During a recent class, my freshmen and I were discussing the best ways to engage with the complex world of high school. We talked about how to juggle multiple deadlines, contact their busy and unavailable teachers and balance appealing extracurricular activities with coursework and the omnipresent complication of Covid-19.

This discussion was part of an ongoing conversation about effective study skills and traits. Most of my 13- and 14-year-old students had not set foot in a physical classroom since sixth grade when the pandemic first drove teaching and learning online. The only classroom they had known for the past two years was their own bedroom, dining room, or living room. Even those who had some in-person instruction had only reduced coursework.

Suddenly, my students began tearing up. They were overwhelmed. They were frequently up until 11 p.m., midnight, even 1 a.m., doing work that felt, at best, dimly connected to their learning. Things were moving fast, too fast it seemed. It was hard, they said, and it was hard to develop relationships with their teachers, who were themselves reacclimating to in-person learning and increased class sizes.

It seems that our school may not have learned all the lessons of the pandemic.

I worry that we have returned with a vengeance to the model of schooling that treats students as containers to be filled with knowledge and their free time as a free resource for extending the school day. Most important, we have forgotten the reason why a return to in-person learning was so welcome in the first place: It allowed us to be together, learn and solve problems together and collaborate with and in the best interests of students and their communities.

We now have an opportunity to help our educators, schools and districts to learn and do better. Through the educator effectiveness grants, my district has been allocated more than $512,000 from the state of California to improve the professional learning of teachers and staff and create a schooling experience that is more useful, meaningful and humane for students. I see three ways we can make good use of this money.

First, we should further expand and empower the campus- and districtwide professional collaborative networks. Just as many teachers forgot what it felt like to teach in person and how complicated it is to be a student today, many also forgot how to work together. The pivot from remote to in-person means that our many demands of an on-site school day are added to an already expanded list of duties.

Read the full article about collaborative funds by David Tow at EdSource.