These Teaching Practices Are Trending As Schools Rebuild From the Pandemic

As schools and colleges rebuild after pandemic emergency teaching, what trends are emerging in teaching practices and school innovation? To find out, EdSurge recently reached out to education experts across the nation, ran a focus group of teachers, and interviewed a group of teachers-of-the-year from several states.

The key takeaways:

1. Schools and teachers are using tech to forge more human connections with their students now that they're back in person. One key example is the growing practice of doing pulse-checks with students, often by asking them to quickly check an emoji indicating how they are feeling with the option to share.
2. Teachers are finding ways to be more authentic with their students and connect them with the world outside the classroom with technology. In some cases that means making playful TikTok videos, in others it means organizing virtual field trips.
3. Some teachers report that student attitudes toward tech have shifted since the pandemic. A couple of years ago a Kahoot quiz or assignment to make a video for a class project would get kids excited. Now, says one middle school teacher, such assignments might draw frowns and sighs. She’s letting her students choose whether to do a tech or non-tech assignment and hopes that their enthusiasm will eventually return after a break.
4. Meanwhile, students are more savvy and experienced users of tech. As one teacher of the year quipped, “I'm pretty sure they all have graduate degrees in technology at this point.”
5. And schools are getting smarter about their tech purchasing—or at least they’re asking edtech companies more questions about whether their products are backed by evidence that they work in classrooms.
6. More schools are making bigger structural changes, such as shifting to a four-day week.
7. At the college level, institutions are building VR materials of their own to make classes more engaging and hands-on; more colleges are experimenting with open educational materials that are lower-cost than published textbooks and can be more customized to the students a professor is teaching; and adopting a more student-centered approach to teaching.

Dig into the reporting and stories behind these trends in the series of EdSurge articles below.