Paul A. Kirschner & Mirjam Neelen
Paul was interviewed for the Dutch TV. As usual, the interview was quite long and the result was two soundbites 🙂 This is the gist of the interview.
Has education and learning reacted adequately to Covid19?
With Covid19, teachers at all levels had to respond literally overnight to an unknown and unplanned situation and have done an incredible job in adapting their course design and teaching practices. They had to work with what they had and what they had was minimal. They were thrown into the deep end and told to swim!
Teachers had to move from 100% face to face to 100% online learning, sometimes within 24 hours. They had to do so without any training in distance teaching, with nothing in their prior education on it, and no experience in providing for distance learning. And almost every single one of them worked…
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From experience to meaning... 
Hello Pedro, I have a question about this article. Paul is saying that teachers at all levels had to respond literally overnight to an unknown and unplanned situation. In my experience that is not entirely true. Some teachers and entire schools were prepared and had a very good backup. So the question I have is why do you think so many schools and teachers were (or are) not capable of continuing lessons? It’s not that there is no technology available. I’m very curious about the role of schools and learning experts who have been denying to discover the opportunities digital instruments could bring. Why didn’t they adopt any of it during the last twenty years? Why are most schools desiring to get back to the normal situation and get rid of technology?
From what I’ve seen in Flanders, the UK and the US, most schools weren’t prepared at all. The differences between schools were huge, and only a few were ready fast. This was recently also described by the OECD linked to the TALIS-data.
But the second part of your question is not entirely correct: it’s not that they are denying it, but sometimes there is cold feet, sometimes it’s not enough time for PD,…
The desire to get back to normal seems inspired by several reasons. One of the main I’ve learned from a survey of Flemish teachers: the majority prefers IRL teaching.