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Education Dive
Relationships, equity remain essential for curriculum to connect in remote learning
Roger Riddell
Oct. 28, 2020
Dive Brief:
Focusing on relationships with students, families and staff is key to
making curriculum connect in remote learning, education consultant
Brianna Hodges and Future Ready Schools Director of Innovation Thomas
Murray, who share a keynote at the 2021 Future of Education Technology
Conference, tell District Administration.
Not only must leaders continue to know their "why," in regard to what
drives them in their work, but they must strive to understand the ways
the "what" and "how" factors have changed across the school community,
including the challenges and traumas students and staff face due to
COVID-19 and other current events.
Additionally, there must be a continuing acknowledgment that equity
doesn't stop at simply providing a device and internet to every
student, but that curriculum must also meet students at their own pace
and feature content relatable to their own experiences.
Dive Insight:
The importance of relationships, empathy and curriculum that features
examples students from a variety of racial, ethnic and socioeconomic
backgrounds can relate to was on the rise prior to the pandemic. But
with the traditional school model facing ongoing disruption as the
COVID-19 crisis drags on, these have become all the more important.
Social-emotional learning in particular gained focus as a vehicle for
teaching soft skills like collaboration, communication, empathy,
compassion and conflict resolution that are essential for the workforce
— particularly if students are to grow into leaders in their own right.
The pandemic, however, puts principals, superintendents and other
leaders in a greater position to provide firsthand examples of what
those skills look like in action.
For many district and building leaders, this has ranged from taking
part in meal distribution and visiting homes to increasing office hour
availability and forging community partnerships around internet access
and other resources. On a micro level, as Murray explained to District
Administration, it also means examining who is or isn't involved in
extracurricular activities or specific courses, working to understand
why, and addressing it.
Alongside the pandemic, a national reckoning on systemic racism and
inequality sparked by the police-involved deaths of Black Americans has
further ignited recognition of the importance of students seeing both
historical figures and fictional characters who look like them in
curricular materials.
This, along with seeing adults in the school who look like them, can
make a significant difference in a student's level of engagement,
experts agree. Boosting teacher diversity, for example, has been
connected to higher graduation rates, lower dropout and suspension
rates, and more interest in going to college for students of color. And
White students have also been shown to benefit, as they become more
open to talk about bias and racism in class.
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