Reimagine Teaching and Classrooms Post Pandemic

Why Should We Reimagine Teaching and Classrooms for Post-Pandemic Education?

By Doron Zinger
March 23, 2021

Last summer, which seems much longer than nine months ago, teachers across the country sacrificed countless hours and days trying to prepare for the inevitable crisis that they would face as schools opened in the fall. Teachers knew that schooling would look very different, but uncertainties abounded. Teachers often faced challenges alone in the face of a lack of leadership and direction.

In the fall, teachers entered classrooms with little preparation for remote, hybrid, or socially distanced instruction, having to develop new pedagogies, learn to use new technology tools, and dealing with new and growing student trauma. In Southern California these traumas impacted Black and Latinx students disproportionately, harming students who were already marginalized. Most teachers faced working from home, as their students had to navigate school from home as well.

The COVID-19 pandemic was not the only significant event of this school year. The continuing killing of unarmed Black folks including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, ignited protests and calls for Black Lives Mattering. The attempted insurrection of January 6, 2021 also shook our country and demonstrated the fragility of our democracy in the face of white rage.

Through the lens of teaching and school, these dramatic events amplified what most of us already knew and saw on a daily basis. The U.S. educational system steeped in deep inequity along racial lines. Impacts on students abounded from students being sent to jail for not completing remote school work, to the lack of basic technology for students to engage in remote learning, disproportionately impacting the most marginalized students and communities.

Many have taken to talking about narrowly defined “learning loss,” which again, disproportionately impacts low-income communities and multilingual learners, while ignoring the wealth of knowledge embodied by students, their families, and their communities. 

During these times of crisis, a rising call has come from many corners of the education community that we simply can’t return to things as they were before. Talk of a “new normal” has become louder as we near the end of the school year. Calls have come for radical care for students, and a time to try new, culturally responsive and anti-racist approaches to teaching ALL students, rather than the most privileged ones. 

One of the ways voices for education change and equity have been uplifted through the pandemic has been through the building of community across the country through remote modalities. One thing that COVID has taught us, is that Zoom and other video tools could bridge geographical gulfs. Through this technology and shared values, we have been able to bring together people who normally may not connect together at all or regularly.

We have also learned from the pandemic that words alone will not change instruction in our classrooms, and that teachers need both a vision, as well as tools and skills to successfully transform teaching in the new normal. With this in mind we brought together a group of educators to do this work now, with a focus on science education.