3 Reasons to Be Optimistic About This School Year

Let’s not sugarcoat it: 2020 has been a hard year for lots of people for lots of reasons, and the new school year promises to be equally challenging. Perhaps even more challenging, as the springtime novelty of, “I can do school in my pajamas,” and its corresponding naivete of, “This will be a quirky few weeks,” gives way to a sense that this completely abnormal situation is our new normal without end in sight.

We know that the ‘20-‘21 school year will be difficult for teachers, students, and parents alike. But while most naive optimism from the spring has faded into stark reality, every cloud has its silver lining. As teachers have stressed for generations, every struggle comes with an opportunity for growth. With an educator’s eye on the most foreboding back-to-school season in recent memory, let’s make sure we take some time to address real, tangible reasons to be optimistic about the new school year. They include the following:

Distance learning can prompt new levels of participation

Educational research is clear about two things: 

• The more students participate, the more they learn and the greater their educational outcomes.  

• Almost all students self-censor their participation in school, which prevents them from realizing these benefits.

We all know the reason why—participation in class is stressful. It’s almost always an act of public speaking, of raising your hand and being the lone voice in a room of your peers. The social considerations loom large in a student’s mind: will I look foolish asking a silly question? Will I look like the teacher’s pet if I seem too eager to respond? Am I confident enough in my answer, my appearance, and my social standing to invite everyone’s attention? Or is my question or answer just not worth that effort?

The stakes can feel incredibly high when a student participates in a live, in-person classroom. But online, there are a variety of anonymous and low-stakes ways to participate. You can send a private message to your teacher to ask that question you’re unsure is a good one, or you can answer a question by clicking a poll button. Participation comes with safety in numbers—if everyone is typing at the same time, you’re no longer “on stage” when you offer your opinion. And once you’ve started participating and have seen that your contributions are valid and useful, it’s much less intimidating to speak up verbally.

I’ve seen this firsthand as a teacher and as a manager of teams of teachers. Invariably when I’ve asked excellent in-person teachers to try teaching online—and this was my apprehension as well—the first reaction is, “But I’ll miss the in-person interaction.” Within a few lessons, however, nearly every teacher reaches the same conclusion: once you get the hang of the format and how students use it (for example, asking lots of short-answer questions that students can quickly answer in text chat), both the amount of participation and the number of students who voluntarily participate increase dramatically. 

Online classes provide shy students with unprecedented opportunity to participate, and they give teachers lots of options to coax interactivity out of an array of learners. We know that when students participate more, they learn more. For many students, the social safety of participation online might be exactly what they need.

Teachers are innovators

Necessity is the mother of invention. So while we can admit that keeping students engaged in what for many is the drudgery of homebound, limited-socialization distance learning will be difficult, we should also recognize that this school year is creating the necessity for teachers to do what they do best: innovate and create.

Teachers begin every school year like they began their careers: full of hope, energy, and creativity. Every student on that class roster is a mind to inspire, and every lesson on that syllabus is an opportunity to do it. But as September idealism gives way to October pragmatism, teachers are often asked to do everything but innovate: administration asks for more days of testing and more days reviewing for those tests, and the time left over for creative lessons gets interrupted by assemblies and fire drills. Planning truly creative and engaging lessons ends up being an “extra” something teachers do because they want to, not because it’s a central part of the job description, and the budget for incorporating technology tools into the classroom is similarly an afterthought.

But this year, teachers are being specifically asked to innovate. American families have had distance learning forced on them, and everyone is looking for ways to make it more vibrant, more engaging, and more interactive. Creative lesson planning has never been more important, and technology has to be front and center—a welcome opportunity for teachers who have been longing to cater to students’ fascination (and facility) with tech.

Teachers will undoubtedly answer this call for creativity, in a way that doesn’t just benefit this year’s remote classes but also means they’ll have innovative, technology-enabled lessons for years to come. And in a “all hands on deck” year of making things work in the new normal, teachers are bound to collaborate more, too—if only because, again, necessity is the mother of invention—meaning that the best of this year’s lesson plans will make their way in front of thousands of students, raising the bar for education across the board.

Is that level of innovation a high aspiration to reach? Certainly. But with a summer’s head start and a natural penchant for creativity and cooperation, teachers were made for this moment in time, and I’m excited to see how they rise to the occasion.

School could stand some disruption

The word “disruption,” in a scholastic context, is a bad thing: disruptive students get time-outs and detentions. But in technology, it’s a good thing: tech-enabled disruption forces necessary change on status-quo industries that have remained static for too long. And education is notably static: school buildings, schedules, procedures, and norms look similar generation after generation. 

Which isn’t to say that schools don’t do many or even most things well, but the forthcoming school year of upheaval could drive some important evolution. Take elective classes and extracurricular activities, for example. A typical school can only afford to have so many teachers and therefore only offer so many classes outside of the core requirements. A student interested in computers, for example, might only have one computer science offering available. This year, however, online classes allow unique offerings—a graphic design class for one student, a video game coding class for another, and Python and Javascript classes for others yet—that can draw a few students from each building or even district, filling the seats and justifying the cost while still offering each student a chance to learn something meaningful to them. The same goes for languages, artistic disciplines, and others: where in person it might require 25 students’ worth of interest to even think about an offering, online those students don’t have to be from the same school, so the possibilities are endless.

A full year of distance learning will push libraries to offer more digital resources, administrators to consider gamified and personalized learning applications, and teachers to test new multimedia tools. Technology won’t any time soon replace traditional education. (Two months’ worth of distance learning this spring proved that case.) But it will push the education world to quickly and aggressively adopt the growth mindset it implores students to use, and in doing so, we’ll see lasting legacies that make education in 2021 significantly more personalized and engaging than it was in 2019.

So while school this year will undoubtedly be challenging for students, teachers, and parents, and while we’ll all be thrilled when kids are back in classrooms with their friends and in-person activities, we’re optimistic about what this beyond-unique school year has to offer. Students will participate more than ever before, teachers will innovate like never before, and necessary evolution will happen because it simply has to. A central tenet of education is that struggle engenders growth. In the ‘20-‘21 school year, the world of education will benefit from its own mission.

Brian Galvin is the Chief Academic Officer at Varsity Tutors.