Lessons Learned During COVID

Recently, we wrapped up our last meeting of the Creativity Cohorts with our year 1 and 2 participants.  We asked them on an endnote, how are we taking what we’ve learned during this time to alter our instruction for the future?  What they had to say was so wise, we captured it and are sharing it with you.  

Here are their lessons learned:

• Grateful. We will be grateful for every moment in the future that we will spend with our students.
  
• Technology’s use can no longer be underestimated in its role in the classroom
  
• Flexibility to roll with whatever may come our way needs to be our new way in the classroom
  
• Personalized - we are working to connect with our students where they are at in a whole new way
  
• Our focus needs to be on learning and not compliance
  
• Parental involvement has always been key, but with their current increased involvement there may be a new connection moving forward
  
• Connections that’s what this is all about
  
• This is the ultimate teamwork exercise. We are all collaborating together apart trying to make all of this work
  
• All of this are life skills in practice
  
• Good and bad, we are getting feedback that is shaping what we are doing
  
• Technology is not hard or scary and can be useful in preschool classroom
  
• Kids are learning how to compromise and collaborate while completing creative challenges
  
• We have the gift of time to develop ideas for kids and share them with educators
  
• We are grateful for many types of community - global, school, educators, family
  
• Challenges didn’t always go the way we hoped but both the kids and the teacher learned a lot by giving it a try
  
• Relationships are being built that can be leveraged in the future.
  

Life right now is the ultimate creative challenge.  Teachers, students, and parents are being asked to do things we have never had to navigate with constraints that have never been placed on our lives before. As you connect remotely with your students, consider how you can release control to them and allow them to make some creative choices to help foster their own creative confidence.

What are the current lessons you are learning and how will they impact you when we finally arrive at the doorstep of our classrooms?

~Amber Bridge, Corey Rogers, Mindy Cairney
​Digital Learning Consultants