Over the last year the pandemic has laid bare the colossal inequities in our education system as teachers made a rapid shift to emergency teaching and found new ways to support both their students and parents.

Recently, the nation’s top teachers described the devastating impact of the pandemic on the profession itself. EdSource, with the Inverness Institute, has published a treasure trove of insights from Golden State teachers as they have “reflected on a year of learning under Covid.” For most of them the reopening of schools has been “exhausting and unproductive.”

Much has been documented on what has been lost. In listening to 30 highly accomplished teachers from the United States (as well as those from Australia, British Columbia and England) we also have learned what has been gained, including how to incorporate social-emotional learning into the core academic instruction.

As schools begin to reopen with the specter of the delta variant spiking, lessons from these leading teachers point to how schools need to be reinvented in the face of disruptions in teaching and learning. Here are three specific innovations they have discovered and/or used this past year, representing what these leading teachers hope to see in the future of education.

  • Creating more space for personalized learning. 
  • Rethinking the school schedule. 
  • Capitalizing on teacher networks. 

Read the full article about reinventing schools by Barnett Berry at EdSource.