📑 Millions of children across the world aren’t going to school. It’s not just their education that could suffer

Julia Hollingsworth reports on the school closures in China and Italy and the strategies being utilised

Hong Kong-based mental health expert Odile Thiang said the loss of routine and the loss of social activity could have a big impact on children, who were also stuck inside with their parents during an already stressful time. “There’s also that general fear of contamination that people are feeling, so everything is adding up.”

“(The psychological lessons) is yet to be learned, to really see what is going to come out of this major public health experiment that we’re doing here,” she said, adding that children tend to be very resilient.

It will be interesting to see if any long term changes come out of this situation in regards to blended learning. Jennifer Bloomingdale contends that such situations are a great opportunity for remote passion-based learning, while Jennie Magiera explains how Google makes remote learning doable. However, Mike Crowley warns that there is no substitute for the human element and that all such options will only be interim measures:

If we have to, we have a contingency plan to work remotely which is shared below for all of our global colleagues who are generously sharing with us. While our campus may close, our school will not. Learning will continue. It’s a short-term, precautionary measure that we will use if we need to safeguard the wellbeing of our community. We are confident that it will work well in the short-term because of the commitment of our faculty and staff, the support of our local and international communities, and the understanding of our students and families. But we delude ourselves severely if we think we can ever substitute the human elements of learning by attempting to replicate it exclusively online.

I also wonder what impact such a disruption has for data collection? Will this provide some sort of catalyst to break with the year-based learning and move to a mastery model?