Justin Gimelstob Explains How COVID-19 Is Impacting Students’ Learning
Wednesday, April 29, 2020 5:39
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Justin Gimelstob Explains How COVID-19 Is Impacting Students’ Learning
Schools across the country have shut their doors, sending students home to grapple with unfamiliar, untested online learning systems. These measures are necessary for tapering the spread of COVID-19’s reach, but they have unquestionably come with their own downfalls and disruptions.
Philanthropist Justin Gimelstob has always been passionate about helping solve the problems faced by today’s youth. After retiring from a successful career as a professional tennis player, he turned his focus towards bettering the lives of children around the globe.
As both a philanthropist and a father, Justin Gimelstob is concerned about how the present pandemic is impacting today’s youth, particularly regarding their learning environments and education. Here, he explores how COVID-19 has created shifts in the education field that may continue to impact how students learn during the pandemic as well as long after it subsides.
Distance Learning Presents Unique Challenges
When COVID-19 caused schools to close their doors, students were not sent home to play. Instead, educators were tasked with facilitating the semester’s continuation—a daunting feat which required crash courses in e-learning models and the turbulent navigation of untested tech.
While remote learning is far from a novel concept, most of today’s educators are not formally trained in its distinct nuances. According to Justin Gimelstob, e-learning requires a slew of skills that today’s educators have never needed to sharpen; converting content to digital formats, inspiring self-discipline, conducting virtual classroom sessions, designing independent coursework, and connecting with students via online platforms are foreign territory to many of today’s school teachers.
While the adjustment to new distance learning structures may be highly necessary, they have certainly come with sizeable disruptions. As educators struggle to master these new structures, it is often the students who suffer most. For many pupils, merely grasping course material is difficult enough. Now, they have the added challenge of doing so while navigating a foreign digital landscape.
Even so, most educational institutions are proudly reporting that both their educators and pupils are rising to meet that challenge.
Isolation Exasperates Mental Health Concerns
Perhaps the biggest concern of new distance learning models is their lack of social connectedness. For children from unhappy or unhealthy homes, the traditional school day represents a much-needed respite from the stress and trauma of their family lives. Left isolated in their homes, distance learning puts these students at considerable risk.
Outside of its academic purposes, school also serves as a social outlet for students. It is a safe space for self-exploration, social development, and interpersonal bonding. Cut off from these developmentally essential elements, Justin Gimelstob notes that students are far more likely to struggle with depression and anxiety.
Generally speaking, teachers are doing their best to cultivate digital learning environments that implement communication and social connectedness. Unfortunately, check-ins and group discussions can only go so far. Many experts consider mental health risks as one of the COVID era’s greatest challenges.
The Digital Divide Widens Equality Gaps
While the 2020 school year’s interruption is nearly universal, the severity of its repercussion is not quite as uniform. When it comes to distance learning challenges, it is technology that has stepped in to fill the gaps, allowing institutions to continue the semester through distance learning solutions.
Many have taken on the positivity-packed mentality that we’re all in this together, says Justin Gimelstob. But the backlash from government-mandated school closings is disproportionately impacting those communities which are already at risk—particularly minorities and the socio-economically disadvantaged.
While economically secure families are more likely to have the resources and tech necessary to effectively conduct online schooling, students from less fortunate families may struggle to study or participate at all. Put simply, not everyone has the tools necessary to execute online learning, and educational institutions that are already strapped for cash have no way of filling those needs. Unfortunately, for the disadvantaged and vulnerable, COVID is likely widening pre-existing equality gaps.
Unanticipated Benefits of E-Learning
The goal of educational institutions is to teach life skills, not merely impart facts. In this sense, distance learning has a few clear and unanticipated benefits. While the theory has yet to be tested concretely, Justin Gimelstob suggests that this spontaneous shift to e-learning will likely prove an effective crash course in many of today’s most valuable life skills. These shifts call on students to sharpen their competence in tech-savviness, time management, digital literacy, flexibility, and self-discipline—a few of this society’s most in-demand skills.
While this benefit may not fully compensate for the learning difficulties and coursework gaps caused by the pandemic, the opportunity to exercise these essential skills can certainly be considered a welcome (if unintentional) outcome.
An additional benefit exists in the innovation and resource-pooling which school closings have inspired. Now more than ever, educators are collaborating, sharing tools, and finding new and innovative ways to digitally foster a learning community.
While the struggles and drawbacks are apparent, one perk is certain: the new challenges posed by COVID have inspired innovation in the education field that will continue to positively benefit both teachers and students long after lockdown laws lift and schools open up their doors again.
Future Implications in Education
COVID-19 has had clear implications in the education realm. For many of today’s students, online learning appears to be a makeshift yet enough substitute for traditional schooling. Those from disadvantaged groups and minorities, however, are far more likely to suffer its more dire negative consequences.
Because of their social and practical downfalls, it is unlikely that e-learning will become the new norm after the pandemic passes. As students struggle through these new changes, one thing seems certain: e-learning solutions are challenging students and bringing much needed innovation to our education systems—an effect that Justin Gimelstob hopes will have positive aftereffects, even despite the overwhelmingly negative circumstances.
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