Post-lockdown developments in curriculum and assessment are setting the stage for flexible, contemporary educational programmes.
We expect all ACS students to become more effective learners. Last academic year’s forced experience of distance learning for all age groups presented enormous obstacles. Yet for many teachers and students, lockdown was a time to develop new skills and chart exceptional progress. ACS students completed priority curriculum standards and remained engaged at high levels through the end of the school year.
Students grew more proficient at managing their own learning and daily schedules. Parents became even better informed about their children’s classes, and more intimately acquainted with their children as individual learners.
Our aim is to bring this experience forward into the new school year – not to go back, but to drive forward. School divisions are designing strategies to diagnose unfinished learning, accelerate learning gains, manage significant transitions, ensure social-emotional foundations, support vulnerable students, and help a few students with notable distance learning fragility to get back on track.
ACS teachers are developing new strategies and techniques that support more personalisation, predictive analytics, mastery-oriented design, competency-based standards, micro-credentialing, and gamification of the curriculum. In addition, we have launched an extended exploration of blended learning that sets the stage for maximum flexibility and delivers important benefits in multiple scenarios.
In a blended model, learning happens both online (at a distance) and at school (in person) together in a unified instructional design. Online activities do not take the place of face-to-face instruction; instead, the two ways of delivering and interacting with the curriculum complement each other They truly “blend” to create an enriched and more personalised learning experience – often driven by students’ own choices and changing needs.
Blended learning
Learning and teaching must remain dynamic and flexible, able to meet the needs of teachers and students whether they are all together in school - or not.