Have you ever ridden a bicycle when the gears aren’t aligned properly and so every full cycle of the peddles ends up with a jarring ‘clunk’ that breaks the flow of your peddling? If you have, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, imagine walking and every second step with your right foot it feels like someone tapped your knee with a finger. At first it’s uncomfortable, then you just kind of accept it as the norm.

I feel like March was a long month of the gears being misaligned, but we just got used to it. Now the Match break is over we are back at school and we have to adjust to a whole new misalignment with students staying home and the reality that Covid-19 will likely impact us for months to come. So April begins with a new misalignment that we need to adjust to, and while we know the ride won’t be smooth, we know we will get used to it.

I am excited about how this year will change the dynamic of teaching and learning in the future. In 2011, I wrote that ‘the future of education will be open and distributed’. In this post I said,

“Within 5 years, every student from Grade 6 or 7 right up to Grade 12 will be involved in some level of distributed learning.”

I was wrong. Things go much slower than I envisioned. In 2014 I wrote about ‘flexible learning opportunities‘ and I shared this graphic:

I said in the post:

“I think we are only 5-7 years away from the term ‘blended learning’ being obsolete in the same way that the term Distance Learning is now.  Here is an analogy to think about: The move from ‘Distance’ to ‘Distributive’ learning was the switch from having a ‘phone extension chord’ to the cordless phone. The switch from ‘Distributive’ to ‘Blended’ is the switch from a cordless home phone to cell phones. Now, the ubiquitous use of data-rich phones everywhere is similar to the leap we will see.“

It looks like we might get there.

While I think that teaching students, who are not coming to our schools daily, is going to finally catapult us forward in ways that I thought would have happened years ago, I also think it will take some time to get over the feeling that gears are misaligned. In fact, for the next while, it’s going to feel like we are riding up hill in the wrong, clunky gear.

I’m excited about where we are headed. I’m just feeling like the ride to our destination will be a bit uncomfortable. Hopefully by May we feel like our gears are aligned.