 Hi, my name is Tracy Tokahama Espinosa and this is a video on part one, how COVID has changed assessment, evaluation, feedback, curriculum, time and space in the student profile and education. I'm a professor at Harvard University's Extension School. I teach a course called the Neuroscience of Learning, an Introduction to Mind, Brain, Health and Education, and this video is based on my new book, Bringing the Neuroscience of Learning to Online Teaching. This is a flipped conference video, so this means that we're going to be asking you to watch this video, send in your questions, come ready to discuss some of the questions that we're going to pull from your ideas in the synchronous encounter so that we can sort of debate and pull these apart a little bit further. Then we'll follow up using a reflection and extending your knowledge through some bundles or many library references. So today, as promised, we've already presented the problem and the opportunities posed by COVID. We've introduced the book and now we're going to be focusing in on four of those topics. As we do this, I'm just keep a pen handy and note down any ideas that come to you because we are going to ask you to send those in to have a reflection and maybe debate and discuss these ideas a little bit more profoundly when we're together in the synchronous meeting. So typically, I'm not saying that your schools do this, but a typical way that we used to relate the concepts of assessment of evaluation and feedback, which are different, but part of a similar type of process, is that we would use assessment to basically diagnose and get a baseline of where a student might be starting. And then we would go through a standardized test, for example. Then we do activities, we'd give them feedback and eventually after some formative evaluation, we'll have a summative test that would sort of sum up what is that child's ability, A, B, C, D, 90%, 70%, did he actually master a standard, for example. Now, as I say, many of you might not follow this particular baseline structure, but it was brought into question by COVID because we began to look at this idea of standardized testing because it began to be halted. We couldn't put large numbers of kids into the same room to give them a timed test. Through into the spotlight, the way we do testing, and in the United States, the kids take an average of 112 tests, K12, that's a whole lot of testing time and days lost to testing. There are entire school districts that finish their school year in April because kids have to test in May. Back to the day when I was in school, I think I remember we went all the way to the end of June, but that no longer seems to be the case. So we've sort of shortened the school year to accommodate for testing, which can serve a certain purpose, but it does make us question our tools, mainly because multiple choice tests do not evaluate all of the competencies that we hope to have in school. So if we think about our objectives, what is it that we hope to achieve at the end of the day? Many schools have mission statements, right? And they are full, full of characteristics and attitudes, almost nothing with the knowledge and skills, but they do take a lot about attitudes. They talk about kids who love learning or who dare to err and they innovate and they enjoy learning and that they maximize their own potential and their lifelong learners and all of these wonderful things. But then we measure that how by giving a test. Now, that is really questionable because we know if all learning, anything you learn, school out of school, in school or out of school, it's knowledge, dates, facts, formulas, Google-able stuff, right? Skills, the ability to apply the knowledge and or attitudes. So we know knowledge, skills and attitudes play into all of this, but if we're only using multiple choice tests, it's pretty clear we are not actually measuring the competencies we're after. So we just have to acknowledge if all we're looking for dates, facts, formulas, terrific. Let's keep up with a standardized task. But if we're looking at skill sets and attitudinal changes, we have to sort of modify our tools. So this brings into question what are the options? I was told by one of the people who runs the 3D transcript consortium who are trying to look at alternative ways of testing that universities are actually really open to the idea of doing things sort of differently. You still kind of get this resistance at K-12 because they say, well, in order to get into university, the norm is you have to take a test. Well, when the SATs sort of got slammed by COVID, when people couldn't go to the test, almost 60% of students who signed up from couldn't actually take them, universities dropped the requirement. And many of them said for good. Many of them said they will be either optional or they'll be faded out over time, which is a fascinating idea. Now this opened the door back up to these conversations with universities about alternative measurements. What else could we use to say a kid deserves to go on to university aside from a standardized test? And many universities have already been accepting things like e-portfolios, they love that. But what schools were really discovering during the pandemic is the utility of e-portfolios. They could be used, for example, by more actors. Kids from one grade level to another grade level, the teachers could actually follow progress over grade levels or parents could be showing these things or students themselves could actually see their progress and growth. And so there were benefits in terms of actors. There was also benefits in terms of not just measuring a final product, the end number or score on a test, but looking at a kid's process and progress over time. How did that kid evolve to be the engineer he is today or the artist that he has become? How do we see these milestones throughout his lifetime that point to that? And so measuring an e-portfolio goes way beyond what a standardized test would because it does measure the individual over time, something that a standardized test wouldn't be able to do. So e-portfolios have been around before the pandemic, but what was very interesting is that they got picked up in use during the pandemic because standardized tests weren't available. We needed to document and assess students in some way. And then the beauty of e-portfolios became apparent to everybody across the board that they were a superior tool in the sense they gave a more complete picture, a more holistic vision of that individual student. So all of this is to make us really question, you know, the way we used to do evaluation. Is it really to determine the worth of a kid or his success in school? Does a score really explain that? Or should we be thinking about evaluation as a teaching tool? Isn't it really just to do the SCAP analysis? Here's my test. This is where I want you to be. Here's my objective. Now, where's the kid? Now, what do I have to do? Where do we have to teach to fill in that gap of knowledge so he reaches that objective? So COVID was beautiful for stimulating a new way to envision evaluation as not being something scary or to judge somebody, but more as a tool to help us learn better. And some new instruments came out of all of this. Initially, assessment, you know, figuring out that baseline diagnostic of a kid did come from typical tests. But other things began to emerge and these were things like intelligent or cognitive tutors or personalized tutors or learning analytics. These digitally assisted technologies were interesting, but almost I would say a little bit dangerous and because many of them were programmed to look at the average or typical pathway to success. There is no average in education. So it's really very hard. You can have a lot of outliers here that get red flagged because they don't follow a typical path. So we have to be very careful about how we use these things. Cognitive tutors, personalized tutors are a little bit different because they're focused on basic individual knowledge. So they're filling gaps of knowledge that an individual will have. That's very distinct from predicting behaviors of an individual successful student. What makes a successful student? So we have to be careful. There are certain limitations of the types of technology that are coming out to assist teachers in identifying student needs. At this next level, we have this concept of feedback which is huge and became even more important during COVID because we realized that those individual personalized exchanges with students made a whole lot of difference in their learning. But even more than that, which is so interesting, is that we coined a new term during COVID, which is beautiful, is feed forward, mainly because we identify this idea that when students were trained to habituate a new kind of thinking about their mistakes, okay, okay, what will you do better the next time? Rather than lamenting the past, and rather than giving them information to correct a checklist of errors that they might need to fix for next time, shifting them to a mentality of how would you do this differently the next time? Plan ahead, mistakes are a part of learning. How would you now think about this, given what you know now? So the idea is to shift, have this perspective taking in where you're looking towards a future-oriented outcome as opposed to lamenting just what happened in the past. And third, this idea of evaluation in which we put so much weight on the summative aspects of evaluation, something really fascinating that blossomed out of the pandemic, was this big question, why are we educating? What are we supposed to be teaching? What is the point of fourth grade? How will I know if the kid really deserves to graduate? All of these different questions came back because of the limited amount of time and contact many teachers had with their students. And so this older idea of mastery learning returned. It was basically a big self-questioning. What does it really mean to be ready for kindergarten or to have successfully done, achieved everything needed for fifth grade? And this big rethink that went way beyond just looking at what standards were being suggested. What do we mean at a social-emotional level? What do we mean as far as basic thinking skills? Not just the types of skill sets they can do, what level of math or how many words they can read, but going way beyond that, what does mastery mean at each level? And these conversations really change the teacher's focused on curriculum, which is the next question. So before we go there though, please write down a few ideas here. Are there questions or comments you have about these initial ideas or thoughts about evaluation, diagnosis, feedback, assessment, and how they might have changed? Or do you have additional ideas that you'd like to talk about when we meet? Please write those down. The second big idea has to do with curriculum. Really, the bottom line question, what is worth teaching? In an international comparative study I did in 2018, it was very clear that most countries around the world teach basically the same things. Everybody has math, everybody has language. Most have things of history or civics. Everyone has science and some kind of aesthetics or art or philosophy course. Some have vocational training, some have things related to foreign language. Those are subjects, but that doesn't really tell you what's worth teaching. So the bigger questions really started to come up when teachers were trying to prioritize. Well, if we only have this much time left and we have to do it in this modality, what should we really do? Why? Why are we educating? Are we just creating cogs in a wheel? Are we trying to get really innovative thinkers? Or how can we meet this span, this whole spectrum of students that are in the class at the same time? How do we respond to the individual gaps that might exist and at the same time bring the whole group forward? Are we really evaluating the things that are important in education? And have we used all the possible tools that are out there? Just what really, as far as content was concerned, should be prioritized? So all of those questions really made a lot of schools rethink this core idea that we have good schools so that we can produce good students so that we have good society. That's okay, but when we had less time during COVID and we had to decide what do you really prioritize? It was fascinating to see what inevitably bubble to the surface was mental health. Almost every school that we worked with during COVID pointed out to us the real importance of making sure that kids were okay before they went on to hire or to thinking to try to grasp math concepts or whatever. And so just the ability to be together was a huge idea. So prioritizing mental health was important. And then if everybody was in a good place, we could talk about thinking. We could get them to think more critically. That was so much more important and a better use of prioritizing time than trying to teach curriculum and content, which made us really think again, what is the curriculum? What does this really mean? At what age level? What should we really be teaching? So they stepped back and they looked at their larger macro goals as opposed to those minimal standard type things but trying to understand what it was more globally we were after for each level of education. And interesting enough, one of the more creative solutions we found over and over and over again was that teachers knew and decided that it was much better to work together. They themselves saw the collaboration was the key. And so designing a certain problem-based learning activity or a project around which different school subjects could work, for example, we could have science and art and physical education working on a similar project together that saved the student's time. It was a much more authentic type of learning. It achieved many more of the learning goals that they were after and it took less time, which was really fascinating. So the teachers began to embrace other types of teaching methodologies that seemed to be more transdisciplinary in nature and that prioritized this higher order thinking about concepts as opposed to the very specific knowledge-based understanding of this topic. So this sort of led to this newer kind of a model that we had to have healthy individuals mentally and physically that then they could really maximize the potential to learn. When they had their mind and body together they were able to focus. And this was very obvious during COVID when many kids' parents lost their jobs. Sometimes kids didn't know where their next meal was. Some people were kicked out of their housing and there was a lot going on. So we realized that those basic fundamental needs had to be prioritized, getting up to mental health and then thinking about thinking before they could get to higher order thinking. One of the biggest lessons we found, however, is that mental health of teachers was the key to everything. Why? It's kind of like this idea of the Stortis. Do you remember the Stortis? I know we haven't got an airplane in a long time but they usually tell you, put your own mask on first before assisting others. If you are a train wreck you're not gonna be able to help others. And so the idea was, have we created those spaces for teachers? And what was really evident in the first half of 2020 at least was that teachers ended up being the caregivers of the students and of the parents. They were teaching double time, triple time and nobody was really taking care of the teachers. There were some initiatives that began to grow in May, June, July over the summer of 2020 that started to kick in. But this idea of valuing and prioritizing and understanding the self, take care of yourself physically and mentally as teachers to be able to then take care of those around you slowly gained ground throughout the whole COVID epidemic and where people were sort of given permission to have a bit of self-compassion. And that was a huge beneficial leap when teachers themselves as well as their schools began to value and give time for teachers for self-care. All of this of course, really was at another scale in universities which continued to the stage of being in an existential crisis. A lot of things happened and mainly it was the way students reacted. They decided that they weren't going to spend lots of money to go physically to a dorm to be locked into the dorm to learn online when they could just do that from their homes. And so the cost benefit analysis really caused hundreds of thousands of students to rethink education. And some of them did different things which was really interesting and hopefully universities are picking up on this. But many students went off and did micro certificates. They decided, well, I am gonna keep studying but I'm not gonna go to a four year university. I'm going to be doing this micro certificate that's offered by MIT or Harvard or USC or something like that. I'm gonna be doing a micro certificate in X topic in sustainable energy systems or in neuroscience or in other things. They decided to go that route rather than pay for a four year experience on campus. This led to some really very interesting cooperation almost like a quadruple helix model where you have businesses, you have universities, you have governments and you have private sector NGOs. You have people working together towards common goals. So a concrete example is a business in Silicon Valley tells a community college in San Francisco that we need 200 people that know how to do X, this kind of programming, can you get them to us? So they do these micro credentials in that specific programming language and the people are then guaranteed a job. So a lot of those kids decided maybe I don't have to go to college for four years to do these things because there's a job waiting for me at the other end of these kind of structures. So this is really putting the universities into a real big rethink, what is our goal? What is our purpose? How are we gonna manage this in the future? So think about that and if you have other questions related to curriculum, what is important to teach? And also these physical structures, what does university mean? What does it mean to advance K through 12 or should we just be looking at mastery levels of learning? Love to hear your comments on that. The third huge idea has to do with time and space which is a really big aha moment before we used to always think of education in terms of space, our classroom or our school, right? Or we do home work. All of these things were very space oriented and this is one of the biggest deceiving factors. This is why many parents said I want my kids to really go and learn because learning takes place in school. Well, we've had this huge shift of understanding that learning is actually time-based. So if we think instead of space, if we think more of asynchronous and synchronous, what do you need to do in your own time to rehearse in your own time so that when we come together, we can all sort of have this deeper look at a new concept in synchronous time. The shift there was huge. And so getting teachers to actually now think of synchronous and asynchronous versus the spaces they were in really was one of the most impacting ways that education has changed probably forever. And the time and space change occurred at least on these four different levels and we'll have one quick slide about each one of them. The first one is a school calendar that this was already a trend before COVID hit, but going to school for a 12-month cycle, having the same amount of school days, but just having more regular breaks throughout is the way we are gonna be heading. Mainly, think about it, COVID, there's so much learning loss that a lot of schools are saying what summer vacation? And a lot of them were saying we have to upskill teachers so we know that last year's summer vacation was lost. So the shift towards having a 12-month school year paying teachers for a 12-month school year. We understand that teachers worked about three times as much during COVID than they did in a regular school year just because they were learning themselves. They had to restructure a whole another education. Oftentimes the schools offered the option to go back face-to-face or to stay online. So teachers were teaching this kind of a hybrid or blended model of learning. So they were actually teaching the same thing twice or doing twice the effort to integrate the kids that were online as well as those face-to-face. We know that the energy and effort to prepare for that kind of a structure takes time, which means that teaching is likely to move into this year-round profession where hopefully teachers are paid for those 12 months but also recognize them that having more than four perhaps is basically impossible if you're gonna be catering to students in distinct modalities at the same time. A second idea related to time and space was understanding that there are distinct benefits and limitations to synchronous and asynchronous work. What has to happen when you're face-to-face? You have to think on your feet. You have to work at the pace of the regular class there. Asynchronous work can be pretty much at your own time. So we know that there's benefits and drawbacks on both of these. We also know that distinct tools and activities lend themselves to different types of things. So we know that social interaction, there's a lot more activities that can occur synchronously than asynchronously. And we also know that when teaching content, when different people have different starting points with information, it's probably benefited by taking the extra time doing it asynchronously, doing it in your own time when you get to choose how much rehearsal you really need. So understanding that made a big change in the way teachers were planning their classes. And finally, we work with a lot of teachers thinking about a decision tree. So if you have an objective that's really clearly stated in your mind, I want my kids to improve their handwriting skills or I want them to collaborate more. Well, you have to decide, is that better rehearsed asynchronously or synchronously? How does a kid learn that best? Once you've decided that, then you decide if those things should happen online or an offline modalities. And once you've decided if it's online or offline, then you have to think about how, are you gonna teach this implicitly or explicitly? For example, I'm gonna teach kids about collaboration in a asynchronous online gaming implicit learning structure where they're learning to collaborate, but they don't even know that they're learning to collaborate, but I'm asking them to play this particular game, which is then in this digital technology structure, it's not analog. But if I want the kid to rehearse handwriting skills, I'm not gonna have them do that synchronously with me, right? I'm also gonna do that asynchronously, but if they offline and it's an explicit instruction and I'm gonna use an analog tool, right? So different objectives will have to be approached using a distinct balance of asynchronous and synchronous activities. So if you have any thoughts about space and time and how that's been changed by COVID, I would love to get those and we can dig deeper when we meet each other. Finally, the last part has to do with this changing student profile. And I am so sorry to say this, but this is not the last pandemic. We have been warned by people in the United Nations that other pandemics are actually on the horizon, but there's things that might be even worse and more immediate, for example, climate change. We know that extreme weather is going to keep some people out of school, changing tides, changing weather patterns, heat, hurricanes. A lot of these things will actually keep people from going to school anyways. So the idea is there's additional motivation for looking at doing things in a more hybrid manner, not depending only on face-to-face interaction. But we also know, interesting enough, that when we went to the online modality, there were some groups who had been traditionally excluded as learners, people with illnesses who are in hospitals or the prison population or pregnant teens or those kids who dropped out to work so they could support and supplement their family income. There was a lot of kids who had been pushed out of that space of schooling, who now found, with the newly discovered online structure, they could actually attend school. They could actually get their degrees, they could actually finish, which was a huge change, a huge sea change in what we think about education. It actually gave access to many more people who had been traditionally excluded. But on top of that, we also saw that there were different kinds of demographic changes. People were beginning to go back to school because they realized, well, online, they're not gonna notice that I'm 70 and I use a cane. So a lot of older people were actually heading back to school. But we also saw, and even teachers, we saw how we needed to retrain and upskill and try to improve different types of skill sets within our own craft of teaching, for example, learning how to go online. Those things became daily fare. We are at a moment when we are changing. Many economies are changing and they're circling around skill sets that nobody has yet. And so this is gonna be a thing of the future. We're all gonna need to learn how to go back to school. And what's the best way to do that? Is the best way to do that, to haul everybody into the local community college? Possibly. But other options that might be more interesting would be to do some of these things online. This leads to the last point, which I think is probably one of the most exciting things that's going on. When we went online, a lot of teachers realized, well, this is hard, but some of them became really great at that. And the great math teacher in Ecuador, she's teaching eighth grade geometry, right? She did a great job. Well, other people heard about that. And the school in Argentina and the school in Spain contact her and say, any chance you can teach our students as well. And she was thinking, well, different time zones, I guess this can really work. Let's do it. She was able to supplement her income, which is really interesting. The school didn't have to drop math for that year. The students got a top grade teacher. All that was fantastic. But there was a fourth benefit to all of that. She would say, okay, let's do study problems. We're gonna meet on this state all together. Now, the minute she brought in people from distinct nationalities to solve the same problems, they expanded their understanding of the ideas. Oh, that's how you do math in Spain. Oh, that's different from the way we do it in Ecuador. You lay out your problem in this way. They began to talk. They began to exchange ideas. Now, think of this in this global schoolhouse idea that Salcan introduced in 2012, this imaginary way that everybody could have the best teacher, but then you could also have a mixed schoolhouse with distinct perspectives. We know that the only way to reduce bias is by having contact with the other. Well, that's really the only great way that you can do this theory is theory, but actually being in contact with people is distinct. I see this every year in my class at Harvard, we have this year 19 different nationalities and it's such a kick to see how they approach the information and how they learn in different ways and how they teach each other because they're different. Our typical school rooms or schools have been local. You go physically to a place that's walkable and you only talk to the same kind of people and think the same way. That does not allow you the greater perspective taking that is possible now in online learning. So if you have questions or comments about that, please send those in. I'd love to duck about this a lot more with you guys. Finally, all of this just brings into focus huge inequities that exist. And we have to really think about this. It really exacerbated many of the already existing inequities in society. The OCD makes it really clear that schools that were doing okay before the pandemic were still doing okay and the ones that weren't did even worse. And so poor infrastructure, lack of internet, all of those things are a reality. There are wonderful new ideas out there. For example, Raspberry Pi where you have something that projects out signal so that you can for $400 put a box in the middle of that school and it can project out and everybody on their own telephones could have the lesson. So there's technology that's sort of being leveraged in that direction but is that enough? Is that the way to do things? And we have to think whether or not as the UN is now claiming, internet is a right. Just like water is a right. Well, internet, people should have access. If we want equity, we have to then be more equitable in the distribution of resources. But the bigger idea, and we've known this forever and you guys know this better than anybody, I suppose that there's no quality education without quality teachers. Teachers are the lynchpin in every single system. You cannot have quality education without quality teachers. During the pandemic, some teachers received a lot of extra support and a lot of extra resources and a lot of extra time to do things and some didn't. They just didn't. And the poor public school teachers were pretty much left to find their own way. A good friend of mine ended up packing materials into her car and dropping them off on the doorsteps of her sixth grade class because nobody else was supporting these kids. That's just wrong. So there's a lot of things that are coming out of this that make us really think, what is the role of teacher education? How do we prepare teachers better to leverage this technology? How do our tea departments sort of morph into being more than just the guys that help you with the PowerPoint and your email and be the people who now can facilitate access to some of these better tools that save teachers time so that they can be more human with those kids, right? And this leads back to this idea of this changing profile of teachers that has to include content knowledge. You have to know your subject, pedagogical knowledge. You really need to know how to teach, but you also need to know the technology and you need to know how the brain learns. If you don't have all of those pieces, the new teacher profile is not fulfilled. So all of this points to new policy and research questions. A whole new set of questions has been born out of this COVID pandemic. And so we invite you to reflect on that as well. So if you have questions about practices, policies and research, also write those down and make sure that you send them in. So thank you for watching this video. Again, please don't forget to send in your questions or comments so that we can select some of those to talk about when we meet synchronously. I can't wait to have a deeper discussion about each of these topics with you. Thank you.