Dr. Jilliam Joe is the Vice President of Learning Insights at LEAP Innovations. Jilliam has dedicated her career as an educational researcher to measuring effective teaching practices. At LEAP, she provides research and evaluation leadership for LEAP’s programs and leads their personalized-learning educator competency framework development.
As part of our Hop, Skip, Leapfrog interviews with subject-matter experts across the K-12 field, we asked her to weigh in on education opportunities in a post-pandemic world. Read on for three major ideas from our conversation, in Jilliam’s own words.
Takeaway #1: The switch to remote learning forced teachers to dive into technology and make some much-needed innovations around instruction and delivery.
“What we learned very early on is that teachers were inundated with options for delivering instruction through technology because, I mean, it was pretty much the only way that many students who had access to a device and had Wi-Fi were going to receive instruction. And of course, there were some accommodations [in which] students could receive packets and hard copies [of instructional materials], but those soon gave way to strictly digital resources.
There were teachers who were not comfortable with technology before the pandemic. I would probably say their technological literacy was on the low end of the continuum. They had to quickly learn how to choose the right technology for their instructional needs and then apply that technology [to address those needs.] We heard teachers who openly said, ‘Hey, you know what? I did not know what I was doing. I had to rely on my colleagues to show me what to do.’ And so in this very steep and quick learning curve, we saw educators strengthen their collaboration with one another for the purpose of ensuring they had the requisite technological skills to deliver instruction to their students. I think that the pandemic and remote learning helped to close some of the generational gaps between students and teachers in terms of technology. In doing so, instruction became more relevant to students.
I’ll give another example. One teacher said that she assigned students an assessment or an opportunity to demonstrate mastery. She said, ‘You know, I just didn’t have time to think of how to design this assessment.’ So I told them, ‘You choose how best to demonstrate your mastery of the skill.’ She said that the students’ submissions were so creative – she said she [even] had students who submitted TikTok videos. Others demonstrated mastery by developing code. I think that teachers embraced the technological challenges and changes which opened the way for more innovative assessment practices.
I think that this remote learning forced some needed innovations and [alignment] on delivery, like how instruction was delivered and especially assessment practice. Out of necessity, instruction became more relevant to students, also strengthening their foothold into a technological future.”
Takeaway #2: The pandemic highlighted that social-emotional learning is just as important as academic development for student success.
“What we have heard very clearly is that teachers, parents, [and] educators prioritized students’ social and emotional needs during this past year – and even now. There are many cases where educators didn’t finish a whole lesson because they needed to stop and attend to what the social and emotional needs of their students were. We have oftentimes looked at social and emotional development and learning as a means to an end, as opposed to the end itself. I think that this experience we’ve collectively been through during this past year has reinforced – or at least surfaced, and maybe in some pockets reinforced – the idea that social and emotional development is just as important as academic development and cognitive development, and that we can’t have one without the other. We certainly can’t have academic development without social and emotional development. We’ve seen this [in] the literature and through research, but this remote learning experience has made it more applied and more real and on a wider scale.
[It’s] encouraging to me that teachers not only prioritize their students’ well-being, but also they prioritize relationship development. We’ve heard incredible stories of how students and teachers were able to form relationships virtually. Teachers shared stories of how they saw the dynamic of their relationship with particular students evolve during the pandemic, and [how they saw] their students confiding and sharing more and more and more about themselves. I think that on both sides, they were given access to a wider range of information about the teacher and about the students because they were [basically] in each other’s homes. Everything wasn’t all bad. There were skills and relationships that advanced because of the circumstances we were in. Our job is to understand the phenomenon, try to draw insights from it, and then think through how we replicate that in school when we’re not in a pandemic and how we might replicate it through a systems perspective.
I believe that this is an incredible opportunity for us to act on the impetus to broaden our outcomes measures. Social and emotional learning is in such a messy state, but I think we have to get … serious and invest much more attention to creating measures that help educators to assess and provide evidence for the type of constructs that matter in their classroom – like relationship skills and … what we might consider ‘soft skills.’ I think they’re so incredibly important. We need to provide these educators with valid measures so that they can show evidence that what they’re doing with their children – beyond just academic improvement and achievement – is going to help them in the long run.”
Takeaway #3: We do not need an emergency to address equity gaps.
“I ultimately want to do education differently, and I want us as a field to feel the sting of the equity gap – [particularly the depth of the] racial equity gap and how Black and brown students did not access learning in the same way that their counterparts did because of systemic issues related to resources in their school community. What this pandemic showed us is that we can do that. We can absolutely make sure that every child has a device. We can absolutely make sure that every family has Wi-Fi. We don’t need an emergency to make that happen. If public education is important, then we’re going to have to invest a lot more in redefining [the resources] afforded to students and school communities based on what they actually need. I don’t want us to get vaccinated, wipe our brow and pat ourselves on the back, and say, ‘Phew! Great job, we got through it!’ and not address those critical needs that student groups have.”
This blog is one in a series describing interviews from TLA’s Hop, Skip, Leapfrog project.Explore more resources.
