Crises Foster Innovation

There has been a lot going on in the past couple weeks.

Colleges and universities all over the U.S., as well as worldwide, have been closed. Public schools in 30 states, with the count continuously rising, have closed their doors. This leaves more than 50 million kids from elementary to high school at home without structure and sometimes supervision during the day.

This can be so overwhelming to think about and I completely sympathize with peoples’ fears, but the way that teachers have responded and reacted gives me so much hope.

Crises foster innovation.

For teachers of a traditional learning classroom, online applications may have never been used. Teachers in schools without one-to-one access have rarely had to help students with using laptops or tablets.

This can be seen as a hardship, or as an opportunity.

Now is the time to develop the amazing technology that we have into our daily classrooms.

Now is the time to learn the right and wrong ways to use online classrooms, video chats, and other online connections. 

Now is the time to work on flexibility with students who may have other obligations during this time.

Now is the time to create deeper connections with your students as we all go through this together.

This time will not only test our knowledge, but our character. How we adapt to these circumstances will affect students’ perception of schooling and can affect our own perceptions of our classrooms in the future.

Let us take this time as a chance to delve deeper into our teaching methods. Why only use lecture and homework methods? What are the benefits to using technology and different ways of communication in your classroom?

This will not last forever, but what we make of this time can!