An MIT Research Finds that Teachers Have Not Been Valued During the COVID Crisis

IBL News | New York

Researchers from MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab released this month a report investigating teaching and learning during the pandemic.

The primary finding was that “teachers have not been valued as partners in designing educational response to COVID.”

This exclusion from decision-making processes has demoralized teachers, “especially when combined with worsening working conditions and widening inequalities.”

The report — titled “The Teachers Have Something to Say: Lessons Learned from U.S. PK-12 Teachers During the COVID-impacted 2020-21 School Year”— concludes that “teachers have developed a variety of effective instructional strategies in response to the challenging conditions of COVID.”

After noting that “the Delta variant is already disrupting school openings across the country,” the report forecasts that the most effective school systems will be “those that listen seriously to the concerns and insights of teachers and include them in design and decision-making.”