translated from Spanish: The educational emergencies posed by the pandemic

A new wave of high covid-19 contagions has 70% of the country once again quarantined, the learning dynamics of students will have to rely again on digital and connectivity tools, in the spaces that are available (75% of the highest-income households have broadband and only 24% of the poorest) , and in others, it will be the professional commitment of teachers and managers to support the arrangement of the shipment of materials in printed form to households. Undoubtedly this situation leaves us in a complex scenario regarding our urgency to move forward in briging gaps, as evidenced by the data from the study “Impact of Covid-19 on learning and schooling outcomes in Chile”, developed by Mineduc and the World Bank in August 2020: only 40% of students in Chile have been able to continue their distance learning processes.
Last year’s experience with the closure of schools left us with important teachings: to note that we do not have the skills as a country and as a school system to sustain learning processes remotely while seeing the responsiveness of teachers in creativity, collaboration and communication. The latter highlighted as key elements in school communities in order to continue their work, in a context so different from that usual for the school world.
One area in which we must continue to learn and improve refers to the type of “class” that must be promoted, under these conditions, to ensure learning. It is necessary to think of pedagogical dynamics that stimulate the “doing” of children and young people at home autonomously, which summons them to research and create, based on everyday situations. We cannot continue to think of the traditional class in which the adult speaks and the audience listens, because what was already complex in face-to-face mode is not feasible.
Curriculum prioritization gave us the opportunity to make the curriculum more flexible in Chile, concentrating educational action on those learning objectives that respond to three basic principles defined by Mineduc: safety, flexibility and equity. These principles can also be used to think about teaching strategies. This implies a specific knowledge of students and their living conditions, to propose achievable, accessible activities such as analyzing news, important contemporary events; generate projects to solve everyday problems or prototypes to think about country problems, such as the development of cities. Activities that engage students and, even under these conditions, motivate them with their learning process.
Training and support processes for teaching and management teams are required for the design of distance learning strategies or in mixed mode. Evaluation should also be considered, within the teaching-learning processes, as a tool that allows both teachers and students to recognize advances and identify room for improvement. To do this, it is essential to include feedback processes, with guidelines, techniques and spaces defined for the reflection and analysis of what has been done, in which students advance their awareness of what they learn and what they need to learn, a key aspect for the development of autonomy in children.
This crisis has mobilized knowledge, experience and a lot of creativity on the part of school actors, but we certainly still have much to build to advance the learning gap that is presented in our society, aggravated today by the pandemic. In this sense, we must continue to build proposals and bridges to realize them, identifying strengths and weaknesses, generating spaces of trust and collaboration, using data and evidence for decision-making, with a focus on precautionary the acquisition of learning for all.
 
The content poured into this opinion column is author’s sole responsibility, and does not necessarily reflect El Mostrador’s editorial line or position.

Original source in Spanish

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