How Corona accelerated innovation in education

I’ve been a teacher for 20 years now. And form the beginning of my career I heard that ICT integration and pedagogical innovation are very important. And it’s something we (educational professionals) need to work on. And we all did. I’m not going to deny that. But it is a (very) slow process. Teachers all over the EU are very good at finding reasons why it is better not to innovate their teaching practice. So, I constantly have the feeling that we are changing, but not fast enough. Society and the labor market are changing, and we’re always a few steps behind.

But then it became spring 2020. A very small organism, called Coronavirus, appeared and changed almost our entire life. Suddenly in many countries, we were no longer allowed to physically be in the same classroom with our students. Schools were being closed. But we could not just sit this out. Quite soon it became obvious that this new situation would be with us for a long time. Distance learning became the new standard. But nobody was really prepared for this. How could we still teach our students, without being in the classroom? How could we evaluate what they were doing? It took a huge mind shift to make the necessary changes to our work. Everybody was struggling. Some of us still are.

At first, a lot of ad-hoc initiatives popped up. Teachers started to use Skype, Google Meet, Zoom, or other applications to connect with the pupils online. We tried to do our regular teaching online. But of course, this was not as easy as it seemed. Not all pupils have a laptop or pc at their disposal. Internet connections are not powerful everywhere. In other cases, pupils had to make assignments, without their teacher being there to help them out in case of questions. But gradually a lot of teachers found an approach that worked and produced results.

Luckily summer holidays gave schools and teachers the time to reflect on their work and streamline their approach. The number of infections went down. So many schools switched to classroom teaching again or went for a blended approach. In the latter pupils are at school for a few hours and work from home for the other hours. This way teachers combine the strengths of classroom interaction and self-regulated learning.

It was a crazy few months in which teachers did not realize that they were forced by the situation to use ICT intensively and often change the pedagogical approach of their lessons. Suddenly educational innovation accelerated. In my 20 years of teaching, I have never seen a bigger growth in the use of ICT Tools, Apps, Flipped Classroom, Project-Based Learning, etc, than in the last 6 months. And the best thing about it all is that as well teachers as pupils seem to like it. With every disadvantage also comes an advantage. And Corona changed the way we teach, for good.