Wednesday 23 March 2022

A New Normal

 Teaching the past two years have been anything but normal, and this year is proving to be much of the same. I was challenged recently when I saw a social media post that showed a table of comparing a student's current school year with the last "normal" school year they attended. This made me stop and reflect about our Year 3/4 students. The year 4 students have not attended a "normal" school year since year 1 and the year 3 students have not attended a "normal" school year since they were in an ECE programme. This led me to question myself about what is normal. 

School for our year 3/4 students in a Covid world IS normal. They have never really attended school any other way. One of the things that is not normal is the norms that we generally would have used to compare student acheivement and classroom success in the past. Thinking of the things that we need to change in our teaching practice to help focus on where are students are now our staff used the analogy of a face mask. 

We have been asked to wear a mask at school from nose to chin, which presents many problems in a classroom setting. So, as we move from a Mask On to a Mask Off society, we explored what challenges we are now face with the goals that we have for our "new normal" classroom.