 Hello, it is really an honor and a pleasure to be with you here at the Learning Forward Conference to talk about how time and tools have changed post-COVID. My name is Tracy de la Jama Espinoza and I teach a course at the Harvard University Extension School called the Neuroscience of Learning. It's an introduction to mind, brain, health, and education. And the information here is based off of my latest book called The Neuroscience of Learning, an online teaching, which is with Columbia University's Teachers College Press. So we're going to pull out four key ideas. They are probably the most interesting because they were in play before COVID hit, but they were really catalyzed because of COVID. One has to do with changes in evaluation and assessment structures. The second has to do with the curriculum and what we decide is important to teach or not. Then we're going to talk about time and space and how that has changed drastically since pandemic times. And we'll close looking at some of the huge advances that have taken place as far as tools and resources that teachers can use to support their learning endeavors in the classroom. To begin with, start with assessment and evaluation and feedback. And the two big questions related to this topic are how do we or how should we measure quality in education? And that gets to the real heart of really what is worth learning within our school context. And what I'd love for you guys to do is to scan this QR code and go straight to the Google Forms that's available for you to be able to upload your own responses to this or your own questions around this idea as we talk through this. If we think about evaluation, it really got question inside out upside down who what when we're in how of evaluation really was put on the table during the COVID times. One of the things we realized during COVID is that we are one of the most tested societies in the whole world. And one of the most interesting things that came out of COVID is that the objectives that we really held ourselves to what we hope our schools do, we're kind of beautiful and lofty statements about attitudes and behaviors that we expect of good citizens. But what we were actually measuring were things that were not necessarily compatible. So what we'd say, we you know, foster a love of learning and lifelong development of metacognitive and creative skills and all those other things. What we ended up doing is using a bunch of multiple choice tests. And that just doesn't cut it. So one of the key ideas to come out of this is that different types of evaluation need different types of tools. So if we're measuring the competency of just knowledge, you can go ahead and use, you know, multiple choice tests, dates, facts, formulas, anything Googleable, you can actually do that on a multiple choice test. But if you want to get to something higher, if you want to try to measure skills or attitudes, you need to use a different set of tools. The tools that you measure attitudes can also be used to measure knowledge and skills. And so the big idea here is if we really do value knowledge skills and attitudes, maybe our tools need to change within evaluation. And one tool that really surfaced to the top really quickly were e-portfolios, mainly because more actors can be involved can measure progress process and products over time. But it's also used as a great motivational tool to show students, you know, look how far you have come. You might be discouraged about your math progress or the way you're writing right now or your art piece. But just look where you were, you know, a few months ago. So being able to compare information over time was a huge new element within assessment. And so what do we really consider a measure, a good evaluation of quality in education and have the standardized tests that we've been using all along really been tossed out of the window in favor of other types of measurements that can be conducted over time that may very well be a better reflection of student learning outcomes. The second idea has to do with curriculum and just really questioning what is worth teaching. We used to think we have good schools, good students, okay, therefore we'll end up with a good society because we have shaped these students to be really a reflection of what we're looking for in society. But when we looked at the curriculum, doing a lot of math or language and what were the science classes we had or art or physical education, what were the things we actually putting into the educational process? We really panicked during COVID because we didn't have enough time to cover all of those topics. So we really ended up having to prioritize things. And number one at the top of this pile here ended up being mental health. If you did not have people doing all right, quality of life, then they were unable to do higher order thinking. The next step though, if they were in a good place, then rather than teach them curriculum content, one of the things that came up on top is let's teach thinking skills. The curriculum itself was probably the least important thing and what was much more important was actually learning how to learn, learning how to think. And by co-constructing the curriculum with their students, they ended up getting different kinds of priorities, which were first, are we in a good place to study mental health? Then have we learned how to think and approach problem solving skills? And other research came out that really showed that if you teach thinking skills, those kids actually end up doing better on standardized tests. But if you just teach to the test, they don't necessarily learn how to think critically. So the idea here is to rethink really the whole purpose of schools, of universities. Are we out here just to cover a certain amount of content or are we out to shape really strong thinkers in society? And this also pointed to one of the bigger failures that we had during COVID is that we had a lot of teachers taking care of their students and taking care of their families and not necessarily taking care of themselves, which led to a huge drop off of teachers who basically quit because they just were being asked to do way too much and they were not getting enough care themselves. And so that has also now become a real interesting priority within school structures is taking care of the caregivers. It's like they say in the airplanes, you know, put your own mask on first. You cannot take care of others if you are not in a good place. And so the mental health and well-being of teachers as well as of students became a priority during COVID. And it's one of those things that we see is continuing on in really good schools. So I'd like you to think about these bigger questions. You know, what is worth including in this curriculum? Why are we educating in the first place and how do we meet all of these different students' needs? And can we respond to these individual needs at least on that very initial level of making sure people are well enough? And then what should we actually be including within that curriculum structure? And how has teaching itself changed now that we are literally differentiating for every single student in the classroom to be able to tend to their individual needs? What is that saying about our entire structure, which had been very heavily curriculum driven and standardized test driven, which took a big U-turn during COVID? So please take the time to scan this QR code and just answer maybe this one simple question. If we have limited time, what do we prioritize? And if you have questions about this, bring that up as well, because we'd like to discuss what are the roadblocks actually getting to the highest quality education for all in this new era. The third idea has to do with the use of time and space. And the two big questions we want you to think about here are, you know, how can we actually shift from this mentality we've had around spaces for learning and to think about time for learning? And the second question has to do with really structural questions. And maybe these are beyond what a teacher might be able to decide. They're more policy questions. But what does this mean about how we allocate our time in schools? How much goes to evaluation? How many days in a calendar year should we be going to school? How should that be spread out? So as I mentioned before, biggest shift of all really, and one of the ones that was right in front of our noses and we didn't realize it, is that education had before COVID had been very much focused on space, on our class rooms or doing home work, the physical spaces. And after COVID, it became a question of time. What should be a synchronous activity that you do altogether? And what are asynchronous activities, things that you need to rehearse on your own? And the shift in mentality from time to space has really created a whole lot of great opportunities. So if we have a quick look at each of those, before, we used to have long summer breaks because we needed everybody to participate in the harvest. Less than 1% of American kids participate in the harvest right now. So this is not really an issue. The idea of having a year on calendars that you have the same number of school days, they're just more evenly distributed. This is amazing because if you have better spacing without these long drags of summer, we know that there's such a thing as a summer gap. And the poorer kids have worse gaps or the gaps growing bigger and bigger as we go through their academic career because rich kids go off to summer camp and they keep learning stuff. Whereas poor kids do not. And so the summer learning gap persists. And so the thought before COVID was that we needed to spread this around a bit more. The thought post COVID is that we realized that there was a whole lot more prep and a whole lot more setup needed on the part of teachers and teachers on growing professional development had to take place during summer. And so many, many schools were requesting that their teachers stay on. And so there is a new trend. We hope that teachers are going to be paid for a 12 month work calendar and that they will have a different kind of a structure using those maybe two or three weeks that they would have as opposed to these six weeks that we currently have on average to be able to do some prep. This has been proven where it is implemented to lower burnout rates of teachers and focusing of students. There is less absenteeism and across the board there is generally better test scores when you have your run schooling. And so we would like you to think about where that trend is actually going and whether or not it has a place within your own school district. A second point about time and space has to do with this division of synchronous and asynchronous learning. And basically understanding that there is benefits and drawbacks to each of these types of structures. And we have to really plan well to do this in our classrooms. We know that when we are together, synchronous, it's really great to have more social interactions and to have peer learning and peer instruction where people get to talk to each other. But we also know there's a lot of things we need to do asynchronously that might be better as far as digging deeper into content. Why? Because different people come to our class with different levels of prerequisite knowledge. And so people have to fill in their own gaps of understanding before we can do stuff together as a group to meet the objectives of the class. And so synchronous and asynchronous learning has shifted quite a lot as far as planning. Our lessons are concerned. We also know that there's a big issue about how much time we give to evaluation. Before we used to think the biggest deal is to be in front of the class and teaching and that was what we're paid for. We didn't usually get paid for all those long nights and all the weekends that we did evaluating. And in that moment, the planning and also being in front of the class and then evaluating, it used to have in an ideal world of one to one to one ratio. For every hour of class, you had an hour of prep and an hour of evaluation. What we realized during COVID is that was really a different shift. It was really, you know, you had to plan for about three good hours for every single hour you were up in front of a group. And then the evaluation and assessment and giving feedback was another three hours. And so we realized that there was a disproportionate view of how teachers are paid. They're paid for their physical presence in a school, which didn't seem to make a lot of sense when you actually looked at what teachers were doing during COVID. And so please take the time to scan this QR code and answer these two questions related to time and space or to give your comments about this so that we can use that as a jumping off point when we meet synchronously. The last point has to do with changing tools and what are the best tools? How do we judge that? How do we know what is good information or bad? One thing that came up during COVID is that there are multiple digital educational resources on board now. So we have whole platforms dedicated to teaching and learning. And that's where some schools actually went. They actually used some of the MOOCs structures that were out there, multi-course platforms in order to keep people on track when things were going off rail and there was no classes to be had in the physical sense during COVID. But then we also found that there were other types of things like software, which saved a lot of time. Things that checked for plagiarism or doodle polls to figure out when would everybody could meet or to create. So we had students teaching us the basics of Canva and other things like that. And so software became a huge boom during COVID as well. Podcasts as well as gamification and other types of apps came out, as did things like different types of websites, things like Khan Academy or other types of resources for teachers to be able to supplement their teaching and learning. And so now with this great smorgasbord of offers out there, teachers actually had about a thousand to 10,000 more choices per activity than they'd ever had before. The huge investment in educational technology during COVID was absolutely amazing. By one count in reimagined education in London, they said that there was at least $6 billion that was pumped into educational apps in 2020. So if we go back to this idea, how do you choose the best of these 10,000 to one options that we might have instead of using our typical textbook and we say we do want to use some new technology, you're bombarded every day with tons of emails that try to convince you that one thing is better than another. The truth of the matter, the answer is quite easy. You should basically choose the learning resources that help you reach your objectives better. So if you can have clear objectives, what are the knowledge skills and attitudes you want, it's really easy to choose the best learning tools that are out there, whether they're analog or digital. It's easier to do that once you have a very clear idea of what it is you're trying to measure. This led us to this big idea that technology is not going anywhere. We're going to go away before the technology does. We have to accept it's not a good thing or a bad thing. It's how we leverage it, how we use it that's going to make a difference in our classrooms. We can save time by using technology. We can offload all the grading of the quizzes, for example, or the grammatical checks, all those things that used to be so tedious for us, and then have more time to be able to work with students and support them and motivate them and get them engaged and go deeper into their questions. And so from this, we learned this big lesson that synchronous time should prioritize the social-emotional learning, these mental checkups, these abilities to work together as teams, building critical thinking skills. And then when we have asynchronous work with the students, we fill in their gaps using many of these digital tools. The idea is to use leveraged technology in a way that it gives us more time to do the human aspects or human elements of teaching. So please scan this QR code and give us your thoughts about this. So COVID has really forced us to do a lot of rethinking about assessment evaluation, about our curriculum, about the time and space and tools that we work within. I'd like you to please think about that. It really shifts the way we think about teaching and learning. Beforehand, back before the 1980s, if you knew a lot of stuff, you were a great teacher. But about 1989 or so, this model shifted and we said, no, no, you have to have pedagogical knowledge. You actually have to know how to teach to be in a classroom. Then we realized there's a sweet spot here of actually knowing pedagogical content knowledge. Around 2003, 2004, we added this TPEC model of technology. Teachers needed to learn how to leverage technology better. Around 2007, it's just come onto the scenes that we have to really take much more advantage of the learning sciences. If we put all of that within our context and within our cultural settings, then we really have created what I would say, we are learning scientists. All of us as teachers can become learning scientists because we're now using evidence to make better choices about our classroom settings. All of this is now possible in the past few years because we finally have longitudinal studies about really what makes a difference in classroom settings. We have international comparative studies, so we now know what is true for all human learning across the globe and what things are really culturally specific, right? We also have methodologically comparative skills. Thanks to John Hattie's work, we can now figure out effect sizes of quantitative and qualitative interventions and decide where should we really be investing our time. Here's a spoiler, one of the best ways to invest in our time is in building relationships. Building relationships with those students makes a huge difference. And finally, there is a lot more and rich and insightful information about the brain. We have evolved in what we know, we continue to grow in this sense, and so I just would like you to applaud yourselves, pat yourselves on the back. There has never been a better time to be a teacher. We have more tools available, we have more time to be more human because we can offload things to other digital tools. We can personalize learning interventions to a greater extent. We have figured out to do instructional design. How do you design learning experiences in a better way? We have a lot more evidence that tells us why certain things work and why they don't work for all students, for example. And there's this big push now to really go towards mastery instead of just subject area specific knowledge, because no problem you're going to face in the world is only one subject oriented, but rather this transdisciplinary valuing of master learning, of critical thinking skills throughout educational experiences. All of these ideas together really should make you want to celebrate the fact that we are in education at this amazing change of the tide. A lot of the things that we had been imagining changing are actually happening right now and we're a part of this. So I really look forward to hearing many more of your comments, your ideas, things that you would like to see included in our live talk together. So please use this link and send me any questions and comments that I can integrate into our live encounter. Looking forward to seeing you. Thanks.