At the 50th St. Gallen Symposium, educators, researchers and entrepreneurs discussed ways to build back and build better education systems in a post-pandemic school environment.

The coronavirus pandemic has disrupted educational systems at a global scale, harming students’ development in one way or another; either socio-emotionally from living in a world of uncertainty, or cognitively, facing worsened learning conditions. Due to an abrupt transition from in-person learning to remote-learning, even students from wealthier countries faced learning difficulties. The most digital schools were not prepared for a 100% remote experience. Many households did not have a conducive environment for learning.

At the 50th St. Gallen Symposium, the Lemann Foundation, Microsoft and the St. Gallen Symposium hosted an Interactive Session to explore ways of reverting learning losses in the wake of Covid-19 and build back better education systems worldwide.

Multiple Dimensions of Learning Loss Worldwide

Prof. Meira Levinson, Professor of Education at Harvard University, set the scene for participants. Drawing from UNESCO data on the duration and intensity of school closures in more than 170 countries, she explained that there had been “huge amounts of learning loss” around the world. Four kinds of learning were lost during school closures: academic learning (including in math, spelling, reading and other core skills), social learning (to navigate conflicts and interact among peers), emotional learning (such as students’ self-confidence and mental health), and other forms of learning such as those targeted towards students with special needs. The pandemic has also increased inequalities among students – both within and across countries – and left many behind.

While digital technologies have allowed for a certain continuation of learning even in times of school closures, she emphasised that the Covid experience had a quite sobering effect on advocates of digital education and that learning remained a very social process. The big question, according to Prof. Levinson, was now whether stakeholders opted for building back school systems to “recover the status quo”, or to build education better and improve curricula and pedagogies towards self-directed, project-based and mastery-oriented curricula. The disruptions caused by Covid-19, she noted, had the potential to inspire reforms to existing institutions, allowing kids to be more connected to their families, learn in more authentic environments and be “more out and about” in nature and in society.

Connecting Global Knowledge with Local Solutions

Through a design-thinking process developed for the St. Gallen Symposium’s Interactive Sessions, and facilitated by a team of Microsoft Digital Advisors, a cross-generational group of participants from the realms of education, business, science and public policy then moved from framing the precise problem they wanted to address towards ideating solutions.

One working group focused on ways to better integrate the potential of digital technologies in education with holistic pedagogies for a more inclusive and just educational system. To achieve this, industry-academia partnerships and ways to make solving educational challenge a business and investment case were considered essential.

Allowing educators to develop the right abilities to address different kinds of learning losses was the focus of a second group’s ideation work. To this end, they thought about ways to identify the most crucial skills for teachers in various local realities and new models to educate the educators to accelerate learning in a post-pandemic school environment.

A third working group highlighted the need to solve a global learning loss crisis locally, creating a global platform for knowledge sharing that can empower educators and policy-makers in designing local, context-specific approaches. As local public leaders and principals make choices and develop solutions, their lessons learned could again feed into global repositories of knowledge and be multiplied and disseminated by international organisations and multi-stakeholder partnerships.

Graphic recorder Markus Engelberger captured the workshop’s results, which will support the Lemann Foundation and other stakeholders to further drive forward their mission of a more equitable and inclusive education system, in Brazil and globally.

If you would like to engage with the St. Gallen Symposium on these and other challenges, including in the format of an Interactive Session, please reach out to [email protected].