It’s usually hard to say goodbye to students at the end of a course or a semester because we’ve created a temporary community of meaning. But online education during COVID has shifted many classroom norms dramatically. One such norm is class closures. Goodbye is now emblazoned with the red “Leave Meeting” button. Worse still is the “End Meeting for All” tab that prevents any adult learners from lingering and reduces a class to a screen shot of people’s gaping mouths frozen, sometimes in mid-sentence.

Throughout the COVID crisis, the discomfort of the daily uncertainty was often echoed in the familiar refrain of, “I just can’t wait to go back.” Zoom fatigue, social distancing, and the need to always be on watch, fed on each other in a spiraling yearning for going back to the familiar, to normal. Indeed, many schools did not hesitate to revert back to their “regularly scheduled programs” as soon as the guidelines permitted them, and were I to ask their leadership to reflect on what they learned, their answer would be something like, “We survived.”

Prior to the pandemic, the teachers and administrators at SAR High School frequently discussed student stress. We had, at times, sought to address it through various initiatives, some modest and some bold. As the pandemic raged last spring and we began to imagine the 2020-21 school year, we decided, first, to create more “down time” for students to alleviate the increased stress of this new reality.

As the pandemic broke, Bornblum Jewish Community School was nearing completion of a three-year strategic plan which included the creation of two significant positions: Director of Curriculum and Instruction and Director of Student Services. The school leadership and board committed to the goal of moving forward during the pandemic, and the implantation of those two roles placed the focus squarely on the school’s academic achievement while attending to the individual needs and social and emotional well-being of the students.

Professors Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky argue that the most common downfall of leadership is when leaders treat adaptive challenges as technical ones. That’s when managers notice a cultural problem in their organizations and try to solve them by changing the length of weekly meetings. It’s when schools treat narcotics issues with standalone anti-drug presentations. Ultimately, it’s when we choose to apply technical fixes instead of facing the reality that a paradigm shift is likely necessary.

Imagine an elevator pitch from a company looking to differentiate itself five years from now:
“Hire us for a competitive edge and benefit from our revolutionary approach. Our organization believes that a face-to-face, in-person relationship will give you a qualitative advantage over all our competitors. We offer an in-person, personal touch. Not just a face on a screen.”

Like any new invention or technology used in school, Zoom has enormous benefits, but also has unanticipated downsides. It enables students to stay current in their courses from anywhere in the globe, avoiding disruptions and missed classes. At the same time, both teacher instruction and student learning face challenges when done over Zoom, where students are often preoccupied by other apps on their phones and computers and distracted by whatever else may be going on in the location they are Zooming from.