School Closures Will Continue Next School Year
The Coronavirus Pandemic, despite all the anxiety and sorrow it is causing, is an opportunity to stop talking about 21st Century Learning and start demonstrating it. This pandemic is also presenting a great opportunity to develop 21st Century Leaders. Leaders capable of developing resilience in teams to overcome subsequent waves of this and future pandemics. Large enterprises have been successfully connecting more and more of their workforce online over the past two decades. Schools literally just got thrown into the water. Schools that see this as an opportunity to learn how to swim will rebound stronger than ever.
In this article, I will be making the case for school leaders to move from Emergency Response to Strategic Planning. Schools leaders who see this as a strategic imperative will raise their community above the midst of uncertainty and chart a course with a 9-18 month window. In turn, these school leaders will be handsomely rewarded by a community that has greater clarity of the challenge they must overcome and a resolve to overcome it. On the other hand, school leaders that remain mired in the fog of uncertainty, waiting for direction from local or national governments, will slowly see the life drain out of their community.
Why are some school leaders content on remaining in the fog? I believe the answer is that they are hopeful things will return to normal once the weather warms, or that the lock-downs will stamp out the virus. They may also be happy to ride out the current wave of the pandemic because they know they aren't alone. Thousands of schools, for reasons beyond their control, may be forced to wait out this wave, largely because of poor governance. Unfortunately, the coronavirus is not going away anytime soon. A convincing case was recently made by Gabriel Leung, an epidemiologist, and dean of medicine at the University of Hong Kong, in an Oped for the New York Times, predicting that this pandemic will likely be carrying on for 1-2 more years. It will take at least a year before there is a vaccine.
Gabriel Leung also made a case for something I fear schools aren't taking into consideration, which is why school leaders must see this as a strategic imperative. He advocated, in the absence of a vaccine, for governments to adopt a policy of "suppress and lift":
After achieving a sustained decline in the Rt and bringing the number of daily new cases down to an acceptable baseline thanks to stringent physical distancing, a society can consider relaxing some measures (say, reopen schools). But it must be ready to reimpose drastic restrictions as soon as those critical figures start rising again — as they will, especially, paradoxically, in places that have fared not too badly so far. Then the restrictions must be lifted and reapplied, and lifted and reapplied, as long as it takes for the population at large to build up enough immunity to the virus.
My clientele is mainly independent schools, and from what I am hearing and seeing, many leaders have limited planning to the start of next school year. Tom Ulmet, the Executive Director for the Association of China and Mongolia International Schools (ACAMIS), who has collaborated with the ACAMIS Board to develop several helpful resources to help schools navigate through this pandemic, identified these questions preoccupying many Heads of School in China at this time:
How do I cope with school re-opening without the 10-20% of staff who are still abroad and cannot return?
How do I implement all of the cleaning needs with our small supporting staff and keep the school safe when it reopens?
How can I convince newly hired staff for next year to still come with the uncertainties that still exist?
How many new students might we anticipate in August to replace the normal percentage of attrition plus those who evacuated and may not return?
How will these things impact our school budget for next year so we are not forced to close?
I also hear from Heads of School from across Asia and Europe asking the same questions. Unfortunately, in addition to trying to mitigate these challenges that the current round of the pandemic is posing, school leaders need to start capacity building their schools to withstand subsequent waves of the pandemic. Many independent schools in China are preparing to stagger the resumption of classes this month with approximately 10-20% of their students and staff still unable to return to China. In subsequent waves, though, the issue of absent students and staff won't be because they are out of the country, it will be because they are sick or domiciled with someone that is symptomatic. We need to begin capacity building our schools to withstand those shocks. We need to ensure teachers and students that may need to be quarantined in future waves can still deliver and access the curriculum. Not to mention instilling greater confidence in parents that regardless of the medium through which their children learn, student attainment will not be affected.
Thus far, very few governments have had the courage to admit this is going to be a long harrowing ride. Therefore, if we are going to call this pandemic the 'Great War of Our Time', then we need a wartime strategy. Too many leaders are fire-fighting when what they should be doing is strategizing. Empower your front line to fight the fires while leadership survey the battlefields and develop what Richard Rumelt would call a Good Strategy, one where the diagnosis of the challenge takes into account the uncertainty caused by government policy. A “good strategy” provides concrete guiding policies on how to navigate the shifting policy environment and enables educators to identify a coherent set of actions to ensure the curriculum can be accessed regardless of whether it is in a classroom or online. In the words of Richard Rumelt:
A good strategy honestly acknowledges the challenges being faced and provides an approach to overcoming them. And the greater the challenge, the more a good strategy focuses and coordinates efforts to achieve a powerful competitive punch or problem-solving effect.
My concern for many schools currently, is that they are relying too much on their local and national governments to set expectations for their school communities. School leaders are not openly acknowledging what is now becoming obvious, Covid-19 is here to stay. To date, the Hong Kong government has been the bravest. In February it announced school closures would continue until April 20, which was the greatest degree of certainty any government has given to planning for. In March they announced that there was a possibility Primary classes would not resume this school year. Although this was a shock to the education industry, it did force schools to rethink their online learning practices.
Schools that accepted this as the new reality worked in earnest to move from emergency remote learning mode to improving their teachers’ capabilities to deliver the curriculum online. Some schools, though, have opted to remain in emergency remote learning mode, despite knowing that classes might not resume for the remainder of this year. These latter schools are not honestly acknowledging the challenges their community will continue to face. Many of these schools are developing guiding policies in a vacuum, limited in perspective and scope. These guiding policies will prove to be ineffective in empowering their middle leaders to identify and take a set of coherent actions to overcome the challenges that lie ahead.
The Hidden Opportunity
Here is some good news and my advice for acting strategically.
Firstly, there are a lot of teachers that have felt the yoke of traditional classroom teaching finally removed and are thriving in ways we never imagined. There are teachers that aren't seeing a decline in engagement in their online courses, nor are they seeing a decline in the quality of work their students are producing. Do you know who these teachers are? If you don't, this is when you search them out and create space in their time table to collaborate with coordinators, heads of year, and heads of the subject across your school.
Next, senior leaders need to empower their middle leaders to fight the fires and capacity build teachers to thrive online. Create a Middle Leadership Team and establish its purpose to move the community from 'Emergency Remote Learning' to impactful Online Learning. This team I am advocating for isn't meant to get you through this school year. This team is going to be putting in place all the pieces of the puzzle for your school to thrive next year. This team will develop your Education Continuity Plan. Ensure this team works unencumbered with your Board, parents, and non-academic divisions. This team will not only plan for how to respond to future school closures but will ensure the tools that are required to successfully deliver the curriculum online are also being used for classroom instruction.
To be clear, the strategy is not the outcome we expect the Middle Leadership Team to produce, which is an Education Continuity Plan. That is a result. The strategy is capacity building this team to produce that result, even if relegated to collaborating virtually. By capacity building this team to produce that result, you have positioned it to respond to future challenges.
In closing, Senior Leadership's "most important responsibility is identifying the biggest challenges to forward progress and devising a coherent approach to overcoming them" (Richard Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy). Senior Leadership needs to communicate an honest and compelling diagnosis of the challenges their community will face over the next two years and develop guiding policies to empower Middle Leadership to work with stakeholders across the community to coordinate actions, policies, and resources.
