Future of Learning Top Reads for week of Jun 8 2020
“The Next 60 Days: How to Prepare Before Reopening Campus,” by Independent School Management
“Assess your current campus healthcare. You may need to create new roles for response management, compliance, and reporting. Have backup personnel for healthcare roles. If you don’t have an MD on staff—or at least on call—make that connection or consider bringing in a physician. In the unfortunate event of illness on campus, your standard infirmary won’t be sufficient. Be prepared with medical isolation stations. […]
“New roles and responsibilities require new staff as well as training for existing employees. The Reopening Task Force should assign a current staff member to the role of Pandemic Safety Coordinator to ensure protocols are communicated.
“This individual is responsible for putting proper signage in place and helping students understand the new rules and follow directions. This person must make sure screening stations are in place and safety protocols are being followed.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
Are you betting against a second wave of COVID-19? If not, this article provides a checklist for reopening under modified conditions.
At the same time—and to invert the famous phrase—planning is essential, but plans are useless… because people never behave exactly as you expect them to. So as you go through this checklist, keep in mind behavioral considerations:
How will we deal with noncompliance (eg, wearing a mask around the neck rather than over the nose and mouth) among students? Among employees? Among parents and alumni? Among visitors?
What ways do you expect people’s anxiety to appear? How will we monitor for anxiety that you aren’t expecting?
How will we know how to interpret absenteeism?
…and many more.
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“Building a Culture of Experimentation,” by Stefan Thomke, in Harvard Business Review
“In experimental cultures, employees are undaunted by the possibility of failure. ‘The people who thrive here are curious, open-minded, eager to learn and figure things out, and OK with being proven wrong,’ said Vermeer, who now oversees all testing at Booking.com. The firm’s recruiters look for such people, and to make sure they’re empowered to follow their instincts, the company puts new hires through a rigorous onboarding process, which includes experimentation training, and then gives them access to all testing tools.”
Why does this matter to the future of learning?
In the Next Normal and Future Normal, you will compete on learning. That may sound like a funny thing to say about a school—aren’t they all about learning, after all?
Maybe for the students, but for the adults it’s often a different story. Consider how the article ends:
“Vismans put it best: ‘If I have any advice for CEOs, it’s this: Large-scale testing is not a technical thing; it’s a cultural thing that you need to fully embrace. You need to ask yourself two big questions: How willing are you to be confronted every day by how wrong you are? And how much autonomy are you willing to give to the people who work for you? And if the answer is that you don’t like to be proven wrong and don’t want employees to decide the future of your products, it’s not going to work. You will never reap the full benefits of experimentation’.”
How are you nurturing a culture of experimentation?
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