������������

For students in STEP – a one-year program renowned in part for the hands-on leadership experience students gain through field placements at local schools – the impact of the pandemic was particularly acute.

When K-12 schools across the country closed last spring, STEP faculty questioned whether to cancel the program this year.

“As a professional preparation program, we have an obligation to the field to make sure that we’re preparing teachers who are ready to do the work that’s demanded of them, and we didn’t know what the teaching conditions would be like,” said Ira Lit, an associate professor at the GSE and director of STEP. “We also thought there could be health risks to our students if schools were open.”

In the end, he said, they decided they had a responsibility to move forward, with the necessary adjustments. “If schools were going to be available to their students in some way, shape or form, then we felt STEP should be engaged in that work alongside them.” 

STEP candidates were still matched with school placements and experienced a range of scenarios, from exclusively remote to some in-person involvement.

“The STEP students’ ingenuity and flexibility and persistence was incredible,” said Lit. “It gives me real hope for the future because they demonstrated in so many different ways that they are ready for whatever challenges the world will bring.”

A new community-building opportunity

With their cohort sizes much smaller than usual, the GSE’s three other master’s programs – LDT, POLS and International Comparative Education/International Education Policy Analysis (ICE/IEPA) – experimented this year with an idea that never seemed feasible before the pandemic. 

Every Friday morning, in a session preceding the weekly seminar for all three programs, students joined together online for Community Fridays, an initiative aimed at helping them to get to know each other, expand their professional networks and develop job-searching skills. 

“The fact that we were all virtual made it possible to bring students across programs together in one place, weekly, for 30 or 45 minutes,”  said Emi Kuboyama, director of professional networks for ������������ EdCareers, the GSE’s home for career education and professional learning. 

During the first quarter, students took turns delivering a short “Who Am I?” talk to introduce themselves. “The smaller cohort sizes allowed us to include everybody who wanted to share their story,” Kuboyama said. Winter and spring sessions focused more on career topics, including geographically dispersed alumni guest speakers sharing their journeys. 

Kuboyama said her team is exploring ways to build on the success of Community Fridays when the master’s programs resume in person, at their usual cohort size, this fall.  

The pandemic also afforded new learning experiences for students embarking on a career in the classroom. Lit pointed out, for example, that one essential part of a teacher’s work, especially with younger students, is building a strong partnership with their families – something STEP students often have limited access to in their student teaching placements. But with parental involvement so integral to distance learning for young students, that work became front and center this year.

For new GSE graduates heading into the job market, the post-pandemic landscape could be more favorable than anyone expected, both economically and philosophically. 

“There’s a lot of talk right now about how we don’t want to go back to the old ways of schooling,” said Christine Min Wotipka, an associate professor at the GSE and director of the ICE/IEPA master’s program. “We need people who can think creatively about how to remake education, and how to study it. Our graduates have excellent skills for a job market where people are hungry to figure out how to quantify the impact the pandemic has had on education, and where to go from here.”