Lessons Learned From 2021

Lessons Learned From 2021
By Jose Mari Almoradie Carpena
January 2022

We enter 2022 amidst the continuing threat of the COVID-19 pandemic. Undeniably, the pandemic continues to disrupt our way of life; we could no longer spend our free time in malls, we couldn’t freely visit our relatives and friends, and pertinent to our context, we still can’t go back to the “normal” way we would operate our classes. We still can’t “normally” meet our students face-to-face, and we can’t even freely go to our offices to retrieve the stuff we left two years ago.

As we continue living in this COVID-19 world, it would be best to reflect on the lessons we gathered from the previous year. While it is arguable that 2022 might not bring exactly the same challenges, our experiences from 2021 might help us improve our own practices and prepare us for the future.

Consider The Parents As Well

It is understandable that, as teachers, we based our decisions around our students. Sometimes, however, we also have to consider their parents as well. A study by Azevedo et al., which was subsequently cited in a World Bank report, showed that parents’ educational attainment was correlated with a student’s learning engagement. Azevedo et al. argue that this could be due to the fact that parents who were able to attain a higher level of education are more likely to be knowledgeable with the learning content, and value education more than those with lower educational attainment. This may indicate that schools and teachers might need to help those parents who have much less schooling by potentially providing coaching sessions similar to “training the trainer” sessions or “teacher training” sessions.

Ensure Compliance With Health Protocols

As Philippine educational institutions plan to go back to (limited) face-to-face learning, the health and safety of our faculty, staff, and students should be prioritized. It’s a given, yes, but it is essential that we enforce these health protocols, as a presentation by the Department of Education showed that students tended to forget to follow them during the pilot testing of limited face-to-face learning. In the presentation, it was reported that students took off their masks and went around the classroom, getting physically closer to other students in violation of physical distancing. A more systematic issue is the lack of funds for health essentials. In line with these findings, it would be vital for schools to strictly administer and implement health protocols, as well as put aside a substantial amount of funding for essential health-related items.

Flexible Learning as The New Norm for Education

We’re all waiting for the pandemic to subside, students and teachers alike yearn to return to these classrooms. However, the Commission on Higher Education announced that flexible learning will be the “new normal”, and purely face-to-face classes will cease to be practiced. Thus, educational institutions and the national government should direct a fundamental amount of resources to refitting infrastructure to aid in this development. More importantly, schools must help students and teachers adapt and be ready for this new setup. This requires teachers and students being provided with the appropriate readiness programs, and the necessary technologies to access these flexible classes. This requires an effort in tandem with parents as well – connected to my first point, educational institutions must make sure that their students’ households (or wherever they may be studying) is conducive to learning.

Lessons We Personally Learned

Besides the learnings we gained from the experiences of others, we of course have gained some insights regarding our own teaching practices during the course of our own engagements. Personally, I have learned how to make my classes more inclusive by converting some of my lessons into asynchronous materials. Moreover, creating more opportunities for our students to access our supposed synchronous materials offline will help students who have erratic connections. As we all know, consistent and reliable internet connections are pretty much a non-reality in the Philippines, even if telco companies claim that they have a 99% uptime.

Another lesson which I picked up from 2021 is that students and teachers themselves should eventually use data analytics to guide their studies and their work, respectively. Universities which have started to do this have been able to provide students with the tools to identify what aspects of their learning process that should improve on. Conversely, teachers have been able to use class data analytics to identify how to help particular students. In our current stage, the development of such data analytics is still far from our reach, but it is certainly a goal we should keep our eyes on.

What about you? What experiences in 2021 have made an impact on your practice? Were there any significant instances which left an impression on you? Send us an email at asist-crem@dlsu.edu.ph and we’ll include them here!

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