2020 brought the biggest disruption to education on record. In 2021, educators began to feel more optimistic as they became more comfortable with education technology options and returned to the classrooms in most areas of the country. While we are still in an unsettled state within Pre K-12 education, we’re hopeful for policy changes and emerging EdTech solutions to better serve educators and students so everyone is successful.
Here are three themes that will continue to emerge in education and EdTech in 2022:
How will we reverse the Great Resignation? R-E-S-P-E-C-T
The Great Resignation has impacted most industries and Pre K-12 education is no exception. In 2021 many teachers left the profession as they felt the respect and pay were not in balance with the expectations. Teachers are consistently asked to take on more (more students, counseling for well-being and tutoring for struggling learners). 2022 will be a year of reckoning for the country. Teachers are beyond a breaking point and governments and districts need to continue making investments in policies to help them. In the coming years, we will see some pay improvement, but the biggest impact might come through professional learning. As teachers are paid more, there will also be demand for those professions to have even stronger life-long learning, not just a certification, which means accelerated demand for robust professional learning solutions. While this shift won't happen in a single year, 2022 will be seen as a pivotal shift in the zeitgeist, with even more respect given to teaching as an important (and desirable) profession.
Academic assessments will become even better at identifying and addressing opportunity gaps
The pandemic has deepened pre-existing disparities in student opportunities, with a disproportionate impact on students of color and minority communities. To effectively address these widening opportunity gaps, educators need clear visibility to understand and address student learning. After all, if you don't measure, you won't know where gaps lie and with whom. From decision-makers at the state and district levels to teachers in the classroom, educators will continue to have an increasingly urgent need for highly efficient and effective academic measurement combined with clear reporting, including regular formative, interim and summative assessments. But measurement needs to continue to expand from the state-level summative tests to ongoing monitoring within curriculum products. This will drive increasing demand for highly adaptive, time-effective and personalized assessments, whether embedded in classroom solutions or independent of instruction.
EdTech will go beyond personalized learning to enable personalized care
There has always been a desire to have education become more adapted to an individual student's strengths, weaknesses and interests. The last 18 months have forced a lot of individualized learning, to varying results. The path forward will not be to limit EdTech, but rather ask more of it. To meet today's need, EdTech must strive to be as effective as a tutor, giving students not just personalized learning, but personalized care. Students need to feel seen and valued as people before they can be supported as learners. The best EdTech will lean into this, supporting the whole child. The holy grail of adaptive personalized instruction has not yet been reached, but it is on the horizon. At Cambium we believe the solution is to continue to marry the strengths of technology-enabled instruction with that of a master teacher (and caretaker), arming the teacher with both customized content and specific data on the student. The end result? Both the teacher and student feel more seen, valued and supported.
It can be difficult to have any discussion about the future of education without considering the impacts of COVID-19, and determining if those impacts are one-time events or will exist for years. But we owe it to educators and students across the country to make sustained progress, now and in the years to come.