Will Pandemic-Driven Remote Instruction* Alter Familiar Teaching Practices in American Schools?
Yes and no. Sounds like a mealy-mouthed answer to the question, but stick with me for a moment.
Background. Only twice in the past century has technology been the primary medium of instruction for each and every teacher and student. One was planned and the other unplanned.
In the mid-1960s, the federal government planned and then established television as the primary means of instruction in American Samoa. Daily lessons would appear on a monitor in the front of the classroom airing what content and skills were to be learned by elementary and secondary school students. A classroom teacher would then follow up the televised lesson. By the mid-1970s, Samoan schools had reverted back to in-person classroom instruction with television as a supplementary device.
A generation earlier, the unplanned example was in Chicago during the polio epidemic of 1937 when nearly 325,000 students were home for three weeks. The radio in the classroom became the primary teaching device. Once school resumed, goodbye radio; it lost its central place in the teaching of Chicago CONTINUE READING: Will Pandemic-Driven Remote Instruction* Alter Familiar Teaching Practices in American Schools? | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice
