Trilok Singh Bist
The world came to a standstill with the unforeseen onslaught of COVID-19. The pandemic has taken a significant toll on the people across the world. Whether it a country with the largest corona cases or a country hit less aggressively by it, all are reeling under the crushing weight of this disease. The governments all over the world were forced to take stringent measures to curb this disease. Lockdown, shelter in place, or stay at home and travel ban were declared to contain the pandemic at the local and global level.
As the governments eased the restrictive measures to bring life back to normalcy, all walks of life pulsated and buzzed again with activities after a long period of lockdown but the educational sector could not bounce back to a healthy state.
Though the government has permitted the concerned authorities to run schools with standard operating procedures, both the students and the parents have developed the cold feet. Restoring normalcy at the educational front has become a big challenge now. The pandemic seems to have impacted people not only economically but emotionally as well.
The long period of lockdown has transformed the attitude, habit patterns and lifestyle of the students and the parents. On one hand, the parents are paranoid about the safety of their wards and are reluctant to send their kids to the school, the children too have taken a back foot as they are accustomed to the comfort zone of their homes.
Re-opening of the schools has become a challenge now as the students and the parents have developed a laidback attitude. The children are happy as they are free from the hectic schedule of rising early, getting ready, reaching school on time. They are free from the pressure of submitting assignments on time. The fear of exam which used to be a healthy driving force for learning is missing now. The students are taking exams from the comforts of their homes and resort to the unfair means.
The habit of academic dishonesty and short-cut approach to success have filtered deep into attitude of students and they are therefore unwilling to join the school now. The escape route lies in addressing these issues effectively and innovatively.
Restoring the faith of the parents and ridding their minds of the fear is the need of the hour. The schools need to address the parents and the students and exhort them to accept it as ‘a new normal’. By and by, the schools should be shifted to real mode by introducing off-line exams with necessary precautions. Schools must have the Feedback and Feedforward system at place to create a new way of life where students and parents both need to come out of their comfort zone and student reflection, parent reflection and teacher reflection all need to be taken into account while opening the schools for the larger good of the students who have almost forgotten to write or read and even on online classes with their videos off and audio muted, they are into Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Snapchat etc. To bring them out of this we need to reflect on what did we accomplish, what is important about what we did during these 9 months as digitally we have grown manifolds and see where can we apply what we learnt during this pandemic etc. Innovative ways of teaching learning in an inquiry based student led system where each child is made to feel important will help us bring the Gibbs Reflection Cycle as an innovation in our schooling now, what should be the action plan for re-opening the schools has to be school specific by the heads of schools as every school has its own challenges and if we all create an SOP keeping the child at the centre of it, it will definitely be the best way forward with our individual road maps for our schools.
(The author is Principal Delhi Public
School Ghaziabad, Vasundhara)
(feedbackexcelsior@gmail.com)
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