Teach Middle East Magazine Apr - Jun 2020 Issue 3 Volume 7 | Page 8

Administrator's Corner
CREATING A BETTER EDUCATIONAL
FUTURE OUT OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS
BY: JAMES MACDONALD
I
t has been said over and over
recently that we are living in
unprecedented times. We are not
sure how long the COVID-19 crisis
will last, but with discussions revolving
around ‘flattening the curve’, there
is an acknowledgment that we will,
eventually, come out on the other side.
It is a question of when, not if. 
One thing I’ve learned by leading
schools through campus closures
twice before (first in Japan in 2011,
followed by Thailand in 2014) is that,
early on, it is important to think on
two levels: dealing with the urgent
and immediate (and being in crisis
mode will take most of your time
and energy) 
while also finding the
headspace to think strategically.
Regardless of which phase of the crisis
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Term 3 Apr - Jun 2020
your school community is in now,
you need to be thinking about what
educational future will be created
post-crisis. There will be a future 'new
normal'; it is just a question of whether
or not you craft it. And to do so, you
need a vision.
Creating a vision in
challenging times
Consider this idea: What if, back at
the beginning of the school year,
your school’s leadership team held
a retreat and came up with the
somewhat crazy idea to close the
campus for four weeks in April and
implement e-learning? Could you
justify it? Maybe not fully, but I suspect
you could find different reasons to
support it: developing technology
Class Time
skills, improving independent learning
habits, embedding digital citizenship,
providing
amazing
professional
growth for teachers, and last but not
least, throwing off the shackles of the
daily schedule. Whatever justifications
you personally come up with, through
this thought experiment, are your de-
facto vision. 
To help share your vision with others,
a great technique is to create a ‘vision
narrative’ by describing an hour-by-
hour day in the life of an individual
student (or two) post-crisis. How do
their routines and learning change?
This exercise could also include
teachers, leaders and parents. The
vision becomes tangible pretty quickly
when you have a narrative.