The New Normal? Or the New Now?

“I couldn’t wait to get back to normal; and now I’m not sure what normal looks like,” she nervously revealed on the eve of her school reopening after almost a year online.

She isn’t alone. Scores of teachers have asked, “Can we go back? Should we go back?” and even more frightening: “How do we go back?”

My response is always the same: Let’s consider the New Now.

At the core of the New Now is our shared experience of living through a pandemic and navigating it together. While it was admittedly difficult to connect with our students and colleagues in online environments, it was what we had, it was all we had, and the universality of pandemic teaching and learning, I’d argue, forged bonds we didn’t know could exist. Basically, we’ve been in the same boat, trying to find the best way to row it.

Yes, as difficult, draining, and demoralizing pandemic teaching could be, we held on to each other, and that is what will propel us into the New Now: relationships.

When re-thinking instructional design, consider nurturing a relationship in which we allow students to take on more responsibility for the path and pace of their learning, building in more choice, voice, and creativity. In turn, you get to be the facilitator you’d hoped to be. 

Assessments, too, could benefit from the give-and-take of relationships. What if we provided more feedback and less points? What if we allowed students to revise, grow, and do-over while we coach them as an invested partner?

As we begin to come together again, it is the shared experiences and the natural human need to connect that I hope will inform our New Now educational practices.

​image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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