With the reopening of schools, there’s a temptation to return to what we had before. There’s comfort in the idea of returning to what we had before. When people hear we’re going back to in-person instruction in the fall, most parents, teachers, administrators, and students feel relieved and reassured. But if we literally go back — if we turn back the clock to 2019 — we lose out on a unique opportunity to create something new. We’re going to make education better. And to do that, we need to look back objectively and evaluate what we were doing before the pandemic that worked. We also need to look at what went well with our response to the pandemic in terms of technology, delivery options, and instructional settings.

Even with almost every school district returning to in-person learning this fall, we don’t know if a coronavirus variant will push us back into remote learning. We need to recognize that possibility. But to be ready for such an event doesn’t mean going backwards. It means moving forward. Moving on with a plan that takes the prior learning options, what we did well for dynamic learning offerings in a remote setting, and combines them to create something new, adaptable, and flexible. Something better.