The past few months have changed the face of traditional education on a global scale. As every corner of our province battled an ‘invisible enemy’ in the context of COVID-19, education professionals grappled with the task of supporting their students at breakneck speed. Some education sectors were more equipped than others to flip the switch to online learning platforms—such as post-secondary learning environments—as several institutions were already offering online learning options.

In a province where both public and private schools strive to offer innovative learning experiences, the challenges of the 2019-2020 school year brought on by the pandemic were unprecedented. At the time of publishing these words, many questions are still unanswered about what education will look like at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, but one thing is for certain; every education professional has had to adapt to their new working reality, and many of those changes will likely be part of the ‘new normal’ for a long time to come.

Mary Micocci, an attendant for special needs students at a Rosemère elementary school, says the pandemic has changed just about every aspect of the way she will interact with her students once schools in that region reopen in the Fall. “Our whole approach on how we communicate with our students and reassure them will be different. We still want them to feel comfortable and communicate with us, but it will all be done at a [physical] distance,” she says.

Due to physical proximity restrictions in the school setting, Micocci will no longer be able to sit beside her students when they need assistance with their school work, and taking students out of the classroom to work one-on-one in a more focused environment will no longer be an option. “We may have to use more virtual tools than ever before, even in the physical classroom, because we can no longer distribute books and supplies like we used to.”

Though many high school students have attended virtual classes held by their teachers during the school closures, this type of learning scenario presents its own set of challenges. “When you’re teaching in a classroom and can physically see your students, you can often spot-check students’ understanding based on body language, but when you’re teaching to a screen with dozens of black boxes in front of you, that social aspect of teaching is missing, and it’s been a real eye-opener,” says Andrea Venditti, a high school teacher for the Sir Wilfrid Laurier School Board, who teaches Science to secondary IV and V students. “A lot of the teaching I do is inquiry-based learning, which requires collaboration between teachers and students, movement around the classroom…it’s just not conducive to distance learning.”

Despite these challenges, Venditti says her students have been attending her virtual classes and participating in curriculum-based discussions, even if they can’t practice in a lab. “I was lucky to have established a really good relationship with my students even before this [pandemic] happened, so I think that has helped a lot in terms of my students actually wanting to show up to [virtual] class,” she says. “I brought it to a human level. We don’t like not being able to see each other at school, but we have to deal with it, so we might as well make the best of it. That attitude has really helped me to get back to feeling positive and energetic again.”

With ever-changing scenarios and guidelines, education professionals will undoubtedly have to continue to adapt their environments and procedures in order to adhere to health and safety measures that have now taken on a whole new paradigm. “My hope is that students who are returning to school in the Fall will have had time to adapt to the new way of doing things, that their parents will have helped them prepare over the summer, and that we will have the time we need to prepare the school and ourselves for all of the new safety measures,” says Micocci.