Becoming the Force for Innovation: How Educators Can Harness the Impact of COVID-19 to Transform Education

Becoming the Force for Innovation: How Educators Can Harness the Impact of COVID-19 to Transform Education

Lori B. McEwen, Julie A. Foss
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-6829-3.ch003
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Abstract

In this chapter, the authors, former school and district leaders, submit that COVID-19 is a force that has caused collective sight and accelerated momentum relative to shifts we have always known we needed to make in education but haven't yet made at scale. Those shifts, manifested in instructional practice, equitable systems, and the strategic integration of technology, represent an urgency COVID-19 has revealed as an absolute. The authors argue that too often we have hidden behind readiness as a barrier to translating urgency to the lived experience of learners. COVID-19 has shown us our readiness matters little in a global pandemic. Ready or not, educators will respond in the face of unprecedented circumstances. How then, might educators become the force COVID-19 has been to ensure continued momentum?
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Why Innovate?

According to a quote popularly attributed to philosopher and education reformer John Dewey, “If we teach today’s students as we taught yesterday’s, we rob them of tomorrow.” If this was true for Dewey and his like-minded contemporaries almost 100 years ago, it is certainly true today when our rapid advances in technology ensure that many of today’s jobs and careers will not exist in the future.

Our world’s rapid evolution is artfully, or perhaps alarmingly, illustrated in the viral “Shift Happens” video by Scott McLeod and colleagues (McLeod & Fisch, 2007). The presentation’s statistics jolt the viewer into a realization about differences in our students’ futures. One of the final slides notes, “We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist ... in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”

If McLeod’s video (and eventual series of spin-offs) clarified why education needed to change, educators like Harvard Professor Tony Wagner showed us what students would need to be successful. In The Global Achievement Gap, Wagner (2008) identified seven survival skills that children will need for future success. Wagner’s skills are echoed by the World Economic Forum’s (WEF, 2020) top 10 skills for 2025 found in The Future of Jobs Report 2020.

Table 1.
Future-ready skills, 2008 vs. 2020
7 Survival Skills
(Wagner, 2008)		Top 10 Skills for 2025
(World Economic Report, 2020)
     1. Critical thinking and problem solving
     2. Accessing and analyzing information
     3. Collaboration and leadership by influence
     4. Effective oral and written communication
     5. Agility and adaptability
     6. Initiation and entrepreneurship
     7. Curiosity and imagination		     1. Analytical thinking and innovation
     2. Active learning and learning strategies
     3. Complex problem solving
     4. Critical thinking and analysis
     5. Creativity, originality, and initiative
     6. Leadership and social influence
     7. Technology use and control
     8. Technology design and programming
     9. Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
     10. Reasoning, problem solving, and ideation

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