17.09.2020

Beacon Talks raises Post-COVID-19 Education Challenges and Opportunities

The Beacon Talks “Live” with guest Claudia Costin brought important reflections on how education will be after the pandemic and, especially, how schools are dealing with a new way of teaching: for now, fully online. In order to address these challenges and opportunities, the guest who spoke with Beacon’s principal Vera Giusti, was the director and founder of the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Educational Policies of Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV) and former director of the Education at World Bank Group.

Claudia started the “Live” with an introduction to the current world context: automation and robotization have shown a new generation that demands more sophisticated skills, such as more in-depth analysis, critical and systemic thinking and collaborative problem solving. Therefore, it is essential that education looks at the need for innovation. And these are the competences that the International Baccalaureate Organization (IBO) programs, such as the Primary Years Programme and the Diploma Programme, adopted by Beacon, develop with students.

Taking a step back, before the pandemic, Claudia commented on the Brazilian educational background, Among the 79 countries that participated in the latest edition of “Pisa” (“Programa Internacional de Avaliação de Alunos”), an international assessment regarding quality in education that allows comparisons among countries, Brazil is placed in the last 20 positions in the ranking, and is the second most unequal. “The result of “Pisa”, being centered on skills and not on the curriculum, showed us that Brazil is not there yet. In other words, we already had a huge educational challenge prior to the pandemic; now, what has been done is “damage mitigation” and we won’t be able to have a fairer country if we do not reduce educational inequality”, she says.

A major highlight of the conversation was about the innovation opportunities that the crisis provided, such as digital inclusion. In Paraná, a state considered to be rich, 95% of students from public schools were accessing the digital platform, and 5% were also using other resources, such as television, radio and workbooks. At the other end, in Maranhão, 61% of High School students from public schools are on the digital platform – also using other resources.

“Several teachers were forced to develop a fundamental competence for students, which is to learn how to reinvent themselves. If jobs are going to be extinguished at some point due to the automation and robotization of the fourth Industrial Revolution, our students will need to reinvent themselves simultaneously. When students see their own teachers reinventing themselves now, in the face of the pandemic, is a great example that it is also possible for them in the future”.

At the end of the “Live”, Claudia highlighted the importance of resilience nowadays which, according to her, involves dialogues with two situations: looking at the difficulty, knowing how to overcome it, making mistakes and learning from one’s mistakes. “We had a very rich “learning by doing” process. For example, we cannot affirm that online classes began with quality, but there was a learning curve”, she explains. “Nobody had a contingency plan for this situation, but we have been building this together, with partner parents, thus providing even more the union between these parents and students”.

Click here to access the full video.