Above: Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly has been announced as the new Minister of Education.
BitDepth#1263 for August 20, 2020
It is the worst of times for your Ministry, and while it might not seem like it, it is also the best of times.
The shattering of the education system by covid19 and the terrific inequalities in learning opportunity that the termination of in-person teaching has revealed are sobering.
Some students are well-prepared to face this crisis, with access to resources and family support systems while other children, with little of either, are seeing their chances for improvement through education crumbling.
Given the recent history of TT under lockdown, the ministry should be undertaking at least three tiers of planning, covering the likelihood that school will remain closed until December, the possibility of losing the January school term entirely and a scenario modelling the transition of an entire school year to remote learning.
Your role will be pivotal in establishing continuity in the development of the potential of the country’s human resource.
You must be clear about whether schools are closed or in session for online learning. Those are two different states for the education system and demand quite different support systems and many of the hiccups of the last school term emerged from that confusion.
Private schools pressed ahead while public schools stumbled around with no clarity and little practical support.
The Education Ministry must deliver a more focused, organised and clear-cut plan to institute effective remote learning beginning with the new school year.
Learning under this new model of interaction and coaching will be difficult, but in this adaptation there is an opportunity to shape education to embrace new possibilities for student development even during a time of severely limited mobility.
The hardest lesson that was taught after the end of in-person teaching in March was the uneven distribitution of Internet connectivity, a limitation on online learning that was often tied to other social challenges.
Training should emphasise flexibility in the education process, with multiple options in choice of LMS and coaching tracks for the most promising models for engagement and learning.
It’s not possible to intervene in all the issues that make online instruction difficult, but access for students is a core issue that the Education Ministry should address with some vigor.
It’s quite likely that all three Internet service providers, Flow, bmobile and Digicel would see value in encouraging the student population to become fluent with computer technologies.
Some hasty steps were taken after the end of in-person teaching by zero-rating some education resources, but a conversation is overdue about improving Internet access to our most disadvantaged households.
By now, teachers should be clearer about which students have difficulty connecting to remote learning systems and those households should be targeted for connections capable of delivering at least five megabits of Internet access and where needed, basic computing tools for engaging with learning management systems (LMS).
This is where the business of education finds confluence with the scope of social development, so a collaboration between the two ministries, taking advantage of the intimate ground level understanding in schools, has the potential to bring more students into remote learning.
There are efforts underway to train the teaching body at the primary and secondary school level in the principles of remote learning.
That training should emphasise flexibility in the education process, with multiple options in choice of LMS and coaching tracks for the most promising models for engagement and learning.
The ministry should, by now, have assigned a dedicated team to evaluate LMS software, online meeting tools and resources and be prepared to discuss their advantages and disadvantages with teachers as part of crafting new approaches to creating learning environments.
Your team must further acknowledge that any effort at successful remote learning must engage parents in the coaching equation as partners in shaping learning spaces and monitoring engagement.
Parents struggled to keep up with the demands of remote learning on their children when everyone was at home.
In September, some of those parents are going to be working and the burden of monitoring schooling is going to fall on a mix of extended networks, including friends and family for parents who can’t be there when classes are in session.
For that to work, there must be a clearer articulation of curriculum requirements, more options for submitting classwork for teacher review and more leadership from the ministry and collaboration with line teachers in making the new school term work for the benefit of students.
This is not a time for top-down ministerial mandate, it is a time for collaborative exploration by administrators, managers and teachers.
We face a sometimes terrifying new world that is also an opportunity to embrace technology as a lubricator, not a splint for the fracturing that education has experienced in Trinidad and Tobago.
