Friday Fragments, February 5th
What will post-pandemic schools look like, community colleges in the news, meaningful work, and a fun optical illusion.
What I’m reading…
Scott McLeod’s Why most schools won’t ‘reinvent’ themselves after the pandemic offers a more realistic assessment of our collective willingness to “disrupt education” in the wake of the pandemic. He provides a long list of articles written recently about how school leaders will surely be poised to “reinvent” schools by rethinking how we use technology, how students and teachers collaborate, and how the basic delivery of education is structured.
In other words, any school leader who is trying to sell the need for a post-pandemic systemic transformation to their educators, families, and school board members is trying to sell a SECOND enormous disruption to the community (“Now let’s change school as we know it!”) at a time when everyone is completely exhausted from – and ready to be done with – the FIRST enormous disruption to the community (the pandemic), and that is AFTER trying to minimize the disruption and ‘restore order’ during the past 12 to 18 months.
Two pieces related to community colleges…
The Community College Daily reported on Miguel Cardona’s Senate confirmation hearings, noting that Cardona
listed how he would work to ensure all students have education opportunities, including developing “college and career pathways to good futures,” and improving college access by “strengthening this nation’s best-kept secret: community colleges.”
The Office of Community College Research and Leadership has a new research brief: Ensure Students Are Learning: Equity-Minded Approaches for Cultivating Student Engagement in the Classroom that may be of interest.
Paul Musgrave shared a really interesting assignment his students did this past fall, and more generally his thoughts on what meaningful work looks like:
Meaningful work, to me, is the kind that matters after you’ve done it—and has the potential to matter to someone else, too. Most school assignments aren’t meaningful, and to be fair they don’t have to be if they’re meant to lead to meaningful outcomes down the road. What bothers me is that a lot of classes don’t have those kinds of meaningful outcomes, which may explain why students don’t seem to retain anything from course to course. Why would they? Without something meaningful happening in the learning process—either in class or in course assignments—the class, well, wasn’t meaningful. And why waste the brain cells remembering something that ended up not mattering?
I have been thinking a lot lately about what work is valuable to ask students to do—prompted at least in part by the front-row view I have at the moment of my elementary, middle, and high school children’s daily school work.
A fun image circulated this week on Twitter…what do you see in the image below?