Learning to build back better futures for education: lessons from educational innovation during the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic caused serious disruptions to education around the world. On short notice, and without a playbook to draw on, teachers, schools, and education systems had to quickly create alternative education arrangements to sustain the right of education during the crisis created by the rapidly spreading plague. While the shortcomings of these quickly improved arrangements to educate remotely are becoming increasingly obvious, less attention has been given to the ways in which these novel ways to educate represent an innovation with implications for the efforts to build a more relevant and effective education system. The goal of this book is to examine the potential of the innovations generated during the pandemic. Drawing on a systematic analysis of 31 educational innovations that emerged during the pandemic, we examine their value not just to mitigate the impact of the crisis, but to build back better. The result of a collaborative effort of UNESCO’s International Bureau of Education and of the Global Education Innovation Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, this book makes visible some of the innovation dividend generated by educators during the pandemic while offering a methodology for others to advance knowledge about what education systems learned during the pandemic. The new report of UNESCO’s International Commission on the Futures of Education Reimagining our futures together: a new social contract for education calls for broad based and inclusive social dialogue on how to transform education to address the most significant challenges of our times. This book is a contribution to that dialogue that shows that the transformation of education environments that address such challenges began amidst the deep disruptions caused by the greatest education calamity in the history of public education.