Covid’s impact on independent education: a Kodak moment?

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [04:04]So how did we manage that? I'm only going to refer to part of the plan because it's, it's really the only part that was relevant and necessary at the time. And step one for us was to firm up the backend. And I'm not referring to my personal gym plan at that point. I'm referring to the admin side of what needed to happen for us to become operational online in the event of a full lockdown. And I need to just diverge for a moment here and give you a little bit of context. Edu Inc is considered quite a tech school. We are up there, we pilot tech for global companies. We've taken children to Google, we've spent time in Google offices. We are very tech orientated. However, pre-COVID and post-COVID, there are no cell phones in our classrooms. If teachers prefer to work with textbooks, they are hard copy textbooks, and that might sound quite paradoxical, being a tech school who still doesn't allow phones in class and still has textbooks, but there is a philosophy behind that, and it's because we believe that we need to teach the children that tech is a tool, it's not a crutch, which the cell phones often become. What it means is that pre-COVID, although our entire back office was G Suite, we went with the Google option, Not all the teachers were operating fully on Google Classroom because we went to a school that had iPads, laptops, et cetera, as a matter of course. We weren't using e-books as textbooks. So we were probably still running at about seventy percent paper and pen before COVID. The other reason we do that is because our matrix still write paper and pen finals. So to only be using e-books and tablets and laptops meant that throughout their school career, we're kind of teaching them how to drive a car, and then they get to finals and we're saying, right, go and fly that aeroplane.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [06:16]Step two was to establish a very fast communication channel. That reached all the stakeholders simultaneously and easily. We all know that newsletters and emails sit in parents' junk files, out boxes, they don't, they're not looking at that. we had played around with a little bit of podcasting before we went, before COVID, and we chose this as our communication channel for what we needed to do in COVID for the fast pivot. And the reason we did that is because we could send these podcasts via the class WhatsApp groups, Facebook, email, put onto the website, wherever it was easiest for the parent to access, they could get it. And we made it available on multiple platforms, iTunes, Spotify, CastBox, whatever they could access, that's what they used. The morning of the Monday the 23rd, Sunday night, president announced lockdown, Monday morning, teachers are now making sure the kids have what they need, in terms of how to access Google Classroom, just checking out all of that to make sure the kids are completely au fait with all of that. Gersh and I were in the studio trying to record a very calm, educational podcast to send out to our parents on what our plan was going to be, and we made sure that that went out before the end of school on the Monday. Step three was our soft test, and what we did there was, in the podcast, we said, children must bring whatever device they plan to use for the lockdown. To school on Tuesday. And that was a little messy. I mean, obviously, we had children with iPads and some children with laptops, different types of laptops. We even had a few kids lugging in, you know, desktops for the day, just because that's what they would be using during the, the lockdown. Some kids had nothing. And in that instance, we signed out school laptops, school, Chromebooks and things for those kids to have access. One of the quick actions, the very quick actions that we did take was that we'd been looking for an opportunity for some time to incorporate things like Udemy into our curriculum, not in a, as an extramural, but actually as part of our curriculum, because we wanted to expose our kids to how easy it is to access online international learning and get recognized through certification for that. So in the Monday podcast, we told the parents that softer subjects, like creative arts, for example, and a couple of others, would be removed from the curriculum and replaced with a Udemy course. So on the Tuesday during the soft test, we were also getting kids logged on to, you know, getting them access, getting them registered, getting their passwords, and they could choose whatever course they wanted. Of course, remember at this time, we were still thinking that the lockdown was three weeks long. Then was our hard test, and the hard test was Wednesday the 25th, which really ended up our first day of online schooling, or rather schooling from home. Here the idea was to run the timetable as normal with the children at home, so that any, again, any glitches or issues or whatever training we needed to be doing with the children could happen as part of our hard test.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [11:32]For us, the, the, these objectives were very clear right from the start, and the first one was that our learners may not miss a single day or a single hour of school, and that a complete timetable must run at all times. The second one was that the quality of the teaching and the assessments and the learning experience as a whole would not suffer due to the different delivery method. And the third one was that the online experience must replicate the classroom as closely as possible at all times. Those were the three main objectives that we kept putting out to the staff. This is what we're trying to do. This is what we're trying to do. Are you replicating the classroom experience? But we also realized that to make those three objectives possible, we had to have a few things in line. And the first thing, of course, was the staff buy-in. That was a biggie. There was no point in even trying to change objectives if we didn't have the staff on board. The second thing was we needed a very clear understanding of what the teachers at home tech needs were. There's no point in expecting them to, you know, provide quality education when we haven't equipped them to do so. Then we're just setting our own staff up to fail. So we had identified real technical specifications like two screens, et cetera, et cetera, which we then supplied. We actually put fiber into all of their homes because we realized that ten megs per person was the minimum. So if there was a family of four, that family needed at least forty megs going. Otherwise, your cameras didn't work, you know, there were, there were issues. We needed a clear understanding of what our teachers' skill levels were in this space, because it's all very well and good to, for the teachers to say, oh, yeah, I've got this, I know Google Classroom. But when it comes to the crunch, and the child is sitting on the other end of their Google Classroom, it's a different story, because now the teacher's not really being a teacher, they're being an IT specialist. So what was the level of their skill? We needed a very clear communication with our parents in terms of what they needed at home for us to achieve what we were trying to achieve. And to do this, we actually established a partnership with a local computer hardware supplier to get things at discounted prices. And if you remember, in that first six months of COVID, educational suppliers were throwing things at us. When I say we put fiber in our teachers' homes, I think we paid for one or two. The rest the companies paid for. And we needed clear communication to our learners about online behaviors that we needed for this to work. Things like get your PCs and things running half an hour before school, so that if an update starts, you're not sitting during class unable to connect.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [15:48]And then on the very last Saturday, November 2020, we got all the teachers in, and we did a design workshop, and I was quite concerned. I thought, these teachers are beyond exhausted. They are broken tired. But here's me calling them in and asking them to be highly creative in a design workshop. But there was there was something magical that happened then because we were bringing them in to a vision that we all shared and they were so excited to be part of that vision that they all just the the A game was brought to the design training and we had a fantastic day we started by designing we said to them this is your magic wand moment here's your Lego build the the best hybrid classroom you can think of they did that we then put them into another classroom with every piece of technology we owned in the school just dumped it all in various classrooms and we said build build what does it look like for you so they just spent time building and testing and iterating and changing and testing and iterating and we made some very interesting discoveries that day like the fact that The visuals are not what make hybrid work, it's the sound, the sound is the challenge. we did a whole lot of things that day, and oh, and that other thing was the, the communication, your tech for communication needed to be at the back of the room, not at the front of the room with the teacher, so some interesting discoveries that day. But it allowed us to then come back at in January of 2021, where we had actually then built some of those classrooms, not the whole school yet, we had put a few classrooms up, and according to the spec that the teachers had helped put together, so that made them excited to try and use it for, for real. It also meant that January 2021, we could pivot within a day, be fully online running, which was just as well, if you remember, because they closed us down again in January of 2021.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [27:44]So here's a story you all know about to some degree, Eastman Kodak. I'm referring to a case study that I was busy with recently. Kodak was founded in 1892 and went bankrupt in 2012. So that company was 120 years old when it died. Kodak was as good as it got in the photographic industry. Pretty much like independent education is as good as it gets globally, and we have plenty of schools over 100 years old. I'm going to read directly from the study now. Investigations into why the giant in the photography industry failed revealed that even though the company was well aware of the world and that it was changing, the company was reluctant to leave its lucrative production of photographic film. With the onset of the digital revolution in the 1990s, the photography industry was facing disruptive change. How many times did we hear that phrase during COVID, disruptive change? As the world moved to digital imaging, Kodak failed to realize the impact of that change and developed strategies that could have helped it adapt to these changes and stay ahead. Kodak's management was so bent on holding onto their traditions that they did not grasp the potential that digital technology could have had on their industry, and this inability to keep up with the changes brought about by disruptive technology led to its ultimate failure. So our pre-COVID threat to education had a lot to do with what I've just read, perhaps an inability or an unwillingness to keep up with necessary change, to remain relevant, to let go, because this is the way we've always done it. And like most human behavior, we can actually attribute this to some psychology. There is a way of thinking. That defines this and it's called defensive theory. Some of you may have come across it when you studied leadership theory. Brodbeck and McGill define defensive theory as the tendency to overlook the obvious or the they call it the taken for granted. The taken for granted are like the the fish in the water, the fish can't see the water, it's just there. And taken for granted are difficult and painful to dislodge and more so the longer they've been there. And the prospect of really taking a long hard look at the taken for granted is very threatening to us on a psychological level for four reasons. We may lose control, we may not win, we may not be able to suppress negative feelings and we may not be rational.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [35:58]The first one is that hybrid dissolves borders, as demonstrated by our kids out of province and out of country. Fully integrated hybrid classrooms mean that learners can attend school from wherever they are. Families can semigrate, emigrate, parents can go off on contract work, children can go with them because they still attend school with you. What we do is we still give them the option of coming onto campus when they are around and that's they're very happy to do that. It's not as complicated as you might think. It takes a very simple spec of hardware that your parent takes off to your partner shop, they fill that list like a stationery list, app reduce prices because of the partnership and it's a win win all round. The second one is that hybrid maximizes resources. We often complain that we struggle to find teachers, especially in our our African languages. We are not moving forward as quickly as we should be in that space because we can't find the teachers who are suitably qualified and of a high quality. Or that that is too expensive, or that as a school we can't afford to bring in the new subject, these are all things that I've heard repeatedly. In a hybrid space, this allows us to link classes and have one teacher delivering lessons to more than one class in real time at the same time. Why can't, hypothetically, St Peter's grade five Zulu class be linked with our grade five Zulu class? We split the cost of that, we're saving resources on that, and the teacher using the online platform, whether it's Google or whatever the agreement is, is putting the work up, marking the work, doing the assessment, doing everything else as she would as if she was teaching those kids all in the same room. Hybrid allows for best practice to be shared. Again, best practice is something we talk about a lot, and it's absolutely valuable and vital to what we do. We all have that particular teacher of that particular subject who teaches that particular concept exceptionally well. Imagine a world where we could deliver that lesson to several classes at the same time across schools. Having a guest teacher online. Again, we've actually done this, and it's not difficult, and it's very productive. And for us as leaders, the extension of that is it allows us to take our peer observation to the next level as well. And the fourth one is that hybrid just makes us better. Teachers training and professional development is easier to access for teachers because it's not localized to one specific school or organization. You get the benefit of multiple perspectives because you're not all sitting as one staff in the same staff room trying to train. Courses that teachers normally miss because of geographical constraints or time restrictions, that all goes away because the courses are now accessible and most importantly, they're being offered at a reduced cost.

Jacqueline Aitchison, host · [46:41]and then your last question was about the online offerings. You know, we made a distinction early on as well. I think we had one parent who came in once and she said, you know, my child's doing so well online. I think I might remove them and put them in an online school. And our response to her was, your child's never done online school. Your child's done schooling from home. That's an entirely different proposition. And that opened the conversation to explain the difference that we, this is all still being facilitated by the school. It's entirely school driven. We are still the professionals in that space, whereas in the online space, it's an entirely different dynamic. We can't, I've, I've decided personally I can't focus on, what's happening in that space because, yes, we are all losing children to that space. How sustainable that is, is another question. just this morning I was talking to the ops manager and he was talking about seeing ads for an online school and all the advertising had little children in the ads. And I think we all know how unsustainable that was. So, yeah, I'm kind, I'm, I'm kind of feeling that we're riding a wave on that one and that it might be that home school influx that we had a few years ago, we might just see a reintroduction of a whole lot of online schools, children who think, oh, this isn't quite what I thought it was. So I think we, if we can ride the wave, we'll be okay there.