Resources to help you navigate the pandemic
Designed to equip you with the tools necessary to navigate the ever-changing educational climate, this resource library houses relevant titles, journal articles, and opinion pieces.
New Books
Opinions and Commentary
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What are schools doing to tackle the "Big 5" areas of crisis in our society and in our schools? Dive into three avenues serving as a stepping stone to addressing these issues. Principal Connections, 2021.
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SEL is aimed at developing skills that enable young people to understand and express their own and each other’s emotions, manage feelings, learn self-regulation, and build positive relationships. SEL has become a front-line effort to battle the mental health epidemic that is plaguing our young people. In this piece, Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley explore the pertinent question in regards to SEL work: is it enough?
Published in The Washington Post, December 17, 2021.
Published in The Washington Post, December 17, 2021.
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Covid-19 has wreaked havoc on education – but is it possible to ensure that the next pandemic won't do the same? Published by TES. December 11 2020.
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How are schools mitigating the negative effects of technological overload, distraction, and addiction? Explore Andy Hargreaves' proposal for striking the right balance on technology usage. Published by Education Week, November 5, 2021.
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What would a world look like without teachers and schools? On World Teachers Day, Andy Hargreaves reassesses the unique value of teachers and teaching after children and families in many countries had experienced months without them. Published by Education International. October 3 2020.
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Canada’s schools are world renowned for high performance. But some provincial governments show signs of using the coronavirus pandemic to start to privatize the system. Here’s their 4-part playbook for how to ruin a public system in order to open and expand private options. Published in The Star, September 23, 2020
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This revealing feature in the UK’s leading education magazine, Schoolsweek, explores the impact of Andy Hargreaves’s working class upbringing on his values, his education, and his work as a an educator, researcher and policy advisor. Published in Schoolsweek, September 22.
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At a time when teachers, students and families have never experienced more problems with digital learning, reformers are proposing digital learning as our educational future. What’s going on? This op ed explores what unique value digital learning will have to offer after the pandemic – and what it won’t.
Published in The Washington Post. August 6, 2020.
Published in The Washington Post. August 6, 2020.
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The evidence against streaming is overwhelming. But the opposite strategy hasn’t always been implemented or supported well in secondary schools. Getting rid of streaming is important but not enough. Effective destreaming needs to come next. Published in Globe and Mail. July 9, 2020.
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Why he wrote it, and what it says about the learning and life of people like him during his own upbringing and for all students and families who struggle today. Published in International Education News. June 24, 2020.
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Teaching used to be an individual occupation, performed alone, in isolation. Dan Lortie, a Chicago sociologist who wrote the most cited book on teaching, said this in 1975. In doing so, he sparked a global movement to build and strengthen the collaboration and collegiality we see everywhere in teaching today.
Published in the UK Times Education Supplement. May 19. 2020.
Published in the UK Times Education Supplement. May 19. 2020.
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In the early days of the pandemic when kids were suddenly all sent home, people floundered about what to do. In this op ed, Andy Hargreaves offered some early insight that mainly still holds on the best and worst ways to address learning at home.
Published in The Washington Post. April 17. 2020.
Published in The Washington Post. April 17. 2020.
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What really big issues and opportunities await us once the pandemic is over? We have learned that technology is a mixed blessing, that vocational education will make a comeback, and that there are three more things besides. Read what’s next after the pandemic here.
Published in The Conversation. April 16. 2020.
Published in The Conversation. April 16. 2020.
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An early contribution to help parents and teachers think about what they can do and must avoid during the early days of a pandemic.
Published in UK Times Education Supplement April 3. 2020.
Published in UK Times Education Supplement April 3. 2020.
Journal Articles
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This paper draws on current international analysis of pandemic issues in education, and on recent arguments by critical economists and political scientists, to examine two scenarios for educational policy beyond the coronavirus pandemic. One looming possibility is an onrush of austerity, deep cuts to public education, financial hardship for the working and middle classes, and a range of private sector, including online answers to public problems in education, leading to more inequity, and an even wider digital divide. The pandemic, it is argued, is already being used as a strategy to bring about educational privatization by stealth by mismanaging return-to-school strategies and by overselling the effectiveness of online and private school alternatives. The alternative is public education investment to pursue prosperity and better quality of life for everyone. This will reduce inequality instead of increasing it, close the digital divide that COVID-19 has exposed, and encourage balanced technology use to enhance good teaching rather than hybrid or blended technology delivery that may increasingly replace such teaching.
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Hargreaves, A. and Fullan, M. (2020), "Professional capital after the pandemic: revisiting and revising classic understandings of teachers' work", Journal of Professional Capital and Community, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print.
How has teaching changed during the pandemic? What assumptions has the pandemic challenged? What questions does it raise? In this article, Grawemeyer Award joint winners Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan revisit the classic and most-cited text on the nature of teaching by Dan Lortie who passed away in 2020 at the age of 94. Three of Lortie’s insights are addressed in this article.
How has teaching changed during the pandemic? What assumptions has the pandemic challenged? What questions does it raise? In this article, Grawemeyer Award joint winners Andy Hargreaves and Michael Fullan revisit the classic and most-cited text on the nature of teaching by Dan Lortie who passed away in 2020 at the age of 94. Three of Lortie’s insights are addressed in this article.
- Teacher collaboration that was scarce in Lortie’s day in the 1970s has not only increased since then but accelerated even more in the pandemic as teachers have sought each other out for answers to novel challenges.
- People, including parents, learn what it’s like to teach by having watched teachers teach them. During coronavirus, parents have been watching teachers teach online that is not usually the way teachers most wish to teach. This has generated stress and tension. But it has also raised questions about what might be a more productive form of teacher transparency than traditional meetings and report cards after COVID-19.
- COVID has threatened what Lortie called the psychic rewards of teaching that come from having visible impact on student learning and engagement. This is one of he greatest weaknesses of online, remote learning and raises questions about how and how much remote options should be scaled up in the future.
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Hargreaves, A. Large-scale assessments and their effects: The case of mid-stakes tests in Ontario. J Educ Change 21, 393–420 (2020).
High stakes are a common target of widespread criticism. One way some systems have tried to avoid the negative side effects of high stakes tests is by having mid stakes tests that don’t exact punitive consequences for schools and educators who struggle and that provide support and assistance instead. Based on quantitative and qualitative research in 10 Ontario school districts over a decade, this article examines the impact the province’s EQAO test in elementary schools. In the early years, the test and associated measures yielded some benefits for raising achievement and narrowing achievement gas, especially in literacy. Senior administrators also felt the test enabled them to establish a focus for intervention and improvement.
However, there were serious and increasing negative side effects with regard to teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, student and teacher anxiety, cultural bias of test items and language, avoidance of innovation in the years during and immediately before the grades being tested, and excessive concentration on raising the scores of children just below the point of proficiency at the expense of even higher-needs children. The article concludes that the EQAO test, like similar tests is an industrial age anachronism in a 21st century world and reports the province’s positive policy response to the findings at the time.
High stakes are a common target of widespread criticism. One way some systems have tried to avoid the negative side effects of high stakes tests is by having mid stakes tests that don’t exact punitive consequences for schools and educators who struggle and that provide support and assistance instead. Based on quantitative and qualitative research in 10 Ontario school districts over a decade, this article examines the impact the province’s EQAO test in elementary schools. In the early years, the test and associated measures yielded some benefits for raising achievement and narrowing achievement gas, especially in literacy. Senior administrators also felt the test enabled them to establish a focus for intervention and improvement.
However, there were serious and increasing negative side effects with regard to teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, student and teacher anxiety, cultural bias of test items and language, avoidance of innovation in the years during and immediately before the grades being tested, and excessive concentration on raising the scores of children just below the point of proficiency at the expense of even higher-needs children. The article concludes that the EQAO test, like similar tests is an industrial age anachronism in a 21st century world and reports the province’s positive policy response to the findings at the time.
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Shirley, D., Hargreaves, A., & Washington, S. (2020). The sustainability and non-sustainability of teachers’ and leaders’ wellbeing, Teaching and Teacher Education, March
Drawing on interviews with over 200 educators in Ontario, Canada, about how they deal with student wellbeing, this paper highlights issues that teachers and leaders raised about their own wellbeing. As is true for many other front-line professionals, teachers’ wellbeing is always at risk because some aspects of the job can be “heartbreaking”. Schools and districts provided some responses to teacher wellbeing such as yoga, online courses in mindfulness, and so on. But educators report that the major threats to and solutions for wellbeing are in how their work is organized and what is expected of them in these times.
Wellbeing is enhanced when teachers feel able to teach what they believe in and not, for instance, to have to prepare students or standardized tests that teachers believe harm young children. It is enhanced when teachers have opportunities and time to work in a collaborative environment supported by their peers. And wellbeing is strengthened when teachers feel trusted to exercise professional judgments together on behalf of their students rather than being overloaded with too many top-down initiatives.
Drawing on interviews with over 200 educators in Ontario, Canada, about how they deal with student wellbeing, this paper highlights issues that teachers and leaders raised about their own wellbeing. As is true for many other front-line professionals, teachers’ wellbeing is always at risk because some aspects of the job can be “heartbreaking”. Schools and districts provided some responses to teacher wellbeing such as yoga, online courses in mindfulness, and so on. But educators report that the major threats to and solutions for wellbeing are in how their work is organized and what is expected of them in these times.
Wellbeing is enhanced when teachers feel able to teach what they believe in and not, for instance, to have to prepare students or standardized tests that teachers believe harm young children. It is enhanced when teachers have opportunities and time to work in a collaborative environment supported by their peers. And wellbeing is strengthened when teachers feel trusted to exercise professional judgments together on behalf of their students rather than being overloaded with too many top-down initiatives.
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Hargreaves, A. and Shirley, D. (2020), "Leading from the middle: its nature, origins and importance", Journal of Professional Capital and Community, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 92-114.
We live in a time where our educational goals are becoming complex. They embrace creativity, wellbeing and responding to increasing diversity – not just raising achievement in literacy and mathematics. Under these conditions, top-down leadership can no longer deal with the speed of change, the complexity of goals, or the diversity of local circumstances. Based on research with 10 school districts in Ontario and development work in Scotland, Wales and the US Pacific NW, this paper points to practices of leading from the middle across schools and districts that provide a more promising solution.
LfM doesn’t just connect the top and bottom and make the system more efficient and coherent. Working together, districts and schools within and across districts drive change within directions established at the top. They are at the centre and core of change, not just a level connecting the change efforts of others. They take initiative instead f only implementing initiatives. They respond to local diversity instead of adopting standardized solutions. And they take transparent, collective responsibility for each other’s success. LfM needs deliberately designed structures for collaboration, habits or cultures of collaboration, and a guiding philosophy about bringing leadership closer to students, teaching and learning everywhere.
We live in a time where our educational goals are becoming complex. They embrace creativity, wellbeing and responding to increasing diversity – not just raising achievement in literacy and mathematics. Under these conditions, top-down leadership can no longer deal with the speed of change, the complexity of goals, or the diversity of local circumstances. Based on research with 10 school districts in Ontario and development work in Scotland, Wales and the US Pacific NW, this paper points to practices of leading from the middle across schools and districts that provide a more promising solution.
LfM doesn’t just connect the top and bottom and make the system more efficient and coherent. Working together, districts and schools within and across districts drive change within directions established at the top. They are at the centre and core of change, not just a level connecting the change efforts of others. They take initiative instead f only implementing initiatives. They respond to local diversity instead of adopting standardized solutions. And they take transparent, collective responsibility for each other’s success. LfM needs deliberately designed structures for collaboration, habits or cultures of collaboration, and a guiding philosophy about bringing leadership closer to students, teaching and learning everywhere.
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