This article about AMIT was recently published in the Israeli newspaper Mekor Rishon.
Among all the difficulties that the coronavirus has brought, there is one area where it forces us to make a change that may be for the better. The virus is forcing the education system—and others—to connect to the 21st century and adapt to the contemporary world. All at once, teachers and students were separated from the desks and chairs, the blackboards and chalk, and were required to produce alternatives.
The AMIT Network, whose educational institutions are spread across the country, began preparing for distance learning even before Corona, as part of a comprehensive change towards adapting education to the modern era. Thanks to this early acquaintance, they have in recent months been able to design a flexible learning path – through the Zoom software or using Microsoft’s “Teams”, in the classroom or in integrated learning.
“Everyone involved in education knows that the system should have gone in this direction years ago, but schools have had a hard time adapting to changes,” says Dani Rahat, Deputy Director of Pedagogy at the AMIT Network. “We are coming to the corona period and its learning challenges like a ripe fruit. Corona can also be a blessing for the education system, as it requires us to get rid of old habits and traditions, and forces the education system to understand that lessons can no longer be taught by means of long lecturers with the teacher standing and talking and the students sitting and listening.”
As Rahat explains, “This is not just a technical change but a fundamental one. We are shifting the center of responsibility from the teacher to the student. If in the classroom the teacher standing next to the blackboard—the source of information—is the source of authority and students sense that the teacher is responsible and above them, now the student himself is standing at the virtual blackboard. He is responsible for his learning, and the teacher is only the facilitator.”
According to the plan, in the coming school year, all the learning at the AMIT Network will move to the digital space. The materials will appear on the student’s screen and he will embark on an independent learning journey according to his ability and pace and with the help of a variety of means—videos, guiding questions and individual and group projects. Teachers, for their part, will be required to produce materials, mentor, guide and provide feedback, as well as focus on students who need close supervision. On days when students do come to the school, they will engage in activities that cannot be held virtually, such as social gatherings, imparting values, personal contact, enrichment hours and more.
“The skills we seek to give our students now,” Rahat continues, “are self-learning. The student will take responsibility for his learning, and it will no longer depend on whether the teacher is interesting or not, or whether the teacher engages him or not. When the learning process is interesting, you do not need a teacher because the process itself serves to develop and empower the student. We have been training our teachers for years not to be merely ‘knowledge transferors’ but characters who develop skills, identities and values. To switch from being teachers to mentors who impart thinking skills and competencies.”
All the Knowledge in One’s Pocket
AMIT’s futurist, if you will, is Dr. Hilit Finkelstein, who is responsible for research and development of innovative online learning. “We could not have imagined this reality in any film, but it certainly requires the learning that we have been preparing for over the past several years, and it is an extraordinary opportunity to adapt ourselves to the new era,” she says. “Since the Internet revolution, the teacher’s status as a knowledge transmitter has deteriorated. Every child has a whole world of content and wisdom in his pocket. Breaking the paradigm of a teacher, who stands and lectures to thirty-something students in a class, is a serious change, but we want the child to learn to carve out and gather on his own true and correct knowledge.”
Even before the pandemic, in the AMIT schools, the walls in some of the classrooms were broken, and they moved to learning in spaces that are more independent in nature. “Of course, as soon as the coronavirus hit, it caused a serious, dramatic change,” said Finkelstein. “The teacher no longer sits in front of the students, who are at home. Studies show that in frontal learning the class is always divided into thirds. A third will understand the teacher and be bored, a third will not understand and be bored, and a third will understand and be at the teacher’s pace. This difficulty is further intensified in the transition to Zoom, because there are many more distractions and technical glitches, especially for students with ADHD. It is also difficult for a teacher to manage the learning, to see what is happening with the students and to check that they are indeed with him. Therefore, there was no choice but to move away from the outdated frontal instruction as much as possible, and adopt another way.”
It is also not easy for students to get used to the change. “We recognize and understand that the students are also surprised by the responsibility we seek to impose on them. More than once they call out and say ‘Wait, the teachers’ job is to pass on the knowledge, and I just have to sit and listen and bring at the end the grades. Why do the teachers suddenly require from us to work?’ It is also difficult for them to grasp that what they will need in the future is not the knowledge that used to be passed from one to another since there was no other way to consume it. Today they need other skills—to acquire knowledge themselves, know what is right and what is not, exercise critical thinking and more.”
For the past two months, AMIT teachers have been designing long, multidisciplinary study units, adapted for independent and meaningful learning. At AMIT, these units are called “100 Units”, a Hebrew acronym for meaningful, long-term and holistic.
“When the student enters the learning space he knows what is going to happen in the coming month, not just in the next lesson,” Rahat expands. “There is a topic and an overarching idea with stations where the student progresses along the way, in which he studies alone and encounters friends and also the teacher. He performs tasks, with the teacher sitting at home and watching what he did. The teacher meets all the students in the morning for ten minutes. The meeting is recorded, and saved in the virtual classroom. From there, the students work and the teacher accompanies them. Eighty percent of the time the learning will be independent and guided, with the teacher supporting those who need help and get on stuck on a particular task.”
Virtual learning also offers a wealth of new possibilities for enrichment and diversification, Rahat explains, and demonstrates this through the study of English. “In a class with 35 students, it is difficult to give each student time to speak English and listen to him. It is also complex to incorporate real-world factors when they are required to come to school. When using the Microsoft ‘Teams’ software, however, ten-minute learning segments can be held, each time with four students, listening to and advancing their English. It is also possible to incorporate fluent English-speaking seniors in a class, and then the virtual classroom has 10 teachers for 35 students. If we divide them into small virtual rooms, we have reached an ideal English lesson. In history classes, it is possible to host grandparents, who will tell first-hand about the era that is taught. Lecturers and guests from all over the country can participate and together create a different, interesting and relevant lesson. ”
From Zoom to Teams
According to Dr. Amnon Eldar, Director General of the AMIT Network, tackling the corona situation is just one example of the challenges of the current era, with automation and the global economy reducing certainty in the labor market. “Despite all the difficulties, students’ dealing with distance learning is the best preparation for the challenges of the 21st century. At the same time, we all have a unique challenge in preserving social-value education and social entrepreneurship, and it is certainly not an easy task in the age of distance learning.”
Ruhama Vogel, principal of AMIT Wasserman Girls in Ma’ale Adumim, was selected by Microsoft as an outstanding principal during the Corona learning period. A film she made with her students about learning in the days of the Corona was adopted by the Ministry of Education as an example of coping properly with learning at this time. She even devised with her students an exceptional project on entrepreneurship, in which she brings them together with successful high-tech companies.
“This is going to be a completely different year from everything we knew, and it will challenge us in every area,” she says. “No conferences, no parties, no big student forums, and in which I am required to manage up close and remotely together. In any field you look there is a challenge, but I choose to believe that this reality will be an opening for big changes and advance the students’ responsibility, learning and technological ability. This year will be different, as in Naomi Shemer’s song ‘B’shana Ha’Ba’ah‘, but it must also be beautiful. This is our prayer.”
How Will the New School Year Actually Look in Your High School?
“I believe that during this year we will completely part ways from Zoom. Although this video software has entered every field that requires group meetings, we want to implement, as in other AMIT schools, the Teams platform.” Most of the work in the AMIT Network is expected to move to the TEAMS work environment, developed by Microsoft. All materials, including the frontal elements, will be recorded and available to the student at all times, and the teachers will be able to keep track of what is being done in the student’s digital notebook.
“Zoom preserves frontal learning, but we are not interested in it anymore,” Vogel says, explaining the meaning of the change. “We’ll see our students at school, but these will be ‘capsule’ meetings of small groups. We want learning journeys that will leave the school and continue at the students’ homes. Even if a student is in quarantine or has Covid-19, she can always fit in, because these studies are not place- dependent.
“When we talk about a learning journey, it comes from a place of exploration, curiosity and self-learning, while giving space to express emotions related to what the student has learned and read. We built an outline in which every student sees the teacher once every two weeks, and parallel to the teaching that takes place in the classroom, other students learn from home. This obligates the teacher to teach differently, and to ensure that in every situation, whoever is at home and whoever in the classroom will learn the same things. True, this is a very challenging job, and it means that the teachers will also set personal goals for the students and direct them to the same self-responsibility we seek for them to discover.”
One of the benefits of the new format of learning is great flexibility for students and teachers. “There are students who have many siblings at home and only one or two computers, and there are teenagers who like to wake up late and work in the evenings. With this learning method, each student can adapt the learning in a way that is convenient for her,” Finkelstein explains.
This arrangement will also be convenient for the young teacher, who is sometimes required to navigate between his or her own children and those in the physical or virtual classroom: “Just as there is flexibility for students regarding when to learn when creating a study schedule and their working hours, we try very hard to be flexible for the teachers as well. Nothing has to be firmly fixed as it was in the pre-corona curriculum.”
The AMIT Network Director General Dr. Amnon Eldar also conveys a message to the teachers. “The transition to a digital learning environment and creating an independent learner is challenging and exciting, but it requires investing more in each student, increasing education hours, and making the personal connection into the living focus of the educational endeavor. The big challenge is to succeed in reaching the student and see him also when distance learning.”
