think about the school calendar again, just wanna throw that out to you. It had already been a trend around the world that we are going more and more to a 12 month long calendar that has exactly the same amount of school days but they're just differently distributed, right? As opposed to having a big gap during summer. This has slowly, but surely been changing already. But with COVID we can see that this has drastically changed teachers' jobs as well. And jobs as well as pay I hope will be changed. The second idea of synchronous and asynchronous timing, we've had a lot of summaries about benefits and limitations of being synchronous or being asynchronous. What are the things that we can do best in face to face time? And face to face is again, based on time, it's not based on space. We don't have to be in the same space together. We just have to be in the same time together, right? Versus things that are better often in your own time, your own practice, right? We've also looked at multiple types of activities that are different between synchronous and asynchronous moments. And some things are much better for social interactions. We know that the social, the live time is much better spent collaborating, which is why we're offloading this video to a flip time. So in your spare time, you can watch and stop and start the content of the video so that when we're together, we can collaborate on information, right? And so there's different benefits to different types of activities in different moments in time in our new educational context. And finally, this idea of just choosing, how do I choose the best activity? Is this gonna be best rehearsed asynchronously or synchronously? Should I do this online or should I do it offline? Is this something that's explicitly instructed or explicitly instructed, right? Do I use a digital tool or an analog tool? So all of those choices are things that teachers are now having to think through, which many of them had already done in the past, but which they were now more conscious of due to the pandemic situation. So if you have any questions about time and space, please share those as well so that we can put them on the agenda and talk about them together and collaborate towards a better understanding of what this really means for educational context. Finally, the changing student profile is the fourth concept that we wanna talk about here. And this arises for multiple reasons. We saw huge inequities that were brought out by the pandemic, but we also saw additional possibilities. And we were also, you know, our attention was called to other populations who might be out of sync. And tragically enough, the United Nations was pointing out to us that this is not the last pandemic. There's gonna be more of this and probably the biggest thing facing us will be things like climate change. There's gonna be schools that are gonna be closed because of extreme weather conditions. And that's gonna happen more frequently than ever. So can we learn to leverage some of these technological pieces in the best way possible so that most of our students or the great majority will be able to thrive independent of whether or not another pandemic comes or climate change occurs. This also brought attention to other populations that have been traditionally excluded like people in prison or pregnant teens or people who are absent from school for a long-term illness or kids who have to drop out because they have to work and supplement their parents' income. Many of them are really interesting to see how some of those work patterns and some of those other people ended up thriving in the newly designed way of having education online. In fact, there's an estimation in some parts of the states that given the choice, a third or more students are actually saying they don't wanna go back because they've actually figured out another pattern in their lives that was more beneficial. Some kids don't wanna go back because they say, oh no, I had a terribly long commute and the kids bullied me on the bus or something like that. Or other kids say, while getting to school and all that was not the problem, content, what they were able to do, the speed, the pace of their own learning was more respected when they were in an online context. So different kids are seeing different things and that's gonna change our whole scheme forever because we do realize that there are some things that we were doing right when we actually moved things online that benefited some people. So how do we preserve and keep those when we now go back to a regular school system? The other thing that we found is that as far as non-traditional learners were concerned, like for example, although demographics or people who had temporarily left the school system and now saw opportunities to now go back and finish high school because now the local high school was gonna do all these things online, shifted, changed a whole lot of things. It opened access to education for many people which was really interesting. But another spotlight was focused on the whole idea of retraining what teachers were going through, right? Upskilling to try to understand what their new job was as teachers in online context. But not only teachers, the way of the world, you know, the world is changing really fast. And so these new collaborations between businesses, between community colleges, can you offer X kind of a course for certain students? We saw a ton of creativity. As many kids opted not to pay a high tuition to go to university, to do it online, but they decided, nope, I'm gonna keep studying. I'll just take classes of a local community college and transfer those credits later. Well, those community colleges and many businesses took advantage of a really interesting situation to sort of say, hey, these are skill sets I know I'm gonna need. Can you train kids in these? Can they get things like micro certificates? Can they get things out of this aside from college credit that would help us build back our economy? There's a ton of new things coming out as far as infrastructure and green energy and other things that were already popular with students but became extra popular when a really smart kid who was about to go off and study engineering at this university decided not to because they were gonna be online anyways. He stayed local, he did an internship and he took a class at the community college which triangulated with his business and they taught him something about green energy or things like that. It could change his whole focus on what he wants to study. So we see that there is a lot of possibilities that were brought up by new actor integration into what is education all about when we had to question this and when we did go online. And finally, last huge idea has to do with a concept that Sal Khan introduced in 2012 of a global school house. We saw not all teachers were really good at getting online. Some were and the ones that were were super popular. So a teacher who was teaching math, eighth grade math online in Ecuador who was doing it really really well got noticed by a school in Argentina and a school in Spain who said, we need you, can you work with us? And now since she was working from home she could actually, yeah, I can fit those things in different time zones, I can do this, I can also teach that class benefiting everybody. That teacher had additional income, the students had better teachers and the school didn't drop math that year because they didn't have a way to go online. So there was a win-win-win there. What's coming out of this is that a new kind of professional really doesn't have physical limits. So essentially this means that the best teachers can actually be there for many different kinds of students if we use this online structure. The other thing that this also brings up is a question of perspective taking. I am really lucky that in my class at Harvard I get to have around, I have 19 different nationalities in my class this year. It's pretty amazing the way that these students can interact and open each other's eyes to ideas. Our typical schools have been local physical schools as we mentioned before, kids walk to them. So basically the people you live with are the people you study with and that's what you know about the world. What's so interesting is in this new dynamic when that Ecuadorian teacher was able to have her class and she'd say, yeah, I'll do extra tutorials. Anybody from Spain or Argentina or Ecuador you can come together as we do our lessons. All of a sudden this mix and match of students from all around the world changed each other's perspectives on the problems, on the way they actually calculated things, on their best answers, on what they thought was important to learn which really grew the whole knowledge base that they were actually working from. So a huge idea here has to do with international classroom setting and how this really changes the way we look at education in the future. So if you have any questions or comments about the changing student profile either because it's more lifelong learning or because it's more international, we wanna finish by calling attention to the huge inequities that the pandemic pointed out to us in education really need a lot more review. It has exacerbated many of the challenges that had already existed and shown us these inequities especially in the public school setting. We know that the OECD published in April of 2021 that the schools that were doing okay before the pandemic are still doing okay and the ones who weren't doing okay are doing even worse and while it might be intuitive it's just not acceptable. These days we should think about this. Is it possible to give everybody access to the highest quality teachers? Is it possible to help somebody continue their education even if they do have to work or even if they were sent to prison or have an illness or are out of the normal school age? What are things that we might be able to leverage from this new possibilities that have been triggered by COVID? And finally, the biggest inequity we found as always and everybody's research points in the same direction you cannot have quality education without quality teachers. So some teachers got a whole lot of support and some teachers didn't and some teachers got a ton of resources and some teachers didn't, right? So what should basic teacher education look like? How should teachers be taught about the integration of technology and the ability to leverage it so that you can offload some of these tedious things to computers so that teachers have more quality time to do the human part of education. And this changes the whole structure of the way schools are set up. IT departments have never been better looked upon these days but also within society teachers have never been appreciated more. So this is a great moment to take advantage of some of those tensions that are existing. And this now will call us to think and rethink policy measures as well as new research projects which I hope all of you will be involved in. So if you have any questions about practice policies and research, go ahead and send those in as well, okay? So thank you very much for your attention looking forward to the meeting up with you in the synchronous encounter where we will talk about what you think is most important of these issues that we touched upon today. Looking forward to seeing you. Bye.