Visual Thinking Strategies

Online contexts have inevitably been very much on our minds for the past year, as we have passed through the various phases of teaching with COVID-19. We are still not out of the woods but perhaps we can start to think about the future and move away from what has been called Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). This has been characterized as “reactive” or a temporary solution to an immediate problem (Bozkurt and Sharma, 2020) where there was little time for planning. Following the initial impact of the emergency teachers began to look at new tools and the focus was rather on the amazing resources that are available for the online context, and I am not disputing that. Tools such as Kahoot or even simple Jamboards are life-savers, particularly when integrated into a principled learning design. Now, perhaps, though, we can move forward to consider what such a blend might be, where teachers working online and in-person can once more afford the luxury of focusing on the what and who of learning rather than classroom management and the how. We can plan how to use each of the contexts in the best way possible, no longer simply reacting to a crisis putting into practice the lessons we have learned from ERT.