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Education: from school closure to recovery

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After the historic disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, most schools are back open worldwide but education is still in recovery assessing the damage done and lessons learned. The pandemic affected more than 1.5 billion students and youth with the most vulnerable learners were hit hardest.

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A Crisis-Management System for Education Leaders

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A Crisis-Management System for Education Leaders

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Opinion

Planning a coronavirus response is a bit like fighting a wildfire

In emergencies, it often feels like every single person is needed for the crisis at hand. But experienced emergency managers know that even when everything feels incredibly urgent, there is always a need to have people planning for the future. Almost everyone in schools right now should be helping to support the immediate needs of students and families, but a few people in every school and every district should stay out of the fray and be thinking ahead.

The incident command system is a set of tools for managing crisis situations. It was originally developed to fight wildfires in the American West, but the core ideas can be useful in all kinds of emergencies. One basic principle is that in a crisis, there need to be two groups: Operations and Plans.

Operations is responsible for everything that needs to happen immediately and urgently. School counselors are identifying the students in the most vulnerable home settings and figuring out what they can do to support nutrition, shelter, and safety. Food-service staff are turning lunchrooms into soup kitchens. Instructional technology staff are getting classroom computers into homes and sending Wi-Fi-equipped buses down country roads. Teachers and instructional leaders in every grade and subject are identifying the best ways in their local context to support remote learning throughout the school closures that now seem likely to last until the end of the year.

But even during a raging wildfire, there are people in Plans responsible for predicting future challenges and getting ready to address them. When I ran a search and rescue group, looking for children and senior citizens lost in the woods in Virginia, at any given time, most of our volunteers would be out scouring the countryside. But we always had a few people tucked away in a church basement, looking at maps and planning for what the search might look like a day later or, God forbid, a week later.

In these times of crisis, schools and districts should take a few smart people off of daily operations and have them spend their time thinking ahead. What new supports will teachers, students, and families need when the routines of remote learning start wearing thin in May? What could summer programming in August look like with volunteers and a shoestring budget? What could summer programming look like if Congress plowed millions of recovery dollars into state education budgets? Extra instructional days will cost money, require renegotiating union contracts, and bring to the surface other challenges from air conditioning to transportation. Starting to imagine, plan, and organize is the way to bring difficult ideas to life.

The most important planning questions concern the coming fall. While epidemiological forecasts remain uncertain, it seems quite likely that well into next year schools will need to maintain physical distancing and enhanced hygiene practices and be prepared for waves of closures in places struck by flare-ups of infection.

The few places in the world, like Denmark, coming back to school after implementing early and strict closures illustrate the challenging programmatic choices ahead. Schools in Denmark opened elementary grades before secondary schools, made more extensive use of outdoor classrooms, and required students to wash hands regularly throughout the day.

Experienced elementary school teachers will recognize that adding multiple classwide handwashing times to the class schedule is not a trivial undertaking. Schools that plan all summer to outfit classrooms with new handwashing and sanitizing stations will lose less instructional time than schools that improvise new routines in September. This is one of dozens of accommodations that educators will need to make in community building, instructional routines, food service, school counseling, and every other aspect of school life.

Amid the intense pressure to get remote learning right, right now, it may seem inconceivable to devote scarce resources this May to imagining handwashing routines in September. But experienced crisis managers in many other settings have learned the hard way that in the midst of emergencies, the future has a way of crashing down more quickly than could be expected.

Form a planning team. Choose a few key district and school leaders to step away from the immediate fray, recruit a few teachers who have gotten the hang of remote learning, and find a few students and parents who are excited to imagine a new summer and fall. Read about schools in Asia and Europe that are further along the course of the pandemic. Start designing for concrete moments. Tell stories about what the first day of school could look like. Draft new schedules for what could be done with stimulus funds for extended- learning days. Write out the plans for when a COVID-19 flare-up is detected and you have only a day or two to prepare again for remote learning. Revisit the academic and cultural priorities of your community and consider how you can stay focused on the most important work of schooling in the midst of ongoing disruption.

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A Crisis-Management System for Education Leaders

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Opinion In emergencies, it often feels like every single person is needed for the crisis at hand. But experienced emergency managers know that even when everything feels incredibly urgent, there is always a need to have people planning for the future.

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ALL SUBJETCS

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In this section we are establishing the general guidelines to ensure the transition of our mision, vision and core values into the DLP.

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7 Ways to Maintain Relationships During Your School Closure

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7 Ways to Maintain Relationships During Your School Closure

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On any given day in schools across America, many students exchange warm greetings with a smiling teacher, then perhaps move on to a morning check-in, followed by a quick mindfulness exercise to start the day grounded and mentally focused. Surrounded by peers they've known for months, or perhaps even years-and a teacher they see daily-kids feel connected.

In spite of some critics who downplay the importance of social and emotional learning and the value of belonging-the number of such skeptics is falling, to be sure-the research is clear and has been for some time: When kids spend their daytime hours in safe, supportive schools where adults work every day to build strong relationships with every student, they are simply better, more engaged learners.

But how should educators foster that sense of belonging in this new, decentralized world-with teachers and students tethered loosely together via Wi-Fi and cellular networks?

"Right now, it's all about the technology-the mechanics of how to teach remotely. But when I speak to my colleagues who are high school teachers, it's about: 'How are we going to hold our students' hearts?'" says Mays Imad, a professor of pathophysiology and biomedical ethics at Pima Community College.

So we asked dozens of teachers, and peeked in on Instagram and Twitter threads, to find some of the best ideas that teachers are experimenting with to maintain the relationships that drive engagement and learning.

1. Try to Say Hello Frequently, If You Can

Try to make sure your kids know you are thinking of them, care for them, and miss them. For kids with access to technology, simple daily hellos via video might be the only time the student sees the teacher on some days-and that sense of connection is important to sustain.

First- and second-grade teacher John Thomas' masterful, fun hello video to his students is a great example.

For students without internet connectivity, try calling by phone; consider rotating through small groups of students each day to make this a more manageable task. "Taking the time to reach out and call each kid takes forever," says sixth- and eighth-grade English teacher Cathleen Beachboard, but she's seeing a big impact: "The first few days, I had only a few kids logging on, but now I have almost 98 percent attendance," she says.

2. How to Maintain Morning Meetings

Routines that foster connection are a core part of classroom life, and finding ways for students to experience these at home will go a long way toward easing students' transition to home-based learning. "If you do morning meeting, reflect on the elements you have in your meeting and what could be completed virtually at home," writes Thomas. "If technology allows, record and share daily video announcements and read-alouds."

Margaret Shafer, a third-grade teacher, has kids respond to daily prompts during her morning meetings. Kids can see each other's responses and react if they want to. "My relationships with my students are part of my instruction, and their relationships with each other are critical to their enjoyment of school," she says, underscoring the fact that maintaining relationships is not an afterthought. "So when I planned (very quickly!) to start distance learning, the first thing I wanted to start daily was a way to comfort the kids and let them know that I still care about them and their friends are still out there."

3. Reimagine Temperature Checks

Routine, everyday check-ins- roses and thorns or selecting an emoji to match your mood, for example-shouldn't fall by the wayside. Keep it quick and simple: "I posted on Schoology to give me a thumbs up, thumbs sideways (meh), or thumbs down to describe their day.... I encourage them to take selfies of their thumbs," says high school teacher Javier Rivera via Twitter.

Along with checking in with her students herself, Imad is making connecting with peers part of her students' homework: Each student is assigned the task of connecting with one classmate. "Then, I'm asking them to write to me and tell me how, say, Jackie is doing today. They can decide how they want to check in-email, text, Skype," she says, adding that she sets up guidelines and models the practice for her students first. "This exercise might work even better with K-12-'My homework is to check on Allie.'"

4. Try Snail-Mail Pen Pals, Phone Pals, or Virtual Turn and Talk

We learn better in social contexts. For many students, transitioning to learning from home is complicated by the impact of being cut off from peers-even though many older students might communicate with friends via social media and texting.

"If technology doesn't allow, create pen pals or other paper-and-pen activities by sending home envelopes, paper, and stamps if your school is able," says Thomas. "Or mimic 'turn and talk' by setting up phone pals where students call each other on the phone several times a week to discuss specific topics or prompts."

Third-grade teacher Michael Dunlea follows his whole-group instruction via Zoom with breakout rooms so that peers can reflect on the learned material together. Then he seeks deeper connections with students individually: "I keep one student on for a one-on-one conference and ask them to read out loud for a few minutes. This time also provides an opportunity to check on their emotional well-being and see if they need clarification on assignments."

5. Create Virtual Tables (but Don't Just Group Friends)

For older kids, says Kasey Short, an eighth-grade English teacher at Charlotte Country Day School in Charlotte, North Carolina, teachers can set up virtual table groups. Short uses Google Classroom for this because her students are already familiar with the platform. "I will set up discussion threads with four to five students so they can discuss assignments, ask each other questions, and stay connected," she says.

Though many kids will stay in touch with their circle of friends, she says it's important to think about pairing kids with peers who aren't in their immediate social circle-and then mix up the groups weekly. "There will also be spaces for whole class discussions, but I know many students will feel more comfortable sharing ideas in a smaller group setting," she says.

6. Consider Including Parents

Dunlea, the third-grade teacher, asks students to invite a parent online, giving the adults an opportunity to ask questions, express concerns, or request advice.

Beachboard, the sixth- and eighth-grade English teacher, connects with parents each day-she uses the messaging platform Remind, or a dedicated Google Voice phone line for parents who don't have text messaging. She also connects with families by email. "I check in with them once a day with a 'How are you?' and 'Do you need anything?'" she says. "It's important at this time, more than any other, that we are looking out for the mental health of our families and students."

7. Get Kids to Name-and Process-Their Own Emotions

Writing assignments, says Short, the English teacher, offer valuable opportunities for students to process the complex mix of emotions they may be experiencing as a result of their upended routines and schedules, social isolation, and the challenges of being cooped up at home.

"I am going to use some writing opportunities for students to get their thoughts, feelings, fears, and questions down in a creative format of their choice," she says. "I will give them an option to share with the class, or only share with me. This will not only allow them to share out their feelings but also give me a place to check on them and follow up if I see any of them expressing sadness, fear, etc., that their parents may need to know about."

Most important, says Short, "I am going to be honest and as understanding as possible to let students know we are all in this together and will likely all need a little grace."

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7 Ways to Maintain Relationships During Your School Closure

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Suddenly, you're not in the same physical space as your students. We asked teachers to share strategies for maintaining relationships-both peer-to-peer and student-teacher-when everything's gone remote.

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Instead of trying to move classes online, schools should support parents in educating their children.

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Read: What teachers need to make remote learning work
Many school districts have attempted to shift schooling to home, but you cannot simply school at home. That's why many homeschoolers call what they do "home education," not homeschooling. Home education involves an understanding that children can learn while doing everyday tasks; baking can teach math, science, and home economics. Sitting on the couch reading Charlotte's Web to kids in grades five and three and kindergarten counts as "school." So does taking a nature walk and creating a nature journal.

As a homeschool mother, I set my own curriculum and my own schedule. We have the flexibility to plan our schedule around baby and toddler naps, my work schedule, and the activities my children once did. My kids' education is my responsibility, and it is designed to fit our family's individual needs.

The situation into which almost every parent in America has now suddenly and unwillingly been thrust could not be more different. One-size-fits-all education barely works in a classroom, but it is completely unmanageable with kids spread out across their various households working independently.

Most kids aren't going back to school this calendar year; school districts have already conceded as much, as have many universities. Parents are in this not just for a few weeks, but for a few months.

And is this how families want to be spending the next months? Sitting inside staring at a computer screen for six hours a day? Most adults have a hard time in online meetings for that long for one day; it's completely unreasonable to expect it of a child for months on end. And it's leading to behavior issues, too. On one recent Facebook thread about screen time-generated outbursts, one mother wrote, "This is a major conflict in our family because we do not believe in this amount of screen time, and the kids thrive without it. Yet it is expected in order for online learning to occur."
Read: The pandemic is a crisis for students with special needs
Schools can still play a constructive role, even if they aren't holding online classes for kids stuck in their homes. Instead of spending time on online lessons and hours of videochats, schools need to provide a crash course in education for parents, provide loose individual lesson plans and suggestions, and operate as a help line. When I chose home education for my children, I had the benefit of years of reading about educational theory and philosophy and best practices, in anticipation of teaching my children when they became school-age. Parents across the country have been thrown into the deep end of the pool, and they could use much more support.

Parents, teachers, and administrators need to understand the unique nature of education at home. Every family looks different and has different needs. Some children have no siblings; some have many. Some children have parents who don't speak English as a first language, but who could provide instruction much more easily in their native languages. Some families have two working parents trying to fit in school with their kids. Some families have an out-of-work parent because of the financial crisis that has resulted from this pandemic. What would be the best use of a kid's time in the next few weeks and months? If an out-of-work restaurant chef is now home with his kids, will they gain more if he helps them do busywork problems in math, or if he teaches them how to cook?

The next few months will radically alter how parents think about the education of their children. For the time being, they are responsible for it. That's why it's time for parents to take charge of their kids' schooling. Parents, not teachers or administrators, are the ones in the trenches-and so parents, not teachers or administrators, need to set the schedule and priorities.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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remote learning workmany school districts

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Read: What teachers need to make remote learning work Many school districts have attempted to shift schooling to home, but you cannot simply school at home. That's why many homeschoolers call what they do "home education," not homeschooling. Home education involves an understanding that children can learn while doing everyday tasks; baking can teach math, science, and home economics.

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NPR: 9 Ways Schools Will Look Different When (And If) They Reopen

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NPR: 9 Ways Schools Will Look Different When (And If) They Reopen

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Three-quarters of U.S. states have now officially closed their schools for the rest of the academic year. While remote learning continues, summer is a question mark, and attention is already starting to turn to next fall.

Recently, governors including California's Gavin Newsom and New York's Andrew Cuomo have started to talk about what school reopening might look like. And a federal government plan for reopening, according to The Washington Post, says that getting kids back in classrooms or other group care is the first priority for getting back to normal.

But there are still many more unknowns than guarantees. Among the biggest, says Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teachers union, is this: "Is it safe and healthy for my kids to pack them into that classroom?"

Here are nine key ideas - drawn from interviews with public health experts, education officials and educators around the country - for what reopening might look like.
1. Stepped-up health and hygiene measures
"A school building is not what you would call an ideal place in the middle of a pandemic," says Michael Mulgrew, the head of the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers. So the first order of business, he says, is "How do you make sure there's a plan in place to make sure the people walking in are not spreading anything?"

Ideally, he says, this is accomplished by widespread and frequent testing for the coronavirus. But Mulgrew also points to the safety measures being taken right now at the city's 100 "regional enrichment centers" that provide child care for front-line workers. These include wearing masks, temperature checks, hand-washing, frequent sanitization and social distancing rules enforced even for very small children.

Other countries that are already moving to reopen schools may offer lessons for U.S. educators.

Denmark reopened schools, for lower grades only, on April 15 after a four-week shutdown. At the Copenhagen International School, children line up in the morning next to traffic cones spaced 6 feet apart. There are only 10 students to a classroom, with just one teacher. Specialists, such as the art teacher, offer their lessons remotely via video chat. And just five children are allowed on the playground at a time. Ida Storm Jansen, the school's communications director, says they have made up a new game called shadow tag to play while staying 6 feet apart - "tagging each other's shadow so they're not touching."

Kids are creative, she says: "They figure out ways to do things."
2. Class sizes of 12 or fewer
Maria Litvinova, a researcher at the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy, has modeled how school closures reduce the spread of illness. She argues that without treatments or a vaccine, "there is no such thing as 'safe' reopening."

Still, in an attempt to balance safety with the impact on families and the economy, she also recommends reducing social contact by putting children in the smallest groups possible. Assuming there is sufficient testing and contact tracing to reduce the spread of infection, "it's better if that student's been in contact with one group of 15 students versus 100 students."

Based on the typical size of a classroom in New York City, 12 would be the most children you could accommodate while maintaining social distancing, says the UFT's Mulgrew. At the International School in Denmark, they are grouping kids in classes of 10.

Lily Eskelsen Garcia points out that her membership has been asking for smaller classes for a long time. "The doctors say 39 sweaty bodies in a classroom is not healthy and safe - by the way, it never was. But in this case, it might spread an infection that kills people."

Serious cases of coronavirus among children are rare. Eskelsen Garcia says she's concerned not only for the health of children, but also for the health of her members, which include teachers, custodians, food service workers and school support staff. In New York City alone more than 60 educators have reportedly died from the coronavirus, and NPR has found accounts of educator deaths in 13 other states.
3. Staggered schedules
Reducing class size this drastically would probably mean staggering schedules. By way of example, Mulgrew suggests that one group of kids might attend school on Monday, Wednesday and Friday one week, then Tuesday and Thursday the following week. Others have discussed morning and afternoon shifts.
4. Younger kids first?
Denmark reopened its day cares and primary schools first. Norway started with kindergartens, and Israel with special education kindergartens. Mulgrew says opening New York City's elementary schools first might make sense, because they are more likely to be within walking distance for families, and because those students are normally with one main classroom teacher, meaning fewer changes to existing scheduling and staffing. On the other hand, the researcher, Litvinova, points out that the younger children are more likely to be "putting their hands and their mouths on their face" and, therefore, potentially spreading infection.
5. New calendars
To make up for the learning lost while schools are closed, there have been suggestions of starting school sooner, or continuing through next summer, or both.

"This situation is going to be like what is often called the summer slide, but on steroids," Virginia's superintendent of public instruction, James Lane, told NPR. "I think there will be opportunities for us to discuss different ways to approach calendars." This means, among other things, renegotiating union contracts. And while districts are rewriting calendars, Litvinova says, they should probably prepare for having to close schools again when and if outbreaks recur, until there is a vaccine.
6. Different attendance policies
Schools can open up, but some parents might still choose to keep their children at home. In Denmark, a Facebook group called "my kid is not going to be a guinea pig" reportedly has 40,000 members.

Melissa Thomasson, a health care economist at the Farmer School of Business at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, recently published a paper on the educational effects of the 1916 polio epidemic in New York City. The start of school was delayed by weeks to slow the spread of what was called "infantile paralysis." According to Thomasson's research, even when schools did reopen, about 200,000 of the city's 829,000 registered students stayed home out of fear of spreading the disease. And the city announced a policy of "leniency" for absences during this time.
7. No assemblies, sports games or parent-teacher conferences
Students can't mix in large groups, and parents probably won't be allowed in school buildings either.
8. Remote learning continues
Every expert NPR spoke with predicted that the need for remote learning would continue because of staggered schedules, schools prepared to close again for future waves of infection, and many students needing remediation. And that means training and support for teachers, and equipment for children.

Eskelsen Garcia of the NEA says the equity issue is acute: "What we've been telling [political leaders] for years is the digital divide is hurting children. It's hurting entire communities. To have broadband, a tablet or a laptop is not to play video games. It is as essential as indoor plumbing. It is what you need to succeed. And now it's been laid bare."
9. Social, emotional and practical help for kids
Developmental experts say disruption from the pandemic constitutes an "adverse childhood experience" for every American child. When schools reopen, says Virginia's James Lane, ameliorating this trauma will be at the core of their mission.

"I also think that there is a need for us to focus on social and emotional learning for students," Lane says, "and not only how we can provide the academic support, but how can we provide the mental health support and the wraparound supports for students when they come back, to help them recover and bring back that safety net of schools."

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9 Ways Schools Will Look Different When (And If) They Reopen

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Three-quarters of U.S. states have now officially closed their schools for the rest of the academic year. While remote learning continues, summer is a question mark, and attention is already starting to turn to next fall. Recently, governors including California's Gavin Newsom and New York's Andrew Cuomo have started to talk about what school reopening might look like.

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Simple Ways You can Improve your virtual presence

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Harvard Business Review on LinkedIn: Simple ways you can improve your virtual presence: 1. Turn off your | 165 comments

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Simple ways you can improve your virtual presence: 1. Turn off your selfie cam during video calls to eliminate the biggest distraction. 2. Make sure your... 165 comments on LinkedIn

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Are Interactive Large Group Virtual Meetings Possible?

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Are Interactive Large Group Virtual Meetings Possible?

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By Ron Koller and IBM team
How many times have you dialed into an all-hands call or large group virtual meeting only to find yourself 10 minutes into the meeting checking email, on another call, or browsing Amazon? Quite frankly, traditional large group virtual meetings are often boring. There are too many people to the point where the only thing that matters is that everyone is on mute and knows if their cameras off.

But as we write this article, it's April 2020, and most of the world is at home under quarantine. Organizations' digital and virtual transformations have been spurred by COVID-19 in a matter of days. Some people have had to get creative on how to facilitate productive virtual meetings, while others are sticking to the same old presenter-led meetings. Think of the vocabulary that you now use every day: virtual happy hour, Zoom, WFH (work from home), Tiger King - lol. One change that will live beyond the COVID-19 pandemic is the need and the imperative of large groups of people to collaborate virtually.

Most of us have become virtual pioneers in some way as the extenuating circumstances have encouraged us all to get creative. Our client challenged us to make virtual large group meetings interactive. Webinar-style virtual meetings are not only boring, but they are not productive. But our team's recent experience has shown that when done right, interactive large group virtual meetings are powerful motivators. They are also cost-effective, engage more people, and compound interactions and insights into innovative results.

The Basics: Types of Virtual Sessions

Before we jump into our story, let's talk about the basics. As we become resident experts (or victims) in the land of virtual meetings, it's important to make a few distinctions. Think of categorizing virtual meetings into a 2x2 grid. Small groups (under 30 people) vs. large groups (over 30 people) represent one means of categorizing, while traditional vs. interactive sessions represent the other.

Traditional Virtual Sessions
Starting with our first quadrant, traditional + small group sessions are most likely 90% of the calls you're attending right now. Think of any video-conferencing software like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, WebEx, or GoToMeetings, where you have to speak one at a time, with occasional use of the chat feature. It's decent collaboration, but usually involves looking and reacting to one person's screen at a time, which is not so dynamic. Productivity is constrained by the number of people in the meeting. The more people in the session means less interaction. Moving across the grid we have traditional + large group sessions. Think of these as webinars where you mostly sit and listen. If the presenter is feeling creative, you might be asked to fill out a poll during the session, ask a question through the chat feature, or be bold enough to un-mute yourself to actually speak out loud. Interaction, at best, is limited.
Interactive Virtual Sessions
Here's where things start to get interesting. As we move down the grid into interactive sessions, we see a shift. These are dynamic in nature with 4 major differences. First, the person leading the session now acts as a facilitator rather than a presenter. Their focus changes from delivering content to enabling conversation. Second, attendees are urged to speak up and collaborate. They actively engage and ideate individually or collectively, and feel like they have a seat at the table.

Third, breakout sessions are utilized heavily. These are small, collaborative teams formed to complete a goal or meet an objective. In a large group setting where individual voices may not be as prominent, breakout groups provide an optimal forum for the introverts and more passive members to engage. They are also an opportunity to ask questions or raise concerns participants otherwise may not feel comfortable sharing with the larger group.

The result? Richer conversation and more meaningful session outputs. When coordinated correctly, breakout sessions also provide the momentum needed to keep the work of a session going. Lastly, there has to be some type of technology to facilitate visual collaboration between participants. Some examples include Mural (our preferred tool), Miro, Stormboard, or InVision. If you don't have any type of tool that's getting people to collaborate in a shared digital workspace, you'll struggle to make the session interactive.
Interactive + small group virtual sessions
As I start explaining interactive sessions, you'll probably find that it isn't rocket science. A multitude of people are starting to facilitate interactive + small group virtual sessions for the past several years.

For example, at a very large insurance company, we needed to host a session centered around planning an organizational change implementation that involved geographically dispersed people across their Claims division. Because there was no place to bring these people together, we brought 20 individuals from across the United States together using WebEx Meetings, a video conferencing tool, and Mural, a digital workspace for visual collaboration, to capture their feedback. We broke the participants out into 4 groups of 5 people, facilitating the same exercises in breakout groups, then coming back together to talk about what we had done in our individual teams. There were definitely some hurdles involved with pulling it off, but it's become easier and easier to facilitate these kinds of sessions. The real bonus though was that we had engaged and energized employees across the country as change agents in their respective regions.

In this particular arena, I'm sure many of you are innovating further than anyone can imagine. These sessions are THE hot skill right now, and due to COVID-19, a lot more folks have had to get their feet wet on short notice. I recommend following the work of Douglas Ferguson at Voltage Control for additional virtual facilitation best practices.
Interactive + large group virtual sessions
Now, let's talk about the main event, the final square in our grid: interactive+large group sessions. These represent the new frontier of interactive sessions that many seasoned facilitators haven't yet explored. They require loads of prep work. You can bring together groups of 60, 70, and 80 people in a session and have them walk away feeling engaged. You need lots of people and skilled facilitators to orchestrate it all.

Our Experience in the New Frontier

The idea of attempting to pull off an interactive large group virtual session fell into our laps after we had facilitated a face-to-face large group session for a world-renowned global hospital system. The sessions were centered around process and technology changes, as well as creating customized deployment experiences for the way of delivering service. COVID-19 struck and our client asked if we could switch these 100 person face-to-face sessions to all virtual. The definitive guide to facilitating remote workshops recommended virtual sessions no larger than 24 participants.

Prior Best Practices - 25 people working in 1 workspace

We looked at this space intended for a small group to work through and thought that 75-100 people crowded into one space would neither provide the highly interactive nor productive experience we were looking for. Also, breaking it up into 25 people per session would take more time than the client had. We had a problem and needed a solution in a hurry.

The breakthrough idea came when we built upon Mural's recommendation of 25 people per session. We thought, "How about 25 people per breakout session? And what if we could facilitate several breakout sessions simultaneously in the same room with separate audio?" It was an interesting hypothesis. We tested it with a group of 60 people on Friday, March 27th, and immediately scaled the next week, running 10 sessions with over 500 total participants. Fortunately, the test session and subsequent sessions all met the same objectives we had with prior face-to-face sessions.

Large Group Interactive Mural session - 3 or 4 groups of 20-25 people working in breakout groups simultaneously.

This is what interactive large group workshops look like in action with 60 participants. Notice that we took the same activities that were in 4 sections above and stacked them into 3 columns. Each column represents the breakout/table groups we would have had in a face-to-face meeting. Participants zoomed in to work on their own group's work. Occasionally they would zoom out to see what other groups were doing.

Below is the output of a session with 3 breakout groups working simultaneously in the same Mural Workspace with 50+ participants.

Not familiar with Mural? Check out Mural.co and follow Mariano Suarez-Battan. Without Mariano, Interactive LG Meetings would only be a dream.
Qualitative Results

With any session, what the facilitator says about how it went should always be taken with a grain of salt. At the end of the day, it's all about the participants and whether or not they thought their time was spent wisely. Here is what our participants said when asked to describe their experience after the session.

After the sessions, teams also reported that they received dozens of requests for additional people to join follow-up sessions. Leaders reported higher energy and engagement among employees who attended.
Quantitative Results
Again, so what? We showed a shiny new toy for people and they liked it. We took a bunch of isolated people and connected them for the first time in a few weeks. So, we decided to evaluate the session quantitatively; organizations are always interested in measurement. While the organization was very satisfied with the 10 Interactive Large Group Virtual Sessions we conducted, we wanted to do some quantitative analysis to see if the data supported participants'experiences.

The table below represents a look at 16 sessions we performed for the organization from late January to early April. In all 16 sessions, workshop participants brainstormed using Post-it notes, one idea per note. We took the total number of Post-it notes generated and divided the total by the number of participants in the session and divided that by the amount of time they spent brainstorming and normalized to 1-hour. The resulting metric is what we call Contributions per person per hour (CPPPH).

Not surprisingly, the most productive session was the smallest group who participated in a face-to-face two-hour session, half of which involved creating Post-It notes. The least productive session was a webinar-style large group virtual meeting. The interactive large group sessions' CPPPH were comparable to the interactive large group face-to-face sessions and better than the webinar-style virtual workshop.
What's Next?
This is just the beginning. We invite you to start facilitating interactive LG virtual workshops yourself. Perhaps you can try tracking the number of CPPPH as well. Since we're all in this together, we might as well innovate together!

Here is the team of IBMers who helped make all these sessions a reality:

Justin Berger, Hannah Beersdorf, Allison Jennings, Sofia Klotz, Rachel Reiss, Jenny Chen, Omid Elyaskordi, Sanjana Chintalapudi, Colin MacQueen, Nora Gorges, Christin Spencer, and Mike Boyd

#remotecollaboration

#innovation

#ibmtalent

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Are Interactive Large Group Virtual Meetings Possible?

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We did it, and you can too By Ron Koller and IBM team How many times have you dialed into an all-hands call or large group virtual meeting only to find yourself 10 minutes into the meeting checking email, on another call, or browsing Amazon?

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TRABAJAR EN EL TOOLKIT
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11 teams from Euro Valle participated at this year's national tournament, two of them have been invited to move on to the International Competition, GLOBAL FINALS, in Kansas City, next May!

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11 teams from Euro Valle participated at this year's national tournament, two of them have been invited to move on to the International Competition, GLOBAL FINALS, in Kansas City, next May!

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TEC SALUD DONATION

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Home for all your photos and videos, automatically organized and easy to share.

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Create a new spreadsheet and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Sheets to edit Excel files. Free from Google.

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TECSALUD LETTER

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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By Maria Montemayor

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Listening Forward

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New plans of action

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WHAT IS NEXT

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NWEA MAP Resources During Time of COVID-19

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NWEA MAP Resources During Time of COVID-19

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NWEA MAP Resources During Time of COVID-19

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El hombre en busca de sentido, Viktor Frankl [Audiolibro completo]

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There will be no quick return to our previous lives, according to nearly two dozen experts. But there is hope for managing the scourge now and in the long term.
To hear more audio stories from publishers, like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
The coronavirus is spreading from America's biggest cities to its suburbs, and has begun encroaching on the nation's rural regions. The virus is believed to have infected millions of citizens and has killed more than 34,000.

Yet President Trump this week proposed guidelines for reopening the economy and suggested that a swath of the United States would soon resume something resembling normalcy. For weeks now, the administration's view of the crisis and our future has been rosier than that of its own medical advisers, and of scientists generally.

In truth, it is not clear to anyone where this crisis is leading us. More than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history shared their thoughts on the future during in-depth interviews. When can we emerge from our homes? How long, realistically, before we have a treatment or vaccine? How will we keep the virus at bay?

Some felt that American ingenuity, once fully engaged, might well produce advances to ease the burdens. The path forward depends on factors that are certainly difficult but doable, they said: a carefully staggered approach to reopening, widespread testing and surveillance, a treatment that works, adequate resources for health care providers - and eventually an effective vaccine.

Still, it was impossible to avoid gloomy forecasts for the next year. The scenario that Mr. Trump has been unrolling at his daily press briefings - that the lockdowns will end soon, that a protective pill is almost at hand, that football stadiums and restaurants will soon be full - is a fantasy, most experts said.

"We face a doleful future," said Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, a former president of the National Academy of Medicine.

He and others foresaw an unhappy population trapped indoors for months, with the most vulnerable possibly quarantined for far longer. They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.

"My optimistic side says the virus will ease off in the summer and a vaccine will arrive like the cavalry," said Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University medical school. "But I'm learning to guard against my essentially optimistic nature."

Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.

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Listen to 'The Daily': The Next Year (or Two) of the Pandemic

Immunity passports. Stop-start lockdowns. Strategic self-infection. This is what our new normal might look like.

Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.

More Americans may die than the White House admits.

Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, is arguably the leading cause of death in the United States right now. The virus has killed more than 1,800 Americans almost every day since April 7, and the official toll may be an undercount.

By comparison, heart disease typically kills 1,774 Americans a day, and cancer kills 1,641.

Yes, the coronavirus curves are plateauing. There are fewer hospital admissions in New York, the center of the epidemic, and fewer Covid-19 patients in I.C.U.s. The daily death toll is still grim, but no longer rising.

An epidemiological model produced by the White House originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Another model, by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, now puts that figure at 60,000.

While this is encouraging news, it masks some significant concerns. The institute's projection runs through Aug. 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time.

The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House's "phased" plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed. The best hope is that fatalities can be held to a minimum.

Reputable longer-term projections for how many Americans will die vary, but they are all grim. Various experts consulted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48 percent to 65 percent of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1 percent, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread.

A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States by September under the same circumstances.

By comparison, about 420,000 Americans died in World War II.

The limited data from China are even more discouraging. Its epidemic has been halted - for the moment - and virtually everyone infected in its first wave has died or recovered.

China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5 percent. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones.

Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China's estimated death rate was 17 percent in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Center for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7 percent by late February.

In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos. Officials in both Wuhan and New York had to revise their death counts upward this week when they realized that many people had died at home of Covid-19, strokes, heart attacks or other causes, or because ambulances never came for them.

In fast-moving epidemics, far more victims pour into hospitals or die at home than doctors can test; at the same time, the mildly ill or asymptomatic never get tested. Those two factors distort the true fatality rate in opposite ways. If you don't know how many people are infected, you don't know how deadly a virus is.

Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C. has suggested it might be 25 percent of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that.

China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60 percent were. Our knowledge gaps are still wide enough to make epidemiologists weep.

"All models are just models," Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, science adviser to the White House coronavirus task force, has said. "When you get new data, you change them."

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There may be good news buried in this inconsistency: The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.

At the moment, however, we do not know exactly how transmissible or lethal the virus is. But refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals tell us all we need to know: It is far worse than a bad flu season.

The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.

No one knows exactly what percentage of Americans have been infected so far - estimates have ranged from 3 percent to 10 percent - but it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable.

Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.

Then the emergency rooms will get busy again.

"There's this magical thinking saying, 'We're all going to hunker down for a while and then the vaccine we need will be available,'" said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine.

In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, " Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance," Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews.

Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance. Each assumes the virus will blossom every time too many hosts emerge and force another lockdown. Then the cycle repeats. On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth.

Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theaters, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travelers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones.

The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia.

Even the "Opening Up America Again" guidelines Mr. Trump issued on Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing - but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place.

On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states' shutdowns.

China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus's incubation period. Compared with China or Italy, the United States is still a playground.

Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps.

Partly as a result, the country has seen up to 30,000 new case infections each day. "People need to realize that it's not safe to play poker wearing bandannas," Dr. Schaffner said.

Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control.

China, which has reported about 100 new infections per day, recently closed all the country's movie theaters again. Singapore has closed all schools and nonessential workplaces. Japan recently declared a state of emergency. (South Korea has struggled at times, too, but on Sunday reported only eight new cases, the first single-digit increase in two months.)

Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the C.D.C., has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed.

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Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90 percent of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals.

"We need to reopen the faucet gradually, not allow the floodgates to reopen," Dr. Frieden said. "This is a time to work to make that day come sooner."

Immunity will become a societal advantage.

Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.

"It will be a frightening schism," Dr. David Nabarro, a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. "Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against."

Already, people with presumed immunity are very much in demand, asked to donate their blood for antibodies and doing risky medical jobs fearlessly.

Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense, said Dr. Daniel R. Lucey, an expert on pandemics at Georgetown University's law school. Many companies are working on them.

Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner's personal details so others cannot borrow them.

The California adult-film industry pioneered a similar idea a decade ago. Actors use a cellphone app to prove they have tested H.I.V. negative in the last 14 days, and producers can verify the information on a password-protected website.

As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection, experts predicted. Younger citizens in particular will calculate that risking a serious illness may still be better than impoverishment and isolation.

"My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going," said Dr. Michele Barry, who directs the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University.

It has happened before. In the 1980s, Cuba successfully contained its small AIDS epidemic by brutally forcing everyone who tested positive into isolation camps. Inside, however, the residents had their own bungalows, food, medical care, salaries, theater troupes and art classes.

Dozens of Cuba's homeless youths infected themselves through sex or blood injections to get in, said Dr. Jorge Pérez Ávila, an AIDS specialist who is Cuba's version of Dr. Fauci. Many died before antiretroviral therapy was introduced.

It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.

The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources.

The next two years will proceed in fits and starts, experts said. As more immune people get back to work, more of the economy will recover.

But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.

Dr. Fauci has said "the virus will tell us" when it's safe. He means that once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.

Detecting rising fevers as they are mapped by Kinsa's smart thermometers may give an earlier signal, Dr. Schaffner said.

But diagnostic testing has been troubled from the beginning. Despite assurances from the White House, doctors and patients continue to complain of delays and shortages.

To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill - including mild cases.

In this country, patients who test positive are asked to stay in their homes but keep away from their families.

Television news has been filled with recuperating personalities like CNN's Chris Cuomo, sweating alone in his basement while his wife left food atop the stairs, his children waved and the dogs hung back.

But even Mr. Cuomo ended up illustrating why the W.H.O. strongly opposes home isolation. On Wednesday, he revealed that his wife had the virus.

"If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases," said Dr. Bruce Aylward, who led the W.H.O. observer team to China.

In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital - often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.

There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients' fears. Nurses even led dance and exercise classes to raise spirits, and help victims clear their lungs and keep their muscle tone.

Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards. Dr. Fineberg co-wrote a New York Times Op-Ed article calling for mandatory but "humane quarantine processes."

By contrast, Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, opposed the idea, saying: "I don't trust our government to remove people from their families by force."

Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.

Someone working in a restaurant or factory may have dozens or even hundreds of contacts. In China's Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.

The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.

China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Dr. Frieden recently estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.

There will not be a vaccine soon.

Even though limited human trials of three candidates - two here and one in China - have already begun, Dr. Fauci has repeatedly said that any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.

All the experts familiar with vaccine production agreed that even that timeline was optimistic. Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccinologist at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, noted that the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.

Researchers differed sharply over what should be done to speed the process. Modern biotechnology techniques using RNA or DNA platforms make it possible to develop candidate vaccines faster than ever before.

But clinical trials take time, in part because there is no way to rush the production of antibodies in the human body.

Also, for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered "antibody-dependent enhancement," which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against H.I.V. and dengue have unexpectedly done the same.

A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers - in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk - will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.

It is possible to speed up that process with "challenge trials." Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then "challenge" them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.

Challenge trials are used only when a disease is completely curable, such as malaria or typhoid fever. Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.

But in these abnormal times, several experts argued that putting a few Americans at high risk for fast results could be more ethical than leaving millions at risk for years.

"Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands," said Dr. Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers.

Others were deeply uncomfortable with that idea. "I think it's very unethical - but I can see how we might do it," said Dr. Lucey.

The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem.

"Challenge trials won't give you an answer on safety," said Michael T. Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. "It may be a big problem."

Dr. W. Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, suggested an alternative strategy. Pick at least two vaccine candidates, briefly test them in humans and do challenge trials in monkeys. Start making the winner immediately, even while widening the human testing to look for hidden problems.

As arduous as testing a vaccine is, producing hundreds of millions of doses is even tougher, experts said.

Most American vaccine plants produce only about 5 million to 10 million doses a year, needed largely by the 4 million babies born and 4 million people who reach age 65 annually, said Dr. R. Gordon Douglas Jr., a former president of Merck's vaccine division.

But if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses - or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.

"People have to start thinking big," Dr. Douglas said. "With that volume, you've got to start cranking it out pretty soon."

Flu vaccine plants are large, but those that grow the vaccines in chicken eggs are not suitable for modern vaccines, which grow in cell broths, he said.

European countries have plants but will need them for their own citizens. China has a large vaccine industry, and may be able to expand it over the coming months. It might be able to make vaccines for the United States, experts said. But captive customers must pay whatever price the seller asks, and the safety and efficacy standards of some Chinese companies are imperfect.

India and Brazil also have large vaccine industries. If the virus moves rapidly through their crowded populations, they may lose millions of citizens but achieve widespread herd immunity well before the United States does. In that case, they might have spare vaccine plant capacity.

Alternatively, suggested Arthur M. Silverstein, a retired medical historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the government might take over and sterilize existing liquor or beer plants, which have large fermentation vats.

"Any distillery could be converted," he said.

Treatments are likely to arrive first.

In the short term, experts were more optimistic about treatments than vaccines. Several felt that so-called convalescent serum could work.

The basic technique has been used for over a century: Blood is drawn from people who have recovered from a disease, then filtered to remove everything but the antibodies. The antibody-rich immunoglobulin is injected into patients.

The obstacle is that there are now relatively few survivors to harvest blood from.

In the pre-vaccine era, antibodies were "farmed" in horses and sheep. But that process was hard to keep sterile, and animal proteins sometimes triggered allergic reactions.

The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said.

The most effective antibodies are chosen, and the genes that produce them are spliced into a benign virus that will grow in a cellular broth.

But, as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers.

Antibodies can last for weeks before breaking down - how long depends on many factors, Dr. Silverstein noted - and they cannot kill virus that is already hidden inside cells.

Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.

But even if one were invented, production would have to ramp up until it was as ubiquitous as aspirin, so 300 million Americans could take it daily.

Mr. Trump has mentioned hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin so often that his news conferences sound like infomercials. But all the experts agreed with Dr. Fauci that no decision should be made until clinical trials are completed.

Some recalled that in the 1950s inadequate testing of thalidomide caused thousands of children to be born with malformed limbs. More than one hydroxychloroquine study has been halted after patients who got high doses developed abnormal heart rhythms.

"I doubt anyone will tolerate high doses, and there are vision issues if it accumulates," Dr. Barry said. "But it would be interesting to see if it could work as a PrEP-like drug," she added, referring to pills used to prevent H.I.V.

Others were harsher, especially about Mr. Trump's idea of combining a chloroquine with azithromycin.

"It's total nonsense," said Dr. Luciana Borio, a former director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council. "I told my family, if I get Covid, do not give me this combo."

Chloroquine might protect patients hospitalized with pneumonia against lethal cytokine storms because it damps down immune reactions, several doctors said.

That does not, however, make it useful for preventing infections, as Mr. Trump has implied it would be, because it has no known antiviral properties.

Several antivirals, including remdesivir, favipiravir and baloxavir, are being tested against the coronavirus; the latter two are flu drugs.

Trials of various combinations in China are set to issue results by next month, but they will be small and possibly inconclusive because doctors there ran out of patients to test. End dates for most trials in the United States are not yet set.

Goodbye, 'America First.'

Previously unthinkable societal changes have taken place already. Schools and business have closed in every state, and tens of millions have applied for unemployment. Taxes and mortgage payments are delayed, and foreclosures forbidden.

Stimulus checks, intended to offset the crisis, began landing in checking accounts this week, making much of America, temporarily, a welfare state. Food banks are opening across the country, and huge lines have formed.

A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Mr. Trump is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.

And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world's most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries.

A major recipient is the United States, through Project Airbridge, an air-cargo operation overseen by Mr. Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

This is not a world in which "America First" is a viable strategy, several experts noted.

"If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults," said Nicholas Mulder, an economic historian at Cornell University. He has called Mr. Kushner's project "Lend-Lease in reverse," a reference to American military aid to other countries during World War II.

Dr. Osterholm was even blunter. "If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us," he said.

"What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?"

Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Dr. Mulder noted.

The psychological fallout will be harder to gauge. The isolation and poverty caused by a long shutdown may drive up rates of domestic abuse, depression and suicide.

Even political perspectives may shift. Initially, the virus heavily hit Democratic cities like Seattle, New York and Detroit. But as it spreads through the country, it will spare no one.

Even voters in Republican-leaning states who do not blame Mr. Trump for America's lack of preparedness or for limiting access to health insurance may change their minds if they see friends and relatives die.

In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, " Coronavirus: Out of Many, One," Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.

He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.

In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans' and widows' pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.

If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general - including climate change, experts said.

The blue skies that have shone above American cities during this lockdown era could even become permanent.

More on the Coronavirus Pandemic

Correction: April 25, 2020

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The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead

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There will be no quick return to our previous lives, according to nearly two dozen experts. But there is hope for managing the scourge now and in the long term. To hear more audio stories from publishers, like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android .

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Executive Summary

With the Covid-19 epidemic, many employees - and their managers - are finding themselves working out of the office and separated from each other for the first time. Fortunately, there are specific, research-based steps that managers can take without great effort to improve the engagement and productivity of remote employees, even when there is little time to prepare. First, it's important to understand the common challenges, from isolation to distractions to lack of face-to-face supervision. Then managers can support remote workers with 1) regular, structured check-ins; 2) multiple communication options (and established norms for each; 3) opportunities for social interactions; and 4) ongoing encouragement and emotional support.

Ada Yakota/Getty Images

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In response to the uncertainties presented by Covid-19, many companies and universities have asked their employees to work remotely. While close to a quarter of the U.S. workforce already works from home at least part of the time, the new policies leave many employees - and their managers - working out of the office and separated from each other for the first time.

Although it is always preferable to establish clear remote-work policies and training in advance, in times of crisis or other rapidly changing circumstances, this level of preparation may not be feasible. Fortunately, there are specific, research-based steps that managers can take without great effort to improve the engagement and productivity of remote employees, even when there is little time to prepare.

Common Challenges of Remote Work

To start, managers need to understand factors that can make remote work especially demanding. Otherwise high-performing employees may experience declines in job performance and engagement when they begin working remotely, especially in the absence of preparation and training. Challenges inherent in remote work include:

Lack of face-to-face supervision: Both managers and their employees often express concerns about the lack of face-to-face interaction. Supervisors worry that employees will not work as hard or as efficiently (though research indicates otherwise, at least for some types of jobs). Many employees, on the other hand, struggle with reduced access to managerial support and communication. In some cases, employees feel that remote managers are out of touch with their needs, and thereby are neither supportive nor helpful in getting their work done.

Lack of access to information: Newly remote workers are often surprised by the added time and effort needed to locate information from coworkers. Even getting answers to what seem like simple questions can feel like a large obstacle to a worker based at home.

This phenomenon extends beyond task-related work to interpersonal challenges that can emerge among remote coworkers. Research has found that a lack of "mutual knowledge" among remote workers translates to a lower willingness to give coworkers the benefit of the doubt in difficult situations. For example, if you know that your officemate is having a rough day, you will view a brusque email from them as a natural product of their stress. However, if you receive this email from a remote coworker, with no understanding of their current circumstances, you are more likely to take offense, or at a minimum to think poorly of your coworker's professionalism.

Social isolation: Loneliness is one of the most common complaints about remote work, with employees missing the informal social interaction of an office setting. It is thought that extraverts may suffer from isolation more in the short run, particularly if they do not have opportunities to connect with others in their remote-work environment. However, over a longer period of time, isolation can cause any employee to feel less "belonging" to their organization, and can even result in increased intention to leave the company.

Distractions at home: We often see photos representing remote work which portray a parent holding a child and typing on a laptop, often sitting on a sofa or living-room floor. In fact, this is a terrible representation of effective virtual work. Typically, we encourage employers to ensure that their remote workers have both dedicated workspace and adequate childcare before allowing them to work remotely. Yet, in the case of a sudden transition to virtual work, there is a much greater chance that employees will be contending with suboptimal workspaces and (in the case of school and daycare closures) unexpected parenting responsibilities. Even in normal circumstances family and home demands can impinge on remote work; managers should expect these distractions to be greater during this unplanned work-from-home transition.

How Managers Can Support Remote Employees

As much as remote work can be fraught with challenges, there are also relatively quick and inexpensive things that managers can do to ease the transition. Actions that you can take today include:

Establish structured daily check-ins: Many successful remote managers establish a daily call with their remote employees. This could take the form of a series of one-on-one calls, if your employees work more independently from each other, or a team call, if their work is highly collaborative. The important feature is that the calls are regular and predictable, and that they are a forum in which employees know that they can consult with you, and that their concerns and questions will be heard.

Provide several different communication technology options: Email alone is insufficient. Remote workers benefit from having a "richer" technology, such as video conferencing, that gives participants many of the visual cues that they would have if they were face-to-face. Video conferencing has many advantages, especially for smaller groups: Visual cues allow for increased "mutual knowledge" about coworkers and also help reduce the sense of isolation among teams. Video is also particularly useful for complex or sensitive conversations, as it feels more personal than written or audio-only communication.

There are other circumstances when quick collaboration is more important than visual detail. For these situations, provide mobile-enabled individual messaging functionality (like Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.) which can be used for simpler, less formal conversations, as well as time-sensitive communication.

If your company doesn't have technology tools already in place, there are inexpensive ways to obtain simple versions of these tools for your team, as a short-term fix. Consult with your organization's IT department to ensure there is an appropriate level of data security before using any of these tools.

And then establish "rules of engagement": Remote work becomes more efficient and satisfying when managers set expectations for the frequency, means, and ideal timing of communication for their teams. For example, "We use videoconferencing for daily check-in meetings, but we use IM when something is urgent." Also, if you can, let your employees know the best way and time to reach you during the workday (e.g., "I tend to be more available late in the day for ad hoc phone or video conversations, but if there's an emergency earlier in the day, send me a text.") Finally, keep an eye on communication among team members (to the extent appropriate), to ensure that they are sharing information as needed.

We recommend that managers establish these "rules of engagement" with employees as soon as possible, ideally during the first online check-in meeting. While some choices about specific expectations may be better than others, the most important factor is that all employees share the same set of expectations for communication.

Provide opportunities for remote social interaction: One of the most essential steps a manager can take is to structure ways for employees to interact socially (that is, have informal conversations about non-work topics) while working remotely. This is true for all remote workers, but particularly so for workers who have been abruptly transitioned out of the office.

The easiest way to establish some basic social interaction is to leave some time at the beginning of team calls just for non-work items (e.g., "We're going to spend the first few minutes just catching up with each other. How was your weekend?"). Other options include virtual pizza parties (in which pizza is delivered to all team members at the time of a videoconference), or virtual office parties (in which party "care packages" can be sent in advance to be opened and enjoyed simultaneously). While these types of events may sound artificial or forced, experienced managers of remote workers (and the workers themselves) report that virtual events help reduce feelings of isolation, promoting a sense of belonging.

Offer encouragement and emotional support: Especially in the context of an abrupt shift to remote work, it is important for managers to acknowledge stress, listen to employees' anxieties and concerns, and empathize with their struggles. If a newly remote employee is clearly struggling but not communicating stress or anxiety, ask them how they're doing. Even a general question such as "How is this remote work situation working out for you so far?" can elicit important information that you might not otherwise hear. Once you ask the question, be sure to listen carefully to the response, and briefly restate it back to the employee, to ensure that you understood correctly. Let the employee's stress or concerns (rather than your own) be the focus of this conversation.

Research on emotional intelligence and emotional contagion tells us that employees look to their managers for cues about how to react to sudden changes or crisis situations. If a manager communicates stress and helplessness, this will have what Daniel Goleman calls a "trickle-down" effect on employees. Effective leaders take a two-pronged approach, both acknowledging the stress and anxiety that employees may be feeling in difficult circumstances, but also providing affirmation of their confidence in their teams, using phrases such as "we've got this," or "this is tough, but I know we can handle it," or "let's look for ways to use our strengths during this time." With this support, employees are more likely to take up the challenge with a sense of purpose and focus.

We'll add our own note of encouragement to managers facing remote work for the first time: you've got this. Let us know in the comments your own tips for managing your remote employees.

If our content helps you to contend with coronavirus and other challenges, please consider subscribing to HBR. A subscription purchase is the best way to support the creation of these resources.

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A Guide to Managing Your (Newly) Remote Workers

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Executive Summary With the Covid-19 epidemic, many employees - and their managers - are finding themselves working out of the office and separated from each other for the first time. Fortunately, there are specific, research-based steps that managers can take without great effort to improve the engagement and productivity of remote employees, even when there is little time to prepare.

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Distance learning during the COVID-19 outbreak can provide kids with benefits that go beyond academics. Getty Images

While under stay-at-home orders, it's important for children to still have a consistent structure to their day.

Although kids may not be learning as much as they would in the classroom, online lessons and meetings with other students can help provide social interaction children are missing while stuck at home.

If your child's schoolwork seems overwhelming, speak with his or her teacher and work together to find something that works for everyone.

All data and statistics are based on publicly available data at the time of publication. Some information may be out of date. Visit our coronavirus hub and follow our live updates page for the most recent information on the COVID-19 outbreak.
I adopted my daughter as a single mother 7 years ago. I've never had a parenting partner to tap out to and have always lived thousands of miles away from any family that may have otherwise been able to help.

As a work-from-home freelancer, I've had to have a lot of hustle - often working late into the evenings, even with my daughter in school and childcare. But I've always made it work, and I've always been grateful for our life together.

Still, you can probably imagine the stress I felt when it became clear school and childcare would be shut down indefinitely due to COVID-19, and that on top of full-time work and full-time mothering, I was now going to be expected to take over my daughter's education as well.

I pride myself on being able to do it all, but there's a point when "it all" becomes a bit too much for anyone to handle.

Like so many parents around the country, I was dreading homeschooling my daughter when it first became clear schools would not be opening back up. This is not a role I ever would have chosen, nor is it how I ever imagined her education going.

To be honest, I'm not the most patient person when it comes to teaching anyone anything, and even helping her with her homework has been a struggle for us in the past.

How was I supposed to spend several hours a day teaching her while also managing my work schedule and keeping a roof over our heads?

Of course I was tempted to latch onto the memes and Facebook posts about eschewing homeschooling altogether and allowing us both to just relax into this moment. After all, how much could she possibly miss over the next 6 weeks of school? She's only in first grade. Couldn't all the kids just catch up together when school resumes?

I knew the answer was "yes." But deep down, I also knew that homeschooling under these circumstances wasn't necessarily meant to be about academics alone.

"One of the main points of continuing to learn, in my view, is to give kids a sense of normalcy and growth," said Kathryn Haydon, a former second grade teacher and education consultant who spends her days now as the innovation strategist behind Sparkitivity.

Haydon explained that while many parents may be feeling as though kids "deserve a break" right now, allowing them to spend their days playing video games and watching movies without any kind of structure is something most kids will grow tired of very quickly. Especially when children are otherwise being deprived of social interaction as well.

"A specific benefit to distance learning programs is to provide connection with outside teachers, mentors, and kids when most people are not able to even visit neighbors," Haydon said.

Psychologist and author Wendy Walsh, PhD, specializes in attachment. And she agrees. "We hope this will be temporary, but none of us really knows for sure," she said. "The point of homeschooling in the meantime is structure. Not rigid structure, but enough structure to get things done during the day."

Walsh explained that a lack of structure can cause cognitive impairment for both kids and adults, leading to a likely rise in depression as a result.

"Having schoolwork to focus on, and the structure and normalcy that provides, can help keep kids from succumbing to that depression too," she said.

Haydon further explained that the goal of distance learning should be to engage kids in learning, to provide connection, and to provide a sense of continuity and normalcy.

"The goal should not be to cram a ton of concepts down kids' throats out of fear that they will 'be behind.' This is an opportunity to find different ways of learning in a new context," she said.

Melissa Packwood, MEd, is a certified teacher in Florida who has a master's degree in reading and literacy as well as a graduate certificate in special education.

She said it's important to remember that traditional homeschooling and quarantine schooling from home are two different things, and that the latter has been borne mostly out of necessity. But she pointed out there are still benefits to be reaped from our current situation.

"Families will have more time together to bond, children will have more free time to explore hobbies at home. Children will also have the opportunity to work on life skills such as cooking, cleaning, building, organizing, and entertaining oneself," Packwood said.

Walsh agreed that our current situation is nothing like traditional homeschooling, where, she pointed out, kids are often still getting a ton of social interaction through homeschooling groups, team activities, and play with friends.

"Trying to teach a class full of kindergartners over Zoom is stupid," she said. "It's chaos."

But as she points out, it's not about teaching 25 kindergarteners popsicle stick art. "It's about giving them the opportunity for those social interactions they'd otherwise be having."

Having witnessed my daughter in classroom Zoom sessions over the past few days, I can attest to the truth behind that statement.

I'm not sure she's actually learned anything from any of those sessions, and I give her teacher all the credit in the world for even attempting to host them - but my little girl's face sure has lit up every single time she's been met with a screen full of her classmate's faces.

I quickly recognized distance learning as something my daughter actually needed in this time of crisis - as the structure and normalcy that might just help her adjust to our current way of life. But that doesn't mean I had any idea how to make it all work when it started.

I still had a job to do, and no other adult in the home to help me juggle it all.

"There's a general rule of thumb that at a maximum, there are around 3 1/2 formal academic hours of learning in a typical school day," Haydon said. "This can be a lot less, depending on circumstances. Homeschoolers tend to do 1 to 3 hours of formal academic learning."

For me, remembering that I didn't need to offer my child a traditional 7-hour school day was key to creating a schedule that allowed room for her schooling and my work.

I allotted 2 hours a day to helping her with school, broken up into 3 different sessions throughout the day.

In between those sessions, I scheduled time for her to work on art projects and have uninterrupted screen time - a survival tool allowing me to work uninterrupted as well.

"To help smooth the path, it is important to be flexible, be patient, take breaks when needed, and understand both your limits and your child's limits," Packwood said. "It is okay to stop if frustrated. It is okay to complete work at 6 p.m. instead of 8 a.m. Do what works for you and your family."

For parents like me, still working from home, she further suggests establishing separate areas for you to work, kids to play, and schoolwork to take place.

"If possible, separate your day into blocks of time so you can assist your children as needed," she said. (This is a tip that made this new normal bearable for me and my daughter.) "If this is not possible, then consider working on school activities after your working hours."

So far, we've found the amount of work sent home for my daughter to be completely doable. I've even come to see it as a blessing. My daughter is far happier since we started distance learning than she was in the week we both spent flailing.

Having something to do each day has given her purpose and helped us both to recalibrate and focus on what needs to be done.

But not all parents have been so lucky. Some have shared horror stories of pages upon pages of worksheets to complete and unrealistic expectations being handed down by teachers and administrators.

"It's a very, very difficult situation right now and teachers had, sometimes, only a day or two to adjust," Haydon said. "Having taught virtually myself, I know it is not easy to do. It takes careful work and planning to do well, a luxury teachers right now have not had."

That said, if you feel like the work being assigned by your child's teacher is too much, or if you just feel like you can't personally keep up, that's OK. You are allowed to express that and adjust expectations all around.

"If it's really not working, talk directly to the teacher. Speak kindly and give yourself and the teacher and your child the gift of grace," Haydon said.

Packwood said that parents have every right to let teachers and schools know what they will and will not be completing from home right now.

"Teachers and principals should understand this without issue as they are also working their way through these uncharted waters," she said. "Communicate with firm yet kind words so you and the teacher can work on coming to an agreement that works for both the requirements and your student."

Walsh advises using a timer to help kids stay on track during schooling periods.

"That way it's not you, you're not the mean one - you can even show kids how to set the timer so they're in control."

She further suggests having your kids help you to make a schedule that works for everyone involved, and then allowing them to decorate it on a big poster board you can keep where schooling will most often take place.

"The purpose really is to create some structure for your child where they will feel safer and more organized," she explained. "By the way, it will also help you as the parent feel safer."

But she said you shouldn't let any of this overwhelm you.

"Don't get too strict. All your child's peers will fall behind in this time and they will all catch back up together. They have good, young brains with plenty of neuroplasticity - they can catch up when the time comes," she said.

This is a sentiment I've come to agree with completely - while also recognizing the social and emotional benefits my daughter has gained from our now almost 2 weeks of quarantine schooling.

As far as I'm concerned, the social and emotional benefits far outweigh any potential educational benefits she may be gaining during this part of the pandemic.

She needed this right now. We both did. And somehow, some way, we're making it work - better than I had believed we could before this adventure began.

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How I Stopped Stressing and Embraced My Kid's Distance Learning

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While under stay-at-home orders, it's important for children to still have a consistent structure to their day. Although kids may not be learning as much as they would in the classroom, online lessons and meetings with other students can help provide social interaction children are missing while stuck at home.

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Top 10 risks and opportunities for education in the face of COVID-19

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Top 10 risks and opportunities for education in the face of COVID-19

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March 2020 will forever be known in the education community as the month when almost all the world's schools shut their doors. On March 1, six governments instituted nationwide school closures due to the deadly coronavirus pandemic, and by the end of the month, 185 countries had closed, affecting 90 percent of the world's students. The speed of these closures and the rapid move to distance learning has allowed little time for planning or reflection on both the potential risks to safeguard against and the potential opportunities to leverage.

With every crisis comes deep challenges and opportunities for transformation- past education crises have shown that it is possible to build back better. To help me reflect on what some of these challenges and opportunities may be, I recently spoke to Jim Knight, current member of the House of Lords, head of education for Tes Global, and former U.K. schools minister; and to Vicki Phillips, current chief of education at the National Geographic Society and a former U.S. superintendent of schools and state secretary of education. They provide perspectives from inside and outside of government in the U.K. and U.S., though their insights can likely help the many countries worldwide struggling to continue education during the pandemic.

Risks and challenges
#1: Distance learning will reinforce teaching and learning approaches that we know do not work well.
Jim: Many countries are shifting to distance learning approaches, whether through distributing physical packets of materials for students or through using technology to facilitate online learning. And there are real risks because many of these approaches can be very solitary and didactic when you're just asking students to sit and quietly watch videos, read documents online, or click through presentations-that's really dull. The worst form of learning is to sit passively and listen, and this may be the form that most students will receive during school closures. It serves no one well, especially those who are the furthest behind.
#2: Educators will be overwhelmed and unsupported to do their jobs well.
Vicki: Teachers had little or no notice about their schools closing and shifting to online learning-this can be challenging for anybody. They've shared that they are overwhelmed with all sorts of materials and products, and we are seeing educators begin to push back and request help filtering through all the resources to find those that are quality.

At the same time, teachers are just like the rest of us in that they are experiencing this strange new world as mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. They are trying to deal with their individual lives and take care of their kids and find new ways to make sure that learning continues.
#3: The protection and safety of children will be harder to safeguard.
Jim: In the U.K., we have stringent processes around checking who has access to children during school, in after-school clubs and sports. Schools have safeguard measures in place to ensure that predators toward children, such as pedophiles, can't access young people. Now, once you move to online learning in a home environment, you can't safeguard against this. People have to be mindful about the design of online learning so that bad individuals don't get to children outside of their home.
#4: School closures will widen the equity gaps.
Vicki: Over the last decade or so, progress has been made in the number of students who have access to devices and connectivity, making this move to online learning possible. At the same time, not every child has access to digital devices or internet connectivity at home, and we need to ensure those kids get access to learning resources as well. This means that learning resources need to be available on every kind of device and it means, for kids who don't have access, we still need to find a way to reach them.
#5: Poor experiences with ed-tech during the pandemic will make it harder to get buy-in later for good use of ed-tech.
Jim: We know that some students who use ed-tech during the pandemic will have a poor experience because they're not used to it. Some people will say, "During the virus we tried the ed-tech-enabled learning approaches, it was terrible, and look at my test scores." Yes, this will happen. People's test scores will be impacted. People will become unhappy because the mental health effects of being isolated will be profound. We must be prepared for that. Those poor experiences are really important to learn what does and doesn't work.

Opportunities to Leverage
#1: Blended learning approaches will be tried, tested, and increasingly used.
Jim: We know that the more engaging learning styles are ones that are more interactive, and that face-to-face learning is better than 100 percent online learning. We also know blended learning can draw on the best of both worlds and create a better learning experience than one hundred percent face-to-face learning. If, after having done 100 percent online at the end of this, I think it's quite possible that we can then think about rebalancing the mix between face-to-face and online. Teachers will have started to innovate and experiment with these online tools and may want to continue online pedagogies as a result of all this. That's really exciting.
#2: Teachers and schools will receive more respect, appreciation, and support for their important role in society.
Vicki: I think it will be easier to understand that schools aren't just buildings where students go to learn, and that teachers are irreplaceable. There's something magic about that in-person connection, that bond between teachers and their students. Having that face-to-face connection with learners and being able to support them across their unique skills⁠-that's very hard to replicate in a distance learning environment. Also, many students access critical resources at school, such as meals, clothing, and mental health support that may not be as widely available at home.
#3: Quality teaching and learning materials will be better curated and more widely used.
Vicki: Educators are looking to other educators as well as trusted sources to help curate high-quality online learning tools. At National Geographic, we've curated collections for K-12 learners in our resource library. We've created a new landing page that allows educators, parents, and caregivers to access our free materials quickly, and inspire young people. But it's not just teachers struggling-it's parents and other caregivers who are trying to bring learning to life. To that end, we're livestreaming our Explorer Classroom model that connects young people with scientists, researchers, educators, and storytellers. During this transition, we want students and families to have access to that larger world, in addition to their own backyard.
#4: Teacher collaboration will grow and help improve learning.
Jim: As a profession, I hope we come out of this crisis stronger by collaborating and working together. I'm a firm believer in not asking heavily burdened teachers to reinvent the wheel. At my company Tes, we've got a big resource-sharing platform for teachers, including coronavirus-related resources. There are other platforms too, such as Teachers Pay Teachers and Khan Academy, where teachers can see what others have done. A teacher could say, "well, rather than record a video with the instructional element I need, I might be able to find someone who has done that really well already." One of the most important things teachers can do now is draw on what others are doing: Form community online, share the burden, and make things a bit easier.
#5: This crisis will help us come together across boundaries.
Vicki: We would be remiss if we didn't take away a greater sense of empathy for each other-the idea that we can work through anything together-from this crisis. I think it's an opportunity for the education sector to unite, forge connections across countries and continents, and truly share what works in a global way. I don't think, prior to this crisis, that we've been able to do this, and we will have missed a big opportunity if we don't try to do that now.

Jim: We will get through this stronger. I live in a divided country, and from where I sit, it looks like the U.S. is a divided country too. When you go through a big national crisis like this, you come out stronger as a country because you've been fighting together, working together.

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Top 10 risks and opportunities for education in the face of COVID-19

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March 2020 will forever be known in the education community as the month when almost all the world's schools shut their doors. On March 1, six governments instituted nationwide school closures due to the deadly coronavirus pandemic, and by the end of the month, 185 countries had closed, affecting 90 percent of the world's students.

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Hay que tener Habilidades Duras (Hard Skills) y Habilidades Blandas (Soft Skills)

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Hay que tener Habilidades Duras (Hard Skills) y Habilidades Blandas (Soft Skills)

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22 de octubre de 2018 | Escrito por: Juan Hernández

Para el Doctor Hosting las Habilidades Blandas (Soft Skills) son nuestras actitudes en cualquier trabajo, mientras que las Habilidades Duras (Hard Skills) son las aptitudes que tenemos para la realización de un trabajo específico. Ambas se complementan entre sí, y cuanto más se dominen mejor trabajo se realizará.

Habilidades Duras (Hard Skills)

Los Hard Skills se refieren a los conocimientos que se aprenden estudiando, realizando cursos o practicando, por ejemplo:

Titulaciones

Uso de programas informáticos e interfaces

Manejo de herramientas

Dominio de idiomas

Operaciones con datos y análisis

Comprensión lectora

Búsqueda de información

Redacción

Diseño gráfico

Diseño Industrial

Conocimientos legales

Grabación y edición de vídeo

Grabación y edición de música

Fotografía

Arquitectura

Habilidades Suaves

Las Soft Skills están relacionadas con la sociabilidad, se mejoran con el contacto con otras personas en un trabajo. Por ejemplo:

Adaptabilidad

Asertividad

Atención al cliente

Autocontrol

Buen humor

Celeridad

Compromiso

Comunicación

Concentración

Control del estrés

Cooperatividad

Cortesía

Decisión

Disciplina

Escucha

Flexibilidad

Fiabilidad

Imagen personal

Inteligencia emocional

Integridad

Liderazgo

Limpieza

Lealtad

Motivación

Negociación

Optimismo

Organización

Paciencia

Positivismo

Precaución

Proactividad

Productividad

Profesionalidad

Puntualidad

Resiliencia

Respeto

Responsabilidad

Simpatía

Trabajo en equipo

Tranquilidad

Voluntad

Las Habilidades Duras te conseguirán entrevistas y las Habilidades Blandas te conseguirán trabajos

Antes las empresas daban valor a cada habilidad en función del puesto de trabajo. Por ejemplo en un despacho de abogados o en una empresa de construcción de barcos primaban los conocimientos técnicos (Hard Skills), mientras que para ser camarero o vendedor se daba más valor a la capacidad de socialización (Soft Skills). Hoy en día esto está cambiando y las empresas empiezan a valorar las habilidades que no son específicas al puesto de trabajo, pero que hacen que un empleado pueda contribuir a que el resto de profesionales mejore su desempeño. Se puede decir que las Habilidades Duras son nuestro cerebro y las Habilidades Blandas son nuestro corazón, por tanto conviene cultivarlas para tener más oportunidades laborales.

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Hay que tener Habilidades Duras (Hard Skills) y Habilidades Blandas (Soft Skills)

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22 de octubre de 2018 | Escrito por: Juan Hernández Para el Doctor Hosting las Habilidades Blandas (Soft Skills) son nuestras actitudes en cualquier trabajo, mientras que las Habilidades Duras (Hard Skills) son las aptitudes que tenemos para la realización de un trabajo específico.

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All school year, Montenique Woodard's seventh period, her last class of the day, has been her hardest. "I feel like I don't know what to do with them," she said of her middle school science class when Edutopia first talked to her back in the fall. One boy in particular, the "class clown," was a persistent challenge, and his behavior influenced his 23 peers, 15 of whom are boys.

But reconnecting months later during the coronavirus closures, Woodard shared some surprising news: the same boy was "thriving" during remote learning. "I think not having those everyday distractions in school has really allowed for kids like him to focus on the work and not necessarily all the social things going on because some kids can't separate that out," said Woodard, who teaches in Washington, D.C.

We've been hearing that a lot. Increasingly, teachers in our audience are reporting that a handful of their students-shy kids, hyperactive kids, highly creative kids-are suddenly doing better with remote learning than they were doing in the physical classroom. "It's been awesome to see some of my kids finally find their niche in education," said Holli Ross, a first-year high school teacher in northern California, echoing the sentiments of dozens of teachers we've heard from.

That's not to say it's the norm. Many students are struggling to adapt to remote learning: Digital access and connectivity remain a pervasive equity issue; stay-at-home orders have magnified existing problems in familial dynamics; and, universally, teachers and students grapple with how to replicate the engagement and discourse from an in-person classroom.

But it's not a tiny handful, either, and the unplanned break from the physical classroom may be bringing to light hidden reasons some kids struggle while others succeed. In the responses we gathered from our educators, we found recurring themes-like social situations and the inflexible bell schedule-that simply don't work well for all kids. For a few of the teachers, at least, it's inspired them to consider making permanent changes when they return to the classroom.

The Benefits of Self-Pacing

On average, the typical high school student starts school at 8:00 a.m. While school schedules differ by district, many students then face back-to-back classes with little reprieve. But during the pandemic, school schedules have suddenly become more fluid, allowing students more choice over when and how they do their school work.

"I think a few of mine are doing really well getting a taste of more independence," said Lauren Huddleston, a middle school English teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. "They're taking ownership a bit more because they're no longer under the micromanagement of the school day."
©Nora Fleming
This flexibility to make their own hours is also giving students a chance to exercise, take breaks, or even be bored, all of which research shows is beneficial. High school English teacher Ashlee Tripp speculated these kids were doing well because, "they enjoy the freedom to work at their own pace and decide how they want their day to look," and students seem to agree.

"The reason I enjoy online learning is because of the opportunity to structure my day efficiently," wrote a 10th grade student in English teacher Katie Burrows-Stone's class survey. "I am able to workout, relax, and complete the work in a timely manner, with no distractions."

Time to Rethink the Overextended Kid

During the school day, many students remain constantly on the go. Lunches are often filled with club meetings. After school, many participate in extracurriculars or sports-often to impress colleges-or work a part-time job. On average, high school students spend a minimum of seven and a half hours a week on homework at night.

After enrichment activities were canceled due to shelter-in-place orders, our teachers say they also saw a difference in some students' performance.

"For my students, there are some that are thriving. I think it is partly because so many things like sports and social activities are no longer happening and they have more time than they ever had to work on school work," said Kasey Short, a middle school English and social studies teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, by way of explanation.

Research has found jam-packed schedules can be a significant challenge for a child to juggle: Students who are over-committed, especially if they feel obligated to take certain courses or participate in activities, are more likely to experience unhealthy anxiety levels.

"This has given me so much pause about what we are doing in education: Is our current model way too much? Why would anyone need to have seven classes? Why does the school day need to be so long?" said Rosie Reid, a high school English teacher and the 2019 California Teacher of the Year. "I can't say enough about how this closure has changed my entire approach to teaching because I see how it has been an amazing respite for so many students."

Lowering the Stakes

Other teachers point to the changing academic expectations during the pandemic as a causal link. Given the structure of home learning-and pervasive equity issues-many school systems have encouraged teachers to be more lenient with coursework and grading.

"I think a huge part of [some students' work improving] is that we've dramatically ratcheted down the total workload in order to make tasks accessible rather than overwhelming," said Mark Gardner, high school English teacher in Camas, Washington.

According to a Pew Research Center study, teens cite academic pressure as the top pressure they face, with 61 percent of teens reporting they feel the heat to achieve at a certain level academically. Teachers too, have also been under increasing scrutiny in the last decade-plus to prepare students to hit benchmarks on standardized testing, pressure that trickles down to students, who are twice as likely to report unhealthy levels of stress during the school year compared to the summer.

"One student told me he likes remote learning better because he no longer feels the extreme pressure of failing," said Cathleen Beachboard, a middle school English teacher in Fauquier County, Virginia, who says other students in her class have expressed similar sentiments. "He says that now that the pressure of state testing is off, he feels he can really learn."

Reducing the Chatter

Though we've seen many comments-from both students and teachers-about missing the in-person connections and relationships at school, for some students, school socialization may be fraught with anxiety, our teachers suggest.

"Students who have been victims of physical or verbal bullying while at school are likely to be relieved to be home in a safe space," said Elena Spathis, high school Spanish teacher in Hillsdale, New Jersey.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2017, at least 20 percent of students ages 12-18 reported being bullied at school. Students who are the most bullied have also been found to have lower academic performance than their non-bullied peers.

For other students, socialization at school may not be negative per se, just distracting or intimidating. Nearly a third of teens have reported feeling pressure to "look good" or "fit in socially" at school, which can influence their participation and focus in class. "The online environment may allow for voices to be heard without the added bit of social anxiety," said Blake Harvard, a psychology teacher in Madison, Alabama.

Getting Enough Z's

Lastly, teachers commented that the difference they've observed in some students' performance may be tied, simply, to sleep. Like many teachers-and workers across the country-most students are no longer waking up to a very early alarm clock.

"I have the time to sleep eight hours a night every night [now]," said Ingrid, a high school junior in California, when asked what she likes about remote learning.

While the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends 8-10 hours a night for teens ages 12-18 and 12 hours for children ages 6-12, a 2018 study of high school students across 30 states found more than 70 percent of students were not getting enough sleep during the school year.

Though the long-standing debate over school start times never seems to end, when the Seattle school district delayed school start times by an hour at one school in 2016-2017, researchers found students' sleep increased and grades improved.

"There are kids who have a hard time getting to class at 8:30, but they might do really well getting their work done at 10:30 at night or even 10:30 in the morning. They just need a couple extra hours," said Ross.
Youki Terada contributed research insights to this article.

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Why Are Some Kids Thriving During Remote Learning?

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All school year, Montenique Woodard's seventh period, her last class of the day, has been her hardest. "I feel like I don't know what to do with them," she said of her middle school science class when Edutopia first talked to her back in the fall.

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NWEA MAP Resources During Time of COVID-19

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Emotional intelligence sets great leaders apart from the rest. Learn to recognize it in yourself and others with this 7 minute video slide deck. Download a customizable version in Subscriber Exclusives.

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I want to share with you my 7 Cs for coronavirus survival if you're a manager or a leader. This message is also available on video.

1. Calm. Your folks, your employees, your customers, your suppliers, are going to be looking to you as a leader to project a sense of calm through this difficult, uncertain situation.

2. Confidence. You have to be calm, but not still-water calm. You have to project confidence that you're going to be able to see this through successfully, with a minimum amount of hurt to the company, but also to all of the stakeholders who are relying on your leadership to get them through the difficult days and months ahead.

3. Communication. You have to relentlessly communicate, communicate, communicate. This is to avoid rumors developing that muddy the waters. But when I'm talking about communication, I'm also talking about a strategy for communication. You need a sense of order in which to communicate decisions and priorities, but also have rapid communication to the entire body of constituents-not delays over hours or days or, even worse, weeks. Silence is absolutely the worst possible thing that you allow to happen, because that's when the rumor mill develops.

4. Collaboration. You are not going to know all the answers; no one expects you to. This is a time for you to call on the resources, the capabilities of all of your employees, all of your team members, and bring them together in taskforces, sub-taskforces, and potentially have a role for everyone in which they feel they can contribute to overcoming the uncertainty, overcoming the crisis. Engaging employees in this way will also reduce that rumor mill, give confidence to them that they will then project in turn to the people who are relying on them as their managers for direction.

5. Community. All of us live in communities. Our factories are in communities, our colleges and universities are in communities. We are leading by example, not just within our organizations, but within our broader communities. And especially since we're talking here about an infectious virus, it's extremely important that we set an example, model behaviors that are community friendly and supportive.

6. Compassion is extremely important at this time. We may rise to the occasion if we're fortunate to have a good team around us, but there are many people in our organizations who are depending upon us, who are not necessarily that resilient. And they need to be given the compassion to express their concerns. So, think of someone in your organization who has elderly parents in a fragile state of health. They're going to be doubly concerned about relatives at this time when the virus is potentially affecting the most vulnerable and medically challenged in our communities. If they want time off, if they want to work from home, if they need to have a little bit of space to look after their family members, please consider giving that to them. Compassion at a time of crisis is a very important manifestation of leadership.

7. Cash. The most obvious commercial C of the 7 Cs is Cash. Cash is king at a time of crisis, and everything needs to be done to look both short term and long term at the financial health of the organization. After all, your employees, suppliers, and customers are depending upon you to lead, not just emotionally but also prudently with respect to the long-term finances of the organization. Whatever you can do to conserve cash is going to be critical, because that's what's going to determine whether your employees are going to be paid next week.

About the Author
John Quelch is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration Emeritus at Harvad Business School and Dean of the University of Miami Herbert Business School.
[Image: stevecoleimages]

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I want to share with you my 7 Cs for coronavirus survival if you're a manager or a leader. This message is also available on video. Calm. Your folks, your employees, your customers, your suppliers, are going to be looking to you as a leader to project a sense of calm through this difficult, uncertain situation.

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This page will be updated regularly in accordance with the latest guidance for health and education. It is designed to give clear guidance for our school community on our planned reopening procedures.

Following on from the Reopening letter sent out last week, we continue to plan for our staggered start back to school on Monday 18 th May. This week's Update from the Principal also discusses this in more detail.

Health and Safety Guidance

Safety is our number one priority. We continue to monitor the situation closely and will follow guidance from the Ministry of Health, WHO, as well as Orbital Education.

Hand sanitisers continue to be available around the school, and students will be encouraged to use these regularly throughout the day. Instructions on the correct way to wash our hands and use sanitisers are also shared with students and staff around school.

Slovenia has currently the best epidemiological picture in mainland Europe. Read more about it here.

WHO guidance - washing your hands properly takes about as long as singing "Happy Birthday" twice, following the process outlined above.

Assemblies will not be held, classes will be split into smaller groups, and school lunches will be served accordingly.

Teachers will be provided with masks to wear in school if directed by the Ministry of Health. All students are welcome to come to school wearing a mask if they wish, but requirements will be communicated out based on further guidance from the Ministry of Health when available.

Pre-opening Procedures

We have purchased further protection, sanitation and cleaning equipment for our school. Our cleaning company have been in school performing a deep clean of the school. Additional cleaning has taken place and the cleaning has been assessed and reviewed. Extra resources for hygiene including hand-wash, wipes, sprays and sanitisers have arrived at school.

Before students can return to school, their parents will have to complete a Parent declaration form.

Students and staff must wear a mask adhering to the following guidelines whilst in school:

Both students and staff are welcome to wear their masks at all times if they choose.

Early Years and Primary students are not required to wear a mask, but are welcome to do so if they wish.

Secondary students aged 12 and above are required to wear a mask when entering the school and when walking on the corridors/halls. They must arrive to school with their mask. They are allowed to remove their masks in the classroom, but may keep it on if they wish.

All students must have a signed declaration from their parents to allow them to return to school.

Gates open at 7:30. Students must proceed to their classroom immediately. (Secondary students must be wearing masks upon arrival.)

We aim to divide students into smaller groups to adhere to current guidance as follows: Early Years - Year 3: 10 or less in a group; Year 4 - Year 13: 15 or less in a group.

All students should bring in their own resources, including water bottles, pencil cases, technology, headphones, etc as normal.

Toilets will be cleaned frequently throughout the day. They will be used on an individual basis (one at a time) only, upon teacher's permission.

Students must follow health and safety guidance as per the posters displayed around the school.

All teachers must wear masks when entering the school and around school common areas, including corridors/halls. Teachers that need a replacement mask will be provided one.

Primary school teachers may remove their masks in the classroom.

Secondary school teachers must continue wearing their mask in the classroom as well.

Class teachers and Form tutors must make sure all students in school have a signed declaration from their parents.

Teachers will be in their classrooms by 7:30 to welcome their students.

Teachers will ensure that classroom doors will be kept open and classrooms are well ventilated regularly.

All meetings will be held online between teachers to avoid larger gatherings.

Teachers have access to hand sanitisers and sprays to maintain a high level of hygiene in the classroom.

Toilets will be cleaned frequently throughout the day. They will be used on an individual basis (one at a time) only.

Staff must follow health and safety guidance as per the posters displayed around the school and ensure that students do the same.

Parents must provide a signed declaration before their child(ren) can return to school.

Parents must ensure that their children, if aged 12 and above, arrive to school with a mask.

Parents are advised not to enter the school building.

Gates open at 7:30. Drop-off and pick-up procedures will operate as normal, but parents will not be permitted to enter the school building. Please scroll down to the FAQ section for more information about after-school provision.

Parents with appointments with a member of staff or Early Years parents who are dropping off/collecting children must wear a mask.

Parents are encouraged to pack an extra healthy snack - fruit or veggies.

Parents must follow health and safety guidance as per the posters displayed around the school and encourage that students do the same.

Schedule of Reopening

We have arranged for a staggered start to allow groups of students to come back to school in a calm, organised and steady manner. Our Year groups will return as follows:

*this schedule may be amended depending on further Ministry guidelines.

Monday 18th May

In Primary, we aim to bring back our Early Years and Year 1 on the first day Monday 18 th May. The Early Years group will be split into 3 groups to adhere to all safety guidance and we will split the Year 1 class into 2 groups. This will be coordinated by Ms. Železinger.

In the Secondary, we will welcome back Years 10 - 13 on Monday 18 th May. These years are following their IGCSE and A Level classes and will be in lessons, completing assessments or gathering evidence for the CAIE exam board. This will be coordinated by Mr. Batson and Ms. Andronikos.

The rest of our Year groups will return in the following days in accordance to our plan above (Schedule of Reopening).

Returning Timetable of Classes

Year groups who have returned to school will carry on with lessons as per their normal timetable.

Online lessons continue for Year groups who have not transitioned back to school.

Returning Year groups will be split where required to adhere to all health and safety guidelines.

Uniform Requirements

All students are expected to wear full school uniform when they return to school.

Years 4 - 6 will not be changing into slippers, please provide comfortable footwear.

As mentioned on our Uniform page, Primary students will be allowed to wear their 'hot weather' uniform throughout Block 7.

Secondary students must come to school wearing their own mask.

As mentioned on our Uniform page, as an alternative to the standard uniform, Secondary students are also able to wear a plain white collared polo shirt (preferably BISL branded and now available from our Uniform shop) with grey shorts/skirt, black or grey socks and elegant black shoes. Please note - navy shorts are not permitted. Sixth Form students are required to be in usual formal attire. If there are any questions please check the website or contact your form tutors.

A provision for PE will be provided to individual classes as we move forward in Block 7.

No, the school will organise a 'staggered' start for students returning to BISL. We will slowly bring back the year groups safely into school adhering to the guidance from the Ministry of Health.

Yes, all staff will start back at school on Monday 18 th May.
3. Will there be any After School clubs, 4. Have the pick-up and drop-off procedures changed? Assemblies 5. What are the procedures for Early Years pick-up and drop-off? , Trips or Adventure Days?
No, we will focus entirely on the safety of the students and the staff in school. No large gatherings/meetings or opportunities for large groups of students will occur. Students will be in lessons with teachers. The only after-school activity will be the extended provision for EY until 4.30pm and Year 1 until 3.40pm to enable families to pick the younger students up later than the rest of the school.

No, pick-up and drop-off procedures continue as usual, but parents will not be permitted to enter the school building. Gates will open at 7:30. Students must proceed directly to their allocated Class/Form rooms where their teachers will be waiting.
6. Should parents fill in any forms before they send their children back to school? 7. What happens if I have not filled in the Parental declaration for my child to return to school on their first day? 8. Can I print and send the form in with my child on their first day back?
Gates and all doors will open from 7:30. EY parents should use the separate Early Years entrance for EY2+3 groups and the main entrance for EY 1 group only. EY parents will be emailed to inform them about the group their child is in. One parent and student at a time will be able to enter the EY cloakroom area. Primary and Secondary students should be dropped off in the blue drop-off zone as usual. Parents will not be able to enter the school premises beyond this point.
9. Can Years 10 and above fill out the form for themselves?
EY students should be picked up promptly between 14:45 - 15:00 at the allocated entrances (as per drop off). Primary students will assemble for pick up in the playground (assembly hall if raining) and should be picked up promptly between 14:45 - 15:00. Parents are asked to stay in their cars and NOT assemble at the front of the gates (unless collecting their child on foot).
10. What are the expectations of families that choose to not allow their children to come back into school?
EY and Y1 students that have been registered for the after school supervision are to be picked up from the playground via the main entrance. We ask parents to collect their children on time and by no later than 15:40 for Year 1 and 16:30 for EY.
11. How many students will there be in a class?
For parents entering the building at any time, health and safety measures apply at all times.
12. Will students and teachers be required to wear masks?
Yes, a completed and signed Parental declaration is compulsory before your child can return to school.

Students will not be permitted back into the school building without a signed Parental declaration.

Yes, your child can bring the printed and signed form with them on their first day, but must immediately give it to their teacher. We however advise parents to return the completed form electronically via email to reception@britishschool.si prior to the first day of returning to school.
13. Can students use outdoor play equipment?
Yes, students that are 15 years old and above can fill in and sign the form themselves.
14. Will students go outside for break?
We respect the wishes of parents in this situation as some might not want their children back at school immediately. Please send an email to reception@britishschool.si to notify us of your decision.
15. Should students bring in water bottles?
We aim to divide students into smaller groups to adhere to current guidance as follows: Early Years - Year 3: 10 or less in a group; Year 4 - Year 13: 15 or less in a group.
16. Can students share resources?

17. Will classrooms be ventilated?
All teachers must wear masks when entering the school and around school common areas, including corridors/halls. Primary school teachers may remove their masks in the classroom. Secondary school teachers must continue wearing their mask in the classroom as well.
18. Will there be hand sanitisers in every classroom?
Early Years and Primary students are not required to wear a mask, but are welcome to do so if they wish. Secondary students aged 12 and above are required to wear a mask when entering the school and when walking on the corridors/halls. They must arrive to school with their mask. They are allowed to remove their masks in the classroom, but may keep it on if they wish.
19. Will the school be cleaned before the opening? 20. Will online lessons continue during the day for students who choose not to return or are not yet due to return 21. Where is the information about which Year groups are returning to school and when? 22. Will the timetable change? 23. How will returning classes be structured? ?
No. Students are not permitted to use outside play equipment.

Students will be spending time outside, with careful consideration of adhering to safety distance. In Secondary, Year 7 and 8 students will be allowed outside after lunch to have some time outdoors in separate areas of the playground. For Primary, staggered play time and separate areas of the playground will be allocated. Students can play outside with the same group of students they share class with, supervised by the same member of staff as in the classroom.

Yes, water bottles filled with water should be brought from home.

No, students should continue using in their own resources, including water bottles, pencil cases, technology, headphones, etc as normal.

Yes, classrooms are ventilated regularly, and classroom doors remain open at all times.
26. Will specialist lessons go ahead (PE, languages etc)? 27. Will the library be open?
Yes. Hand sanitisers are also available at the entrance and in common areas.
28. What are the uniform expectation as student return?
Yes, our cleaning company have been in school performing a deep clean of the school. Additional cleaning has taken place. The cleaning has been assessed and reviewed. Extra resources for hygiene including hand-wash, wipes, sprays and sanitisers have arrived at school. Staff have been in school preparing and we are confident that our school is clean and well prepared for our students to return safely.

Our teachers will return to the normal timetables and teach the students in school. They will continue to upload work onto Canvas for students who are not in school at the end of the day. If a Year group has not return yet, their online lessons continue until that Year group returns. Once the Year group has returned to the school, the teacher will teach during the day and assist those absent by continuing to upload some resources from the school day.

The diagram of our 'staggered' start is included above in this article (Schedule of Reopening).

Yes, there will be adjustments to the timetable to reduce the movement of students around the school and, where required, to allow for the split groupings.

Teachers will adapt their teaching environment to ensure that social distancing and sanitary guidance can be observed.
29. Will school lunches be available? 30. Have the school term dates changed?
24. Will all Year 10 to Year 13 students follow full timetables when they return to school on Monday 18 May?
31. If parents require any assistance with payment of school fees or a request of a payment plan, who should they contact? As a group of Schools in Orbital Education, there is no blanket discount offered to all families in our schools across the world. Each individual family request is considered on a case by case basis by the School Principal assisted by the Business Manager. They assess the needs of the case and then a decision is made.
Only Year 10s will return to a full timetable of lessons on Monday 18 th May. Year 11, 12 and 13 students will receive further guidance from Mr Batson directly ( jason.batson@britishschool.si). Please ensure that emails are closely monitored.

25. What happens with Years 7 to 9 who are not returning to school on Monday 18 May?

These Year groups will have a Virtual Form Meeting at 8am on Monday 18 th May with their Form Tutors. Form Tutors will schedule this meeting in advance directly with their Tutor Groups. This meeting will be used to discuss any questions and share further information. Form Tutors are as follows:

Year 7 - Ms Poulet and Ms Tušar

Year 8A - Mr Kirwan and Ms Begić

Year 8B - Ms Clayton and Ms Maddison

Year 9 - Ms Dascalescu and Ms Zupanc

Provisions will be provided to individual classes, prioritising the health and safety of all students, as we move forward in Block 7.

No, the library is closed. Students may return any library books in the box at reception. In Primary, the same applies to Readers - these will not be available and once returned will be stored away with all library books. No library books or Readers can be taken home during this time and the use of books in the classroom will be minimised too.

All students are expected to wear full school uniform when they return to school.

Years 4 - 6 will not be changing into slippers, please provide comfortable footwear.

As mentioned on our Uniform page, Primary students will be allowed to wear their 'hot weather' uniform throughout Block 7.

Secondary students must come to school wearing their own mask.

As mentioned on our Uniform page, as an alternative to the standard uniform, Secondary students are also able to wear a plain white collared polo shirt (preferably BISL branded and now available from our Uniform shop) with grey shorts/skirt, black or grey socks and elegant black shoes. Please note - navy shorts are not permitted. Sixth Form students are required to be in usual formal attire. If there are any questions please check the website or contact the tutors below:

A provision for PE will be provided to individual classes as we move forward in Block 7.

Yes, lunches will be served as packed lunches and delivered directly to classrooms, adhering to the guidance from the Ministry of Health.

Yes, please click here to see our term dates. Block break has been moved to 11 th - 15 th May, so Block 7 will now start on Monday 18 th May.

The first point of contact for any financial requests or payment plan proposals is the accounts@britishschool.si.

Yes, please see this link for more information.

33. Will the split classes of less than 10 students change back to normal over this term?
Yes, classes will return to the usual teacher when guidance is given or measures are relaxed further enabling us to do this safely. This is a safety measure we have planned in accordance with health advice and classes are reviewed regularly. Parents will be informed of any changes by email from the class teacher or Head of School.

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This page will be updated regularly in accordance with the latest guidance for health and education. It is designed to give clear guidance for our school community on our planned reopening procedures. Following on from the Reopening letter sent out last week, we continue to plan for our staggered start back to school on Monday 18 th May.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This page will be updated regularly in accordance with the latest guidance for health and education. It is designed to give clear guidance for our school community on our planned reopening procedures.

Following on from the Reopening letter sent out last week, we continue to plan for our staggered start back to school on Monday 18 th May. This week's Update from the Principal also discusses this in more detail.

Health and Safety Guidance

Safety is our number one priority. We continue to monitor the situation closely and will follow guidance from the Ministry of Health, WHO, as well as Orbital Education.

Hand sanitisers continue to be available around the school, and students will be encouraged to use these regularly throughout the day. Instructions on the correct way to wash our hands and use sanitisers are also shared with students and staff around school.

Slovenia has currently the best epidemiological picture in mainland Europe. Read more about it here.

WHO guidance - washing your hands properly takes about as long as singing "Happy Birthday" twice, following the process outlined above.

Assemblies will not be held, classes will be split into smaller groups, and school lunches will be served accordingly.

Teachers will be provided with masks to wear in school if directed by the Ministry of Health. All students are welcome to come to school wearing a mask if they wish, but requirements will be communicated out based on further guidance from the Ministry of Health when available.

Pre-opening Procedures

We have purchased further protection, sanitation and cleaning equipment for our school. Our cleaning company have been in school performing a deep clean of the school. Additional cleaning has taken place and the cleaning has been assessed and reviewed. Extra resources for hygiene including hand-wash, wipes, sprays and sanitisers have arrived at school.

Before students can return to school, their parents will have to complete a Parent declaration form.

Students and staff must wear a mask adhering to the following guidelines whilst in school:

Both students and staff are welcome to wear their masks at all times if they choose.

Early Years and Primary students are not required to wear a mask, but are welcome to do so if they wish.

Secondary students aged 12 and above are required to wear a mask when entering the school and when walking on the corridors/halls. They must arrive to school with their mask. They are allowed to remove their masks in the classroom, but may keep it on if they wish.

All students must have a signed declaration from their parents to allow them to return to school.

Gates open at 7:30. Students must proceed to their classroom immediately. (Secondary students must be wearing masks upon arrival.)

We aim to divide students into smaller groups to adhere to current guidance as follows: Early Years - Year 3: 10 or less in a group; Year 4 - Year 13: 15 or less in a group.

All students should bring in their own resources, including water bottles, pencil cases, technology, headphones, etc as normal.

Toilets will be cleaned frequently throughout the day. They will be used on an individual basis (one at a time) only, upon teacher's permission.

Students must follow health and safety guidance as per the posters displayed around the school.

All teachers must wear masks when entering the school and around school common areas, including corridors/halls. Teachers that need a replacement mask will be provided one.

Primary school teachers may remove their masks in the classroom.

Secondary school teachers must continue wearing their mask in the classroom as well.

Class teachers and Form tutors must make sure all students in school have a signed declaration from their parents.

Teachers will be in their classrooms by 7:30 to welcome their students.

Teachers will ensure that classroom doors will be kept open and classrooms are well ventilated regularly.

All meetings will be held online between teachers to avoid larger gatherings.

Teachers have access to hand sanitisers and sprays to maintain a high level of hygiene in the classroom.

Toilets will be cleaned frequently throughout the day. They will be used on an individual basis (one at a time) only.

Staff must follow health and safety guidance as per the posters displayed around the school and ensure that students do the same.

Parents must provide a signed declaration before their child(ren) can return to school.

Parents must ensure that their children, if aged 12 and above, arrive to school with a mask.

Parents are advised not to enter the school building.

Gates open at 7:30. Drop-off and pick-up procedures will operate as normal, but parents will not be permitted to enter the school building. Please scroll down to the FAQ section for more information about after-school provision.

Parents with appointments with a member of staff or Early Years parents who are dropping off/collecting children must wear a mask.

Parents are encouraged to pack an extra healthy snack - fruit or veggies.

Parents must follow health and safety guidance as per the posters displayed around the school and encourage that students do the same.

Schedule of Reopening

We have arranged for a staggered start to allow groups of students to come back to school in a calm, organised and steady manner. Our Year groups will return as follows:

*this schedule may be amended depending on further Ministry guidelines.

Monday 18th May

In Primary, we aim to bring back our Early Years and Year 1 on the first day Monday 18 th May. The Early Years group will be split into 3 groups to adhere to all safety guidance and we will split the Year 1 class into 2 groups. This will be coordinated by Ms. Železinger.

In the Secondary, we will welcome back Years 10 - 13 on Monday 18 th May. These years are following their IGCSE and A Level classes and will be in lessons, completing assessments or gathering evidence for the CAIE exam board. This will be coordinated by Mr. Batson and Ms. Andronikos.

The rest of our Year groups will return in the following days in accordance to our plan above (Schedule of Reopening).

Returning Timetable of Classes

Year groups who have returned to school will carry on with lessons as per their normal timetable.

Online lessons continue for Year groups who have not transitioned back to school.

Returning Year groups will be split where required to adhere to all health and safety guidelines.

Uniform Requirements

All students are expected to wear full school uniform when they return to school.

Years 4 - 6 will not be changing into slippers, please provide comfortable footwear.

As mentioned on our Uniform page, Primary students will be allowed to wear their 'hot weather' uniform throughout Block 7.

Secondary students must come to school wearing their own mask.

As mentioned on our Uniform page, as an alternative to the standard uniform, Secondary students are also able to wear a plain white collared polo shirt (preferably BISL branded and now available from our Uniform shop) with grey shorts/skirt, black or grey socks and elegant black shoes. Please note - navy shorts are not permitted. Sixth Form students are required to be in usual formal attire. If there are any questions please check the website or contact your form tutors.

A provision for PE will be provided to individual classes as we move forward in Block 7.

No, the school will organise a 'staggered' start for students returning to BISL. We will slowly bring back the year groups safely into school adhering to the guidance from the Ministry of Health.

Yes, all staff will start back at school on Monday 18 th May.
3. Will there be any After School clubs, 4. Have the pick-up and drop-off procedures changed? Assemblies 5. What are the procedures for Early Years pick-up and drop-off? , Trips or Adventure Days?
No, we will focus entirely on the safety of the students and the staff in school. No large gatherings/meetings or opportunities for large groups of students will occur. Students will be in lessons with teachers. The only after-school activity will be the extended provision for EY until 4.30pm and Year 1 until 3.40pm to enable families to pick the younger students up later than the rest of the school.

No, pick-up and drop-off procedures continue as usual, but parents will not be permitted to enter the school building. Gates will open at 7:30. Students must proceed directly to their allocated Class/Form rooms where their teachers will be waiting.
6. Should parents fill in any forms before they send their children back to school? 7. What happens if I have not filled in the Parental declaration for my child to return to school on their first day? 8. Can I print and send the form in with my child on their first day back?
Gates and all doors will open from 7:30. EY parents should use the separate Early Years entrance for EY2+3 groups and the main entrance for EY 1 group only. EY parents will be emailed to inform them about the group their child is in. One parent and student at a time will be able to enter the EY cloakroom area. Primary and Secondary students should be dropped off in the blue drop-off zone as usual. Parents will not be able to enter the school premises beyond this point.
9. Can Years 10 and above fill out the form for themselves?
EY students should be picked up promptly between 14:45 - 15:00 at the allocated entrances (as per drop off). Primary students will assemble for pick up in the playground (assembly hall if raining) and should be picked up promptly between 14:45 - 15:00. Parents are asked to stay in their cars and NOT assemble at the front of the gates (unless collecting their child on foot).
10. What are the expectations of families that choose to not allow their children to come back into school?
EY and Y1 students that have been registered for the after school supervision are to be picked up from the playground via the main entrance. We ask parents to collect their children on time and by no later than 15:40 for Year 1 and 16:30 for EY.
11. How many students will there be in a class?
For parents entering the building at any time, health and safety measures apply at all times.
12. Will students and teachers be required to wear masks?
Yes, a completed and signed Parental declaration is compulsory before your child can return to school.

Students will not be permitted back into the school building without a signed Parental declaration.

Yes, your child can bring the printed and signed form with them on their first day, but must immediately give it to their teacher. We however advise parents to return the completed form electronically via email to reception@britishschool.si prior to the first day of returning to school.
13. Can students use outdoor play equipment?
Yes, students that are 15 years old and above can fill in and sign the form themselves.
14. Will students go outside for break?
We respect the wishes of parents in this situation as some might not want their children back at school immediately. Please send an email to reception@britishschool.si to notify us of your decision.
15. Should students bring in water bottles?
We aim to divide students into smaller groups to adhere to current guidance as follows: Early Years - Year 3: 10 or less in a group; Year 4 - Year 13: 15 or less in a group.
16. Can students share resources?

17. Will classrooms be ventilated?
All teachers must wear masks when entering the school and around school common areas, including corridors/halls. Primary school teachers may remove their masks in the classroom. Secondary school teachers must continue wearing their mask in the classroom as well.
18. Will there be hand sanitisers in every classroom?
Early Years and Primary students are not required to wear a mask, but are welcome to do so if they wish. Secondary students aged 12 and above are required to wear a mask when entering the school and when walking on the corridors/halls. They must arrive to school with their mask. They are allowed to remove their masks in the classroom, but may keep it on if they wish.
19. Will the school be cleaned before the opening? 20. Will online lessons continue during the day for students who choose not to return or are not yet due to return 21. Where is the information about which Year groups are returning to school and when? 22. Will the timetable change? 23. How will returning classes be structured? ?
No. Students are not permitted to use outside play equipment.

Students will be spending time outside, with careful consideration of adhering to safety distance. In Secondary, Year 7 and 8 students will be allowed outside after lunch to have some time outdoors in separate areas of the playground. For Primary, staggered play time and separate areas of the playground will be allocated. Students can play outside with the same group of students they share class with, supervised by the same member of staff as in the classroom.

Yes, water bottles filled with water should be brought from home.

No, students should continue using in their own resources, including water bottles, pencil cases, technology, headphones, etc as normal.

Yes, classrooms are ventilated regularly, and classroom doors remain open at all times.
26. Will specialist lessons go ahead (PE, languages etc)? 27. Will the library be open?
Yes. Hand sanitisers are also available at the entrance and in common areas.
28. What are the uniform expectation as student return?
Yes, our cleaning company have been in school performing a deep clean of the school. Additional cleaning has taken place. The cleaning has been assessed and reviewed. Extra resources for hygiene including hand-wash, wipes, sprays and sanitisers have arrived at school. Staff have been in school preparing and we are confident that our school is clean and well prepared for our students to return safely.

Our teachers will return to the normal timetables and teach the students in school. They will continue to upload work onto Canvas for students who are not in school at the end of the day. If a Year group has not return yet, their online lessons continue until that Year group returns. Once the Year group has returned to the school, the teacher will teach during the day and assist those absent by continuing to upload some resources from the school day.

The diagram of our 'staggered' start is included above in this article (Schedule of Reopening).

Yes, there will be adjustments to the timetable to reduce the movement of students around the school and, where required, to allow for the split groupings.

Teachers will adapt their teaching environment to ensure that social distancing and sanitary guidance can be observed.
29. Will school lunches be available? 30. Have the school term dates changed?
24. Will all Year 10 to Year 13 students follow full timetables when they return to school on Monday 18 May?
31. If parents require any assistance with payment of school fees or a request of a payment plan, who should they contact? As a group of Schools in Orbital Education, there is no blanket discount offered to all families in our schools across the world. Each individual family request is considered on a case by case basis by the School Principal assisted by the Business Manager. They assess the needs of the case and then a decision is made.
Only Year 10s will return to a full timetable of lessons on Monday 18 th May. Year 11, 12 and 13 students will receive further guidance from Mr Batson directly ( jason.batson@britishschool.si). Please ensure that emails are closely monitored.

25. What happens with Years 7 to 9 who are not returning to school on Monday 18 May?

These Year groups will have a Virtual Form Meeting at 8am on Monday 18 th May with their Form Tutors. Form Tutors will schedule this meeting in advance directly with their Tutor Groups. This meeting will be used to discuss any questions and share further information. Form Tutors are as follows:

Year 7 - Ms Poulet and Ms Tušar

Year 8A - Mr Kirwan and Ms Begić

Year 8B - Ms Clayton and Ms Maddison

Year 9 - Ms Dascalescu and Ms Zupanc

Provisions will be provided to individual classes, prioritising the health and safety of all students, as we move forward in Block 7.

No, the library is closed. Students may return any library books in the box at reception. In Primary, the same applies to Readers - these will not be available and once returned will be stored away with all library books. No library books or Readers can be taken home during this time and the use of books in the classroom will be minimised too.

All students are expected to wear full school uniform when they return to school.

Years 4 - 6 will not be changing into slippers, please provide comfortable footwear.

As mentioned on our Uniform page, Primary students will be allowed to wear their 'hot weather' uniform throughout Block 7.

Secondary students must come to school wearing their own mask.

As mentioned on our Uniform page, as an alternative to the standard uniform, Secondary students are also able to wear a plain white collared polo shirt (preferably BISL branded and now available from our Uniform shop) with grey shorts/skirt, black or grey socks and elegant black shoes. Please note - navy shorts are not permitted. Sixth Form students are required to be in usual formal attire. If there are any questions please check the website or contact the tutors below:

A provision for PE will be provided to individual classes as we move forward in Block 7.

Yes, lunches will be served as packed lunches and delivered directly to classrooms, adhering to the guidance from the Ministry of Health.

Yes, please click here to see our term dates. Block break has been moved to 11 th - 15 th May, so Block 7 will now start on Monday 18 th May.

The first point of contact for any financial requests or payment plan proposals is the accounts@britishschool.si.

Yes, please see this link for more information.

33. Will the split classes of less than 10 students change back to normal over this term?
Yes, classes will return to the usual teacher when guidance is given or measures are relaxed further enabling us to do this safely. This is a safety measure we have planned in accordance with health advice and classes are reviewed regularly. Parents will be informed of any changes by email from the class teacher or Head of School.

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This page will be updated regularly in accordance with the latest guidance for health and education. It is designed to give clear guidance for our school community on our planned reopening procedures. Following on from the Reopening letter sent out last week, we continue to plan for our staggered start back to school on Monday 18 th May.

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Paul Taylor/Getty Images

Motivation - the willingness to get the job done by starting rather than procrastinating, persisting in the face of distractions, and investing enough mental effort to succeed - accounts for 40% of the success of team projects. Yet managers are often at a loss as to how to effectively motivate uninspired employees. Our review of research on motivation indicates that the key is for managers to first accurately identify the reason for an employee's lack of motivation and then apply a targeted strategy.

Carefully assessing the nature of the motivational failure - before taking action - is crucial. Applying the wrong strategy (say, urging an employee to work harder, when the reason is that they're convinced they can't do it) can actually backfire, causing motivation to falter further.

These reasons fall into four categories - a quartet we call the motivation traps. Namely, they are 1) values mismatch, 2) lack of self-efficacy, 3) disruptive emotions, and 4) attribution errors. Each of these four traps has distinct causes and comes with specific strategies to release an employee from its clutches.

Here are the four motivation traps and each targeted strategy to help your employees escape them:

Trap 1, Values Mismatch: I don't care enough to do this.

How this trap ensnares employees: When a task doesn't connect with or contribute to something workers value, they won't be motivated to do it.

How to help an employee out of this trap: Find out what the employee cares about and connect it to the task. Too often, managers think about what motivates themselves and assume the same is true of their employees. Engage in probing conversation and perspective-taking to identify what your employee cares about and how that value links with the task.

There are different types of value which you can draw out. One is interest value, or how intellectually compelling a task is. For this, find connections between the task and the things that the employee finds intrinsically interesting. Another is identity value, or how central the skill set demanded by a task is to an employee's self-conception. Point out how the job at hand draws on a capacity that they consider an important part of their identity or role - such as engaging in teamwork, analytical problem solving or working under pressure.

Importance value is how important a task is. Identify ways to highlight how crucial the task is to achieve the team's or company's mission. Finally, utility value is a measure of the cost of achieving (and avoiding) the task versus the larger benefits of achieving. Find ways to show how completing this particular task contributes to the employee's larger goals and avoids blowback. Sometimes it may be necessary to ask an employee to, essentially, hold their nose while carrying out an undesirable task - making clear to them the future benefit its completion will yield or the problems it will prevent.

When an employee doesn't value a task at the outset and the values mismatch may not be apparent, a manager's best bet is to try to appeal to multiple values. One or more of them may resonate with the employee.

Trap 2, Lack of Self-Efficacy: I don't think I'm able to do this.

How this trap ensnares employees: When workers believe they lack the capacity to carry out a task, they won't be motivated to do it.

How to help an employee out of this trap: Build the employee's sense of confidence and competence. This can be done in several ways. One is to point out times in the past when they've surmounted similar challenges. Perhaps share examples of others just like them who overcame the same challenges in a way the employee can do, too. Build their sense of self-efficacy with progressively more difficult challenges, or by breaking down the current task into manageable chunks.

Often, employees who lack self-efficacy are convinced that succeeding at a particular task will require the investment of far more time and energy than they can afford. Explain that they have the ability to succeed but may have misjudged the effort required; urge them to invest more effort while expressing confidence that additional effort will lead to success. It helps if managers offer some extra support as work gets underway.

Occasionally employees have the opposite motivation trap. They may lack motivation because they feel, in a sense, overqualified. Employees with inflated self-efficacy pose one of the more difficult motivational management challenges. Overconfident people often make mistakes, even as they're certain they know what they are doing. When they err, they insist that it's the criteria for judging success on the task that is flawed, so they take no responsibility for their failures.

When dealing with such employees, it's important to avoid challenging their ability or expertise. Instead, demonstrate to them that they have misjudged the requirements of the task, and convince them that it requires a different approach.

Trap 3, Disruptive Emotions: I'm too upset to do this.

How this trap ensnares employees: When workers are consumed with negative emotions such as anxiety, anger, or depression, they won't be motivated to carry out a task.

How to help an employee out of this trap: Begin in a setting where you cannot be overheard. Tell them you want to understand why they are upset and engage in active listening. Do not agree or disagree. Be nonjudgmental by asking what the employee believes is causing them to be upset. Then, briefly summarize what they said back to them and ask if you have understood. If they say "no," apologize and tell them you are listening carefully and to "please try again." When people feel they have been understood, their negative emotions soften a bit. It may be useful to tell them that you want to consider what they told you and schedule a time the next day to discuss. This often helps the person get more control over their emotions.

Keep in mind that anger is the belief that someone or something external to the person has caused or will cause them harm. Ask an employee feeling angry to try to reframe their belief about the external as resulting from ignorance or accident, not intention. Suggest ways they could invest the effort to eliminate the threat. Depression sometimes results from employees' belief that they are internally inadequate in some way that they cannot control. In this case, it often helps to suggest that they are not "broken" or "inadequate" but only need to invest more effort in effective strategies. Offer your help. Anxious or fearful employees often respond positively to assistance with their approach to the task as well as to reminders that they are capable and can succeed with more effort.

If the emotions do not soften with time and effort or if they spring from outside the workplace, for example, it may be advisable to help the employee access counseling.

Trap 4, Attribution Errors: I don't know what went wrong with this.

How this trap ensnares employees: When employees can't accurately identify the reason for their struggles with a task, or when they attribute their struggles to a reason beyond their control, they won't be motivated to do it.

How to help an employee out of this trap: Help the employee think clearly about the cause of their struggles with a task. Attribution errors are often to blame when employees seem to be finding excuses not to carry out a task (calling in sick, pleading overcommitment or "not enough time," trying to foist the task on colleagues). Helping the employee identify exactly why the task seems insurmountable can help them move past such avoidance. If they identify a cause that's out of their control (blaming other people, for example, or a flaw in themselves that can't be fixed), suggest other causes that are under their control, such as the need to adopt a new strategy or to apply a greater level of planning.

With each of these four motivation traps, the trick is to think more comprehensively about what stops employees from initiating, persisting, and putting in mental effort. The research suggests that managers can do more to diagnose the motivation problems of employees. When motivation goes off the rails, identifying exactly which trap has ensnared your employees - and applying just the right targeted intervention - can get things moving again.

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4 Reasons Good Employees Lose Their Motivation

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Motivation - the willingness to get the job done by starting rather than procrastinating, persisting in the face of distractions, and investing enough mental effort to succeed - accounts for 40% of the success of team projects. Yet managers are often at a loss as to how to effectively motivate uninspired employees.

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Library of Congress/HBR Staff

Would you rate yourself as highly productive?

We've learned a lot about personal productivity and what makes some people more productive than others. Last year we published a survey to help professionals assess their own personal productivity - defined as the habits closely associated with accomplishing more each day. The survey focused on seven habits: developing daily routines, planning your schedule, coping with messages, getting a lot done, running effective meetings, honing communication skills, and delegating tasks to others.

After cleaning up the data, we obtained a complete set of answers from 19,957 respondents across six continents. Roughly half were residents of North America; another 21% were residents of Europe and 19% were residents of Asia. The remaining 10% was comprised of residents (in descending order) from Australia, South America, and Africa.

Our survey had its limits - for example, respondents were a self-selected sample of readers of HBR.org, and the ratings were self-assessments of habits rather than objective measures of people's productivity. Nevertheless, we believe the survey results provide useful insights into important productivity habits and challenges facing professionals.

Three general patterns stood out: First, working longer hours does not necessarily mean higher personal productivity. Working smarter is the key to accomplishing more of your top priorities each day. Second, age and seniority were highly correlated with personal productivity - older and more senior professionals recorded higher scores than younger and more junior colleagues. Third, the overall productivity scores of male and female professionals were almost the same, but there were gender differences on particular habits that promote personal productivity.

More specifically, we found that professionals with the highest productivity scores tended to do well on the same clusters of habits. They planned their work based on their top priorities, and then acted with a definite objective. They developed effective techniques for managing a high volume of information and tasks. And they understood the needs of their colleagues - for short meetings, responsive communications, and clear directions.

Let's go deeper into the survey results. On geography, the average productivity score for respondents from North America was in the middle of the pack, even though Americans tend to work longer hours. The North American score was significantly lower than the average productivity scores for respondents from Europe, Asia, and Australia. On the other hand, the North American score was significantly higher than the average productivity scores for residents of South America and Africa (though recall these were the areas where we had the least data).

Drilling down into the data, we found the higher productivity scores for Europe, Asia, and Australia were driven by strong habits in areas such as daily schedules, not constantly checking messages, focusing early on the final product, and thinking carefully before reading or writing.

While our survey turned up significant differences in productivity scores by continent, it showed minimal differences between the average scores of male and female respondents. Overall, the respondents were 55% male and 45% female.

Yet there were some noteworthy differences in how women and men managed to be so productive. Women tended to score particularly high when it came to running effective meetings - women were more likely than men to send out an agenda in advance, keep meetings to less than 90 minutes, and finish meetings with an agreement on next steps. Women were also more likely to say that they prepared their calendars the night before and responded promptly to important emails.

By contrast, men did particularly well when it came to coping with high message volume - not looking at their emails too frequently and skipping over the messages of low value. Men were also more likely than women to report keeping free slots in their daily schedules, getting quickly to the final product, and composing outlines before writing memos.

Beside geography and gender, we analyzed the responses to our questionnaire by age and seniority. There were five age brackets - with the most respondents in the under-30 bracket and the least in the over-60 bracket. We found that the productivity scores of respondents rose systematically the older they got. This trend seems to reflect the benefits of learning from years of experience how to work smarter. The drivers of these higher productivity scores for respondents in older age brackets were their stronger habits in four areas: developing routines for low-value activities, managing message flow, running effective meetings, and delegating tasks to others.

The story was somewhat similar when it came to seniority. There were five levels of seniority captured in the data, with 5 being the most junior and 1 being the most senior. The number of respondents was highest in the most junior level and lowest at the most senior level. As with age, the productivity scores rose systematically with successively higher levels of seniority. This may suggest that business professionals attain higher levels of seniority in part by cultivating good productivity habits (or vice versa, people become more senior and then have to become more productive). However, the drivers of higher scores for senior level respondents were different than those for older respondents. More senior respondents achieved high productivity from better planning of their schedules, getting a lot done, and stronger communication skills.

Finally, we focused on the tails in each of the four demographic categories. We defined tails to include all respondents whose total score fell outside of two standard deviations from the mean. The left tail comprised those with the lowest scores; the right tail had the highest scores. We didn't find any geographic or gender patterns on either tail, though we saw a few of the youngest and most junior professionals in the right tail with the highest scores.

The professionals in the right tail with the highest productivity scores were particularly adept at overcoming procrastination, getting to the final product, and focusing on daily accomplishments. Low ratings on these three habits were typically reported by professionals with the lowest productivity scores. In addition, professionals in the right tail were much better at advance planning - reviewing schedules the night before, sending out meeting agendas, and setting success metrics for their teams. Professionals in the left tail had low scores on these aspects of advance planning. They also did not leave open slots in their schedules and did not use outlines before writing memos.

So what should professionals take away from the results of our survey? If you want to become more productive, you should develop an array of specific habits.
First, plan your work based on your top priorities, and then act with a definite objective.

Revise your daily schedule the night before to emphasize your priorities. Next to each appointment on your calendar, jot down your objectives for it.

Send out a detailed agenda to all participants in advance of any meeting.

When embarking on large projects, sketch out preliminary conclusions as soon as possible.

Before reading any length material, identify your specific purpose for it.

Before writing anything of length, compose an outline with a logical order to help you stay on track.

Second, develop effective techniques for managing the overload of information and tasks.

Make daily processes, like getting dressed or eating breakfast, into routines so you don't spend time thinking about them.

Leave time in your daily schedule to deal with emergencies and unplanned events.

Check the screens on your devices once per hour, instead of every few minutes.

Skip over the majority of your messages by looking at the subject and sender.

Break large projects into pieces and reward yourself for completing each piece.

Delegate to others, if feasible, tasks that do not further your top priorities.

Third, understand the needs of your colleagues for short meetings, responsive communications, and clear directions.

Limit the time for any meeting to 90 minutes at most, but preferably less. End every meeting by delineating the next steps and responsibility for those steps.

Respond right away to messages from people who are important to you.

To capture an audience's attention, speak from a few notes, rather than reading a prepared text.

Establish clear objectives and success metrics for any team efforts.

To improve your team's performance, institute procedures to prevent future mistakes, instead of playing the blame game.

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What Makes Some People More Productive Than Others

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Would you rate yourself as highly productive? We've learned a lot about personal productivity and what makes some people more productive than others. Last year we published a survey to help professionals assess their own personal productivity - defined as the habits closely associated with accomplishing more each day.

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MirageC/Getty Images

In an ongoing crisis, clear communication is more important and more difficult than when things seem normal. Employees and customers are hungry for information, so we're tempted to pull together presentations and communicate with urgency instead of with careful planning. But if we present without addressing our audience's core questions of what, how, and why, we'll sow more confusion than we bring clarity.

At my company, we rework thousands of talks each year for large brands and high-powered executives. When their communications are high-stakes, most of our clients come to us prepared with what needs to happen and how, but they've rarely answered the question why.

Let's put it this way: If your boss comes to you and says, "I need you take on this additional project on top of your current work load," what is your first question going to be? It probably has nothing to do with setting your alarm, re-arranging your schedule, or any other version of how you're going to get the extra work done. When someone asks you to alter a current behavior, your first question is usually why? Because you're not going to try something new or hard unless you're motivated to do so.

Your audience is no different. If they don't know why a new action is necessary, they won't be motivated to help you. They'll continue with their current comfortable behaviors, thank you very much.

Communicators often overlook answering why for two key reasons:

They assume explaining what and how is the fastest way to influence their audience.

They think the answer to why is so self-evident it doesn't need unpacking.

Think about a difficult situation where it's critical for people to rally and align. Something as simple as a team-defining internal initiative or something as grand as pulling out of the economic crisis we're in right now. Let's say you are confident that if your audience executes your plan, your company will pull out unscathed. You know how to do it. You pour all those insights into a passionate presentation. You get a smattering of applause and then...nothing happens.

Have you been there? You've worked through your scenarios, planning, research, validation and poured energy into communicating "what" needs to happen and "how" to do it. You've walked away disappointed by the lack of response from the very people whose lives will be improved if they would simply do "what" you said "how" you said to do it.

Let's dissect this example a bit more.

Leaders explain the what of their insights and the how of applying the findings. This is how most leaders approach their talks, especially professionals who are deep subject matter experts. They focus on the content they want to share. Many leaders don't even consider the why from the audience perspective because it seems so self-evident to them, they think it's obvious to everyone.

On the other hand, let's say you inject your talk with a compelling why - "We can reduce secondary infection rates by 40%, saving thousands of lives" or "We can reach more people and help them advance their careers if we release our content for free." Answering "why" often leads to a human, who will benefit from the action you're asking people to take. It suddenly matters.

There's a good chance your why won't be as clear cut as the example above. So here are three strategies to help you get to the heart of the why in your next presentation.

Ask some good what questions.

The answers to why often hide in our subconscious, and you may have to coax them out. Sometimes, you can get to why by asking yourself a few good " what" questions such as: What is at stake if we do or do not do this? What will the future look like if we get this done? What would the state of the human condition be if we did or didn't do this? Another way to get to why is to have someone else ask you "so what" until you can't answer it anymore. That'll get you to the root of "why."

Follow up with because.

Just considering the why isn't enough - you have to clearly articulate the why. Think about what action you're asking your audience to take, and then follow it with "because."

For example, "We need to improve our process, because ____." Whatever reason follows a "we need to ______, because _______ ." Whatever that second blank is, will answer the question of "why."

State alternate perspectives.

Address skeptics and resistance by addressing potential perspectives you've eliminated. It might sound counterintuitive to reveal anything other than the action you're influencing them to take, but you can better persuade an audience by sharing ideas you abandoned and, you guessed it, "why" you've eliminated them. By sharing the ideas that you considered, explored, tested, and then abandoned, you'll demonstrate that you've thought through all the possibilities.

Answering why is an act of empathy and adds a layer of persuasion to your communications. When people know why they're being asked to do something, they're much more likely to do it.

In times like these, your customers and your employees need your wisdom and leadership more than ever, and you have a unique opportunity to move them forward in the midst of uncertainty. As you seek to inspire and motivate them to do the next right thing, don't forget to include the why.

Nancy Duarte is a best-selling author with thirty years of CEO-ing under her belt. She's driven her firm, Duarte, Inc., to be the global leader behind some of the most influential messages and visuals in business and culture. Duarte, Inc., is the largest design firm in Silicon Valley, as well as one of the top woman-owned businesses in the area. Nancy has written six best-selling books, four have won awards, and her new book, DataStory: Explain Data and Inspire Action Through Story, is available now. Follow Duarte on Twitter: @nancyduarte or LinkedIn.

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Good Leadership Is About Communicating "Why"

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In an ongoing crisis, clear communication is more important and more difficult than when things seem normal. Employees and customers are hungry for information, so we're tempted to pull together presentations and communicate with urgency instead of with careful planning.

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Metacognition: The Key for self regulation

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Metacognition: The Key for self regulation

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When kids hit difficult problems - the seemingly insurmountable English essay, a math test that takes on epic proportions, social struggles that leave them feeling frustrated - it can be tempting to give up and resort to four words no parent ever wants to hear: "I can't do it."

In order to thrive, kids need to be able to make the transition from the negative "I can't" to the proactive "How can I?"

To do that, they need to think about why they're stuck, what's frustrating them, what they would need to get unstuck. They need to think about their own thinking.

There's a word for that, and it's metacognition.

Metacognition is a big word for something most of us do every day without even noticing. Reflecting on our own thoughts is how we gain insight into our feelings, needs, and behaviors - and how we learn, manage, and adapt to new experiences, challenges, and emotional setbacks. It's the running conversation we have in our heads, mentally sounding ourselves out and making plans. Training kids to use it proactively to overcome obstacles, it turns out, can be a powerful tool.

More and more studies are suggesting that kids who are taught to use metacognitive strategies early on are more resilient and more successful, both in and out of school.

"I view metacognition as a goal," says Marc Gladstone, a learning specialist. "Getting into the habit of using metacognitive strategies early on helps kids become more independent learners and bolsters self-advocacy skills."

"Metacognitive thinking teaches us about ourselves," says Tamara Rosier, a learning coach who specializes in metacognitive techniques. "Thinking about our thinking creates perspective - perspective that leaves room for change."

She gives an example: "Instead of saying, 'Math tests make me anxious,' we're asking ourselves, 'What is it about math tests that makes me feel anxious and what can I do to change that?' "

Kids who are taught to think of themselves as being "good" or "bad" at a particular task can have a fixed mindset that makes them passive in approaching a challenge: either they can do it or they can't, but they aren't likely to think they can change that outcome.

Teaching kids to become more metacognitive helps them move from a mindset that leaves little room for change to a mindset which promotes self-awareness and resilience.

Help for kids with learning issues

Helping your child learn to work through difficult situations (or homework assignments, as the case may be) without becoming overwhelmed or giving up is especially valuable for kids with learning issues who may need to come up with different strategies than other students in the class.

For example:

A child with ADHD who struggles to stay on task is likely to feel frustrated and anxious when he's assigned a long essay. If he's unable to reflect on why the project upsets him he might think, "Everyone else is having an easy time. I'm just bad at writing."

A kid who's learned to reflect on his own learning process, on the other hand, could look at the situation and say, "I always feel like this when I have to work for a long time. Maybe if I take breaks every hour or so I'll feel less stressed out." By taking a metacognitive approach, he's able to manage his frustration and find a better way to approach big assignments in the future.

Great for self-regulation

Metacognitive skills are not only excellent tools for kids who learn differently, and often find themselves struggling to keep up. They also enable kids to self-regulate when faced with challenges, especially unexpected ones.

"One of the most powerful byproducts of metacognitive thinking is increased self-regulation," says Gladstone.

Being able to self-regulate helps kids manage experiences that might otherwise overwhelm them. For example, take two girls who have to audition for a school play, both of whom are struggling with unusually difficult material.

A girl who is regularly told how talented she is and is used to being praised for her performances is likely to get frustrated and overwhelmed at the sheer thought of performing badly.

But a girl who is praised for her ability to work hard and persevere when she's faced with a challenge can draw on her metacognitive skills to help her manage her nerves and help her figure out a way of rehearsing that works better for her.

Quieting negative self-talk

Fallout from a fixed mindset often takes the form of self-criticism. The negative feelings kids experience when they feel frustrated easily turn into negative self-talk. "If I'm so smart, why did I fail the test? I'm not smart. I'm useless."

"When you place your value on being 'smart,' anything that makes you feel less than smart is devastating," says Rosier. "A lot of kids develop a negative inner voice, and they develop it in place of metacognition."

This negative voice is sneaky, she explains, often masquerading as a coach. "You can mistake self-criticism for motivation. What we want to do is get rid of the negative inner voice and replace it with metacognitive thinking that helps your child find new ways to manage her challenges instead of beating herself up about them."

How do you help your child start becoming more meta?" Metacognitive questions, says Rosier, will help your child begin thinking in a more reflective way. Questions should be:

Open-ended. Give your child some space to reflect on his thinking: Can you tell me more about why you think that?

Non-blaming. It can be hard to stay open when kids are acting out, but asking them to think about their behavior can help them learn to manage difficult situations in a better way: Why do you think you got so upset when Dad changed the channel?

Solution-focused. Encourage him to think about how he can use his understanding to change things in the future: How could you handle that differently next time?

Process-oriented. Ask questions that help your child get a better idea of how his thought process works: How will you know when this drawing is finished?

"When you teach kids to think about their behavior differently, they begin to behave differently," says Rosier. But she warns that it's important not to expect instant results. Learning to think metacognitively is a process, and parents may have to accept that a lot of the work is happening behind the scenes.

"Of course we want to see progress, but our children - especially teenagers - don't always share their thinking with us and that's okay."

Just asking the questions gets the metacognitive work going internally, even if it's not visible to the parental eye, Rosier explains. The benefits are the same, she says, even if all you get is a grunt in return.

Learning to learn

Asking questions at home will help kids begin to use metacognitive strategies in their schoolwork, too. For many kids - especially those with learning differences - this can be harder than it sounds. It's easy to get bogged down by poor study habits, procrastination, homework meltdowns, and test stress.

If your child is struggling to work through a long paper, ask questions that help him use his metacognitive skills to try a different approach.

What do you think is making it hard for you to work on this paper right now?

What are some strategies that have helped you do well on similar papers in the past?

Can you use those insights to help you with the work you're doing now?

Asking metacognitive questions will help him clarify his process, manage his anxiety, and find a better way to approach his paper, but the benefits don't end when the assignment is done.

The more your child is able to understand his learning process the easier it will be for him to figure out what strategies and supports work best for him - knowledge that will help him succeed - both now and as he grows up.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is metacognition?

How does metacognition work?

How can parents encourage metacognition?

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Metacognition: How Thinking About Thinking Can Help Kids - Child Mind Institute

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A powerful skill for building resilience through the skills and techniques of metacognition from the experts at The Child Mind Institute.

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By Aída de Verdi
Los niños son seres afectivos que se relacionan con su entorno a través del cuerpo. El afecto nace de la interacción con otros seres humanos y se expresa precisamente con el cuerpo antes de que el lenguaje haga su aparición, en un proceso de ingreso al mundo simbólico de la cultura que Freud describe como el principio de realidad, teñido de represión: un código implícito que nos hace distinguir las conductas consideradas por la sociedad como adecuadas de las que no lo son. Los sentimientos de pudor, vergüenza y ridículo -por ejemplo- son aliados del principio de realidad y conllevan, cada uno de ellos, la represión de lo que el cuerpo desea y manifiesta. Afortunadamente, los niños todavía no se someten por completo a los imperativos de la razón; entonces viven su cuerpo como fuente de comunicación con los demás y gracias a ello establecen lazos tan cálidos, impregnados de ternura.

Lo anterior no significa que los niños no sean seres racionales, pero los vínculos de apego -generados en la etapa infantil y determinantes de nuestra manera de conectar con el mundo hasta el último día de nuestra existencia- son independientes de la racionalidad, y sin lazos afectivos no podríamos vivir en este mundo, tendríamos que construirnos el propio. La Modernidad nos dejó como herencia la sobrevalorización de la razón en esta era absurda de desencanto y sensación de pérdida de rumbo, marcada por duelos colectivos como el que estamos viviendo actualmente con la peste posmoderna que nos brinda un panorama de futuros distópicos en medio de un presente inexplicable.

¿Qué mejor ejemplo de una distopía digna de novela de ciencia ficción que una escuela donde los niños no pueden acercarse unos a otros? El colegio es la principal fuente de socialización, siendo el sitio a donde el niño acude separado de su madre a intentar integrarse en la esfera social, fuera de la burbuja del hogar. El principal reto de todo niño dentro de ese ámbito es lograr un sentido de pertenencia a la colectividad y la escuela implica precisamente el contacto con lo colectivo a través del establecimiento de lazos de amistad que no serían posibles si la cercanía física estuviera prohibida. Se nos ha hecho creer que la función primordial del colegio es la de aportar contenidos académicos; no obstante, sin el componente social el proceso de enseñanza-aprendizaje no requiere de toda la configuración, parafernalia y dinámica escolarizada para llevarse a cabo. ¿Tiene sentido una escuela prácticamente sin interacción humana? Lo que se planea implementar bajo el esquema de la "nueva normalidad" en el ámbito escolar se traduce en la represión de la esencia del niño, que es la expresión corporal como forma de comunicación con el otro. ¿Qué repercusiones puede tener en la psique infantil dicha represión? ¿Qué implicaciones tendría para su desarrollo socioemocional?

Los niños están acostumbrados a mostrarse como son, ellos no conocen la simulación ni las máscaras, no necesitan ocultar nada. Más allá de la cualidad particular de cada uno en cuanto a la extroversión o introversión, la autenticidad infantil es tan absoluta como su inocencia. Un cubrebocas es una barrera física que impide la entrada de agentes (microscópicos) externos, pero al mismo tiempo es un obstáculo social; es una máscara, sobre todo cuando se porta en el contexto de la actividad cotidiana: el trabajo y el colegio, lugares que no son de paso como lo es una tienda o un consultorio médico. El adulto ya construyó una identidad y un mundo de relación, de manera que el nuevo código para conducirse -la distancia interpersonal y la máscara protectora- no repercute de manera drástica en su vida. Sin embargo, la identidad del niño está en formación y para que el proceso tenga lugar de manera sana es indispensable la mirada del otro como espejo que le devuelva el reflejo de su propia existencia. Esto se configura inicialmente en la relación con la madre, y posterior a ese primer vínculo se establecen muchos otros fuera de casa que aún tienen el poder de moldear el 'Yo' infantil. Cada una de las relaciones que establece el niño está ligada a la expresión corporal, siendo el rostro la principal fuente de expresividad. ¿Cómo puede un niño darse a conocer, oculto tras un cubrebocas? ¿Será posible una convivencia mediada por la distancia física y las máscaras? ¿Cuál será la calidad de la interacción entre niños en este esquema donde se encontrarán frente a frente pero no podrán acercarse ni mirar mutuamente sus caras? ¿Qué sentido tendrá su sonrisa? Las emociones sin sus correspondientes reacciones corporales y faciales visibles para el prójimo terminan por apagarse, pues la retroalimentación del otro es lo que nutre la vida afectiva del niño, quien solía experimentar todo tipo de sentimientos en sus jornadas escolares. Si un niño lloraba, no faltaba quién le ofreciera un abrazo sanador. Cuando alguien metía gol en el recreo, chocaba las manos con los demás para sentir su triunfo a nivel de equipo. La amistad entre niñas no sería igual sin el tomado de manos para irse a jugar juntas. Incluso los empujones propios de la rivalidad son la manera en que los niños aprenden acerca de territorialidad, límites y defensa personal. ¿Cómo será la vida en la escuela cuando todo eso desaparezca? Lo que no dejará de existir es el impulso del niño: esa fuerza que lo lleva a expresarse, lo conduce a actuar, a comunicarse con el cuerpo. Se hará necesaria entonces una autoridad más rígida, que se dedique a separar a los niños unos de otros, a cubrirles la cara, recordarles que se laven las manos y corregirlos por hacer todo esto de manera deficiente. La figura de la maestra cariñosa, que apapacha, consuela y comprende, no será viable en este nuevo esquema que requiere de disciplina. Pero ¿qué tan sostenible puede ser la figura de la maestra-gendarme? "Te vas a infectar" -será lo que resuene constantemente en el oído del niño, cada vez que cuestione el porqué de estas reglas absurdas e incómodas. Más vale entonces que el recreo sea eliminado, pues nada justificará su existencia en un contexto donde el aprendizaje académico será el único motor de la vida escolar. Para jugar en solitario, cada niño tiene su casa. Sin embargo, en casa no entra la pandemia ni los códigos extraños de comportamiento. En casa no hay cubrebocas y sus habitantes pueden tocarse y abrazarse. El hogar se vuelve el ámbito más libre en este panorama donde todo lo que -potencialmente- toca el bicho queda convertido en "Territorio Covid", regido por una normativa psicótica. Todos aquellos sitios donde confluya una cierta cantidad de personas al mismo tiempo habrán de ser considerados focos de infección. Que el espacio donde acuden los niños cotidianamente sea un territorio de este tipo resulta preocupante no solamente por el motivo obvio, que es el riesgo de contagio, sino quizá más importante aún, debido a lo que ese ambiente tan profundamente restrictivo ocasionará en el desarrollo emocional del niño. La escuela será un lugar lleno de niños donde cada uno de ellos, en obediente aislamiento, se sentirá completamente solo. El impulso a desobedecer forma parte de una naturaleza infantil que intentará aplacarse a través del miedo: la amenaza constante de infección, la paranoia inoculada por el adulto que se ha convertido en una instancia persecutoria.

Definitivamente tiene que haber otra forma de resolver el regreso a clases, alguna manera que sí contemple las necesidades afectivas del niño y su desarrollo socioemocional como eje rector de su educación. Tratar a los niños como si fueran robots no debería de ser opción. Nuestro imperativo de adaptación a esta realidad inédita que la peste del siglo veintiuno nos impone no puede en modo alguno hacer que conceptualicemos a los niños como si fueran adultos pequeños y nos olvidemos de su esencia y sus requerimientos específicos, de acuerdo con la etapa de la vida en la que se encuentran. No podemos permitir que los niños sean los daños colaterales de esta crisis, sacrificando su salud mental para que los adultos tengamos la sensación de que ya volvimos a colocar cada pieza en su lugar y simulemos que el mundo funciona nuevamente. Todos haremos el tránsito del estado de encierro apabullante a una realidad muy lejana a la libertad concretada en esta distopía del desencuentro humano, pero hay que preguntarnos qué va a ocurrir con los niños, ¿qué les vamos a ofrecer?

"Los niños entienden perfectamente" -se dice. Claro que entienden, pero el problema aquí planteado no tiene nada que ver con el intelecto infantil. "Los niños son muy adaptables." Por supuesto que lo son, pero ¿realmente queremos adaptar a nuestros hijos a esta forma de vida? ¿a qué precio?

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Del encierro a la distopía: la nueva escuela

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By Aída de Verdi Los niños son seres afectivos que se relacionan con su entorno a través del cuerpo.

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cintascotch/Getty Images

In 2012, Denmark's biggest energy company, Danish Oil and Natural Gas, slid into financial crisis as the price of natural gas was plunging by 90% and S&P downgraded its credit rating to negative. The board hired a former executive at LEGO, Henrik Poulsen, as the new CEO. Whereas some leaders might have gone into crisis-management mode, laying off workers until prices recovered, Poulsen recognized the moment as an opportunity for fundamental change.

"We saw the need to build an entirely new company," says Poulsen. He renamed the firm Ørsted after the legendary Danish scientist Hans Christian Ørsted, who discovered the principles of electromagnetism. "It had to be a radical transformation; we needed to build a new core business and find new areas of sustainable growth. We looked at the shift to combat climate change, and we became one of the few companies to wholeheartedly make this profound decision, to be one of the first to go from black to green energy."

That strategic impulse-to identify a higher-purpose mission that galvanizes the organization-is a common thread among the Transformation 20, a new study by Innosight of the world's most transformative companies. Fortifying this new view, the Business Roundtable last month released a statement signed by 181 CEOs stating that serving shareholders can no longer be the main purpose of a corporation; rather, it needs to be about serving society, through innovation, commitment to a healthy environment and economic opportunity for all.

Our aim was to identify the global companies that have achieved the highest-impact business transformations over the past decade, using the same methodology as our 2017 study. Our research team screened all the firms in the S&P 500 and Global 2000 using three lenses:

1. New growth: How successful has the company been at creating new products, services, new markets, and new business models? This includes our primary metric: the percentage of revenue outside the core that can be attributed to new growth areas.

2. Repositioning the core: How effectively has the company adapted its traditional core business to changes or disruptions in its markets, giving its legacy business new life?

3. Financials: Has the company posted strong financial and stock market performance, or has it turned around its business from losses or slow growth to get back on track? We looked at revenue CAGR (compound annual growth rate), profitability, and stock price CAGR during the transformation period, which was different for each firm.

Our initial phase of research identified 52 companies making substantial progress towards strategic transformation-merely 3% of the public companies in our data set. From this second-round list, an Innosight partner panel voted to narrow it down to 27 finalists. For the third round, the following companies were selected as the Transformation 20 and ranked by a panel of management experts (see judges).

Each of these companies developed new-growth businesses outside its traditional core which have become a significant share of the overall business. However, we believe it's the decision to infuse a higher purpose into the culture, one that guides strategic decisions and gives clarity to everyday tasks, that has propelled these companies to success.

The #1 company, Netflix, is a case in point. In 2013, CEO Reed Hastings released an 11-page memo to employees and investors detailing a commitment to move from just distributing content digitally to become a leading producer of original content that could win Emmys and Oscars.

As the memo said, "We don't and can't compete on breadth with Comcast, Sky, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, or Google. For us to be hugely successful we have to be a focused passion brand. Starbucks, not 7-Eleven. Southwest, not United. HBO, not Dish."

Since unveiling that new purpose, Netflix revenue has roughly tripled, its profits have multiplied 32-fold, and its stock CAGR has increased 57% annually, versus 11% for the S&P 500.
Finding new purpose
In a comparable way, the purpose-driven mission of preventative healthcare has spurred major change at other large organizations that made the list. China's AIA Group has moved beyond insurance to become a wellness company, whereas Dutch electronics giant Philips has largely divested its legacy lighting business to focus on healthcare technology.

The technology companies on our list also discovered ways to infuse purpose into their organizations as part of their fundamental change.

Siemens moved beyond a purpose of maximizing shareholder value to a mission of "serving society." This transformation began in 2014 with a plan called Vision 2020 that called for harnessing technologies such as AI and the Internet of Things. However, changing the mission also called for changing the culture. "The biggest obstacle to any transformation is literally just the way we've always done things," says Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton. Infusing a higher purpose into the company called for pushing decision making out from the center to every business unit, so that managers and rank-and-file employees feel they have a stake in future success. "Ownership culture is central to everything," Humpton says. This shift in the culture at Siemens has propelled plans to divest its core oil and gas business and redeploy the capital to its Digital Industries unit and Smart Infrastructure business focused on energy efficiency, renewable power storage, distributed power, and electric vehicle mobility.

In the case of Tencent Holdings, the company was founded in 1998 to harness the Internet opportunity, launching online chat forums and video games for China's new generation of digital natives. As of 2005, shortly after its IPO, Tencent defined its purpose in terms of "implementing our Online Lifestyle strategy, which strives to cater to the basic needs of our users."

Only in subsequent years did founder and CEO Pony Ma Huateng broaden the firm's outlook by embracing a mission of "improving the quality of human life through digital innovation." Since 2011, Tencent has invested heavily in new growth ranging from education and entertainment to autonomous vehicles and ride sharing to fintech and the industrial internet-areas that together now represent 25% of its $46 revenue. Through its Tencent Education business unit, the firm is now developing educational content and services for individuals, schools, and education management. All of this growth helped Tencent become the first Asian company to surpass $500 billion in market valuation.

In 2019, Tencent refined its mission once again, in response to the growing global backlash against technology's dominance in our lives, boiling it down to: tech for social good.

Several companies found that refocusing the organization to help save the planet can be especially powerful. Ecolab, #16 on our list, is a prime example.

In the early 2000s, when Douglas Baker Jr. became its CEO, Ecolab was an 80-year-old firm growing 10% annually by selling industrial cleansers and food safety services. "Our strategic plan was to sell more of what we had," Baker says. To grow much beyond its $3.8 billion in revenue, the company could have kept moving into adjacent markets or new geographies, but Baker felt that wasn't bold enough.

The transformation began by talking to customers, Baker says. The same customers who were buying its core products were also voicing concerns about access to clean water. And they weren't alone. Projections for the year 2030 showed that 70% of the world's GDP would be based in water-stressed regions, California and Southern India being prime examples.

In 2011, Ecolab had a $12 billion market cap when it acquired water technology company Nalco in an $8 billion deal. The combined company is now one of the world's leading suppliers of hardware, software, and chemistry that helps manufacturers and service firms become more efficient users of water. A primary metric driving the organization is how much water is saved by its clients annually, which now stands at 188 billion gallons, against a 2030 target of 300 billion gallons.

"We broadened our vision and our purpose changed," Baker says. "As our teams widened their awareness of global issues, our pride has been enhanced." So has Ecolab's market value, which has surpassed $55 billion, placing it among America's top 100 most valuable firms.
Performing mission impossible
Such transformations are never easy. When the firm now known as Ørsted divested its oil and natural gas businesses and began phasing out coal, that created a giant earnings gap that urgently needed to be filled. The company had invested in offshore wind power, but the technology was too expensive, producing energy that was more than double the price of onshore wind.

Under Poulsen, Ørsted embarked on what critics called an impossible mission: a systematic "cost-out" program to reduce the price of offshore wind while achieving scale. The company managed to cut the cost by more than 60% while building three major new ocean-based wind farms in the U.K. and acquiring a leading company in the U.S.

The result: Previously about 80% owned by the Danish government, Ørsted's IPO in 2016 was one the year's largest. Net profits have increased by $3 billion since it began the transformation, and Ørsted is now the world's largest offshore wind company, with about a third share of booming global growth market.

The takeaway lesson from these mission-changers is clear: In an era of relentless change, a company survives and thrives based not on its size or performance at any given time but on its ability to reposition itself to create a new future, and to leverage a purpose-driven mission to that end. That's why strategic transformation may be the business leadership imperative of the 21st century

Click here to see the full T20 study results and methodology.
T20 Panel of Judges

1. Rita McGrath, management professor at Columbia Business School

2. BEH Swan Gin, Chair of the Singapore Economic Development Board

3. Phil Coughlin, Chief Strategy Officer at Expeditors (Seattle)

4. Amantha Imber, CEO of Inventium (Sydney, Australia)

5. Nathan Furr, Professor of Strategy, INSEAD

Editor's note: Every ranking or index is just one way to analyze and compare companies or places, based on a specific methodology and data set. At HBR, we believe that a well-designed index can provide useful insights, even though by definition it is a snapshot of a bigger picture. We always urge you to read the methodology carefully.

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The Top 20 Business Transformations of the Last Decade

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In 2012, Denmark's biggest energy company, Danish Oil and Natural Gas, slid into financial crisis as the price of natural gas was plunging by 90% and S&P downgraded its credit rating to negative. The board hired a former executive at LEGO, Henrik Poulsen, as the new CEO.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever. This is how 

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever. This is how 

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1. Cathy Li Head of Media, Entertainment and Information Industries, World Economic Forum

2. Farah Lalani Community Curator, Media, Entertainment and Information Industries, World Economic Forum

The COVID-19 has resulted in schools shut all across the world. Globally, over 1.2 billion children are out of the classroom.

As a result, education has changed dramatically, with the distinctive rise of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms.

Research suggests that online learning has been shown to increase retention of information, and take less time, meaning the changes coronavirus have caused might be here to stay.

While countries are at different points in their COVID-19 infection rates, worldwide there are currently more than 1.2 billion children in 186 countries affected by school closures due to the pandemic. In Denmark, children up to the age of 11 are returning to nurseries and schools after initially closing on 12 March, but in South Korea students are responding to roll calls from their teachers online.

With this sudden shift away from the classroom in many parts of the globe, some are wondering whether the adoption of online learning will continue to persist post-pandemic, and how such a shift would impact the worldwide education market.

Even before COVID-19, there was already high growth and adoption in education technology, with global edtech investments reaching US$18.66 billion in 2019 and the overall market for online education projected to reach $350 Billion by 2025. Whether it is language apps, virtual tutoring, video conferencing tools, or online learning software, there has been a significant surge in usage since COVID-19.

How is the education sector responding to COVID-19?

What does this mean for the future of learning?

While some believe that the unplanned and rapid move to online learning - with no training, insufficient bandwidth, and little preparation - will result in a poor user experience that is unconducive to sustained growth, others believe that a new hybrid model of education will emerge, with significant benefits. "I believe that the integration of information technology in education will be further accelerated and that online education will eventually become an integral component of school education," says Wang Tao, Vice President of Tencent Cloud and Vice President of Tencent Education.

There have already been successful transitions amongst many universities. For example, Zhejiang University managed to get more than 5,000 courses online just two weeks into the transition using "DingTalk ZJU". The Imperial College London started offering a course on the science of coronavirus, which is now the most enrolled class launched in 2020 on Coursera.

Many are already touting the benefits: Dr Amjad, a Professor at The University of Jordan who has been using Lark to teach his students says, "It has changed the way of teaching. It enables me to reach out to my students more efficiently and effectively through chat groups, video meetings, voting and also document sharing, especially during this pandemic. My students also find it is easier to communicate on Lark. I will stick to Lark even after coronavirus, I believe traditional offline learning and e-learning can go hand by hand."

The challenges of online learning

There are, however, challenges to overcome. Some students without reliable internet access and/or technology struggle to participate in digital learning; this gap is seen across countries and between income brackets within countries. For example, whilst 95% of students in Switzerland, Norway, and Austria have a computer to use for their schoolwork, only 34% in Indonesia do, according to OECD data.

In the US, there is a significant gap between those from privileged and disadvantaged backgrounds: whilst virtually all 15-year-olds from a privileged background said they had a computer to work on, nearly 25% of those from disadvantaged backgrounds did not. While some schools and governments have been providing digital equipment to students in need, such as in New South Wales, Australia, many are still concerned that the pandemic will widenthe digital divide.

Is learning online as effective?

For those who do have access to the right technology, there is evidence that learning online can be more effective in a number of ways. Some research shows that on average, students retain 25-60% more material when learning online compared to only 8-10% in a classroom. This is mostly due to the students being able to learn faster online; e-learning requires 40-60% less time to learn than in a traditional classroom setting because students can learn at their own pace, going back and re-reading, skipping, or accelerating through concepts as they choose.

Nevertheless, the effectiveness of online learning varies amongst age groups. The general consensus on children, especially younger ones, is that a structured environment is required, because kids are more easily distracted. To get the full benefit of online learning, there needs to be a concerted effort to provide this structure and go beyond replicating a physical class/lecture through video capabilities, instead, using a range of collaboration tools and engagement methods that promote "inclusion, personalization and intelligence", according to Dowson Tong, Senior Executive Vice President of Tencent and President of its Cloud and Smart Industries Group.

Since studies have shown that children extensively use their senses to learn, making learning fun and effective through use of technology is crucial, according to BYJU's Mrinal Mohit. "Over a period, we have observed that clever integration of games has demonstrated higher engagement and increased motivation towards learning especially among younger students, making them truly fall in love with learning", he says.

A changing education imperative

It is clear that this pandemic has utterly disrupted an education system that many assert was already losing its relevance. In his book, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, scholar Yuval Noah Harari outlines how schools continue to focus on traditional academic skills and rote learning, rather than on skills such as critical thinking and adaptability, which will be more important for success in the future. Could the move to online learning be the catalyst to create a new, more effective method of educating students? While some worry that the hasty nature of the transition online may have hindered this goal, others plan to make e-learning part of their 'new normal' after experiencing the benefits first-hand.

The importance of disseminating knowledge is highlighted through COVID-19

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has changed education forever. This is how

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We use cookies to improve your experience on our website. By using our website you consent to all cookies in accordance with our updated Cookie Notice. Cathy Li Head of Media, Entertainment and Information Industries, World Economic Forum Farah Lalani Community Curator, Media, Entertainment and Information Industries, World Economic Forum The COVID-19 has resulted in schools shut all across the world.

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How educators can provide excellent instruction as they develop their online classrooms.

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I am just emerging from two weeks on my back, racked with fever, headaches, and all the symptoms of COVID-19. I'll be honest. I underestimated COVID. As a very fit 48-year-old, I thought I could handle it, and I guess I did. But just barely. After three long weeks, I am not close to fully recovered.

Let's be clear. During COVID, traditional school no longer makes sense. Surviving COVID has caused me to question the logic of "traditional school," especially if:

1. You or your child have any existing health challenges (I was in great shape, but COVID beat me like a drum).

2. You regularly interact with grandparents, older neighbors, or friends.

3. You care about the considerable risks posed to teachers and staff at your child's school. (Teachers will be uniquely at risk this fall).

Let's face it, in the best of circumstances, your child's school is a petri dish. Regardless of how often door handles are sterilized and how much social distancing is encouraged, schools are COVID's perfect environment. And the risk of transmission to students is not the real concern. The real threat of transmission is to their teachers, their families, neighbors, and friends. As near as I can tell, my daughter gave COVID to me. She had no symptoms, and unknowingly passed it along. This is what awaits parents next fall: asymptomatic kids passing along COVID to adults.

For many of you, this poses a risk that is simply too high. So, for you, for me, for all of us, it's time to lean into homeschooling. And for those of you who are reluctant, I hate to break it to you, but you don't have a choice.

Homeschool has already been decided for most parents. Your school is finalizing plans that will require you to homeschool at the first sign of an outbreak at the school. (And there will be an outbreak. See the petri dish remark above.)

Just like in March, schools will shift the educational burden to you. Some districts are even planning to START school with parents homeschooling three days a week to facilitate social distancing. So, embrace the new reality: You are a homeschooler.

Once you accept your new title, the only questions are, in what manner you will homeschool, and whether you or the school will set the terms. And, with these questions lie the educational life or death of your child.

I've homeschooled off and on for 15 years, and what I saw last spring was, by all accounts, mayhem. But this wasn't because of the mad scramble schools went through to adjust to COVID. The chaos was because schools were setting the terms of homeschooling. They took their current broken model and superimposed it on the home. I can think of no worse educational model than that.

If you do not set the terms of schooling at home this year, your child will have the same heavy emphasis on standardized testing, the same inflexible curriculum, the same overemphasis on grades, the same underemphasis on building a culture of learning, creativity, or intellectual curiosity in your child. This is not "Homeschooling." It is "FrankenSchooling." And more is coming.

"FrankenSchool" happens when schools take the worst parts of 20th-century education and force-fits them together in a homeschool setting. Despite the reality of COVID and the genuine health risks to kids, teachers, and families, schools seem committed to using wires, glue, tape, bolts, and screws necessary to open school... FrankenSchool or traditional.

Now, don't get me wrong. Last spring was an all-hands on deck moment, and I don't mean to criticize the effort. But I do intend to criticize the plans that are slowly being announced for the fall. At the first sign of COVID outbreak, schools intend to send kids home to learn in FrankenSchool. In order to facilitate social distancing, some districts intend to START school with kids on campus for two days a week and at home for the other three. If homeschooling is a clear expectation now, let's re-think how this could proceed.

It is time to reimagine your child's education. Done right, your child will grow in their curiosity, and, in time, you'll also see improvements in your child's relationships, attitude, and ability to direct their learning. These are not small benefits. COVID has given us all an excuse to reimagine what school could be, what school SHOULD be.

Since May, I have been speaking with hundreds of parents and experimenting with a completely new homeschool model. (In fact, I don't use the word "homeschool" because it reminds me too much of FrankenSchool.) Instead, I use the term "home learning." This summer has been the transition for many. If you'd like to learn more, please join Saturday's webinar, where we'll discuss transitioning to home learning.

First, we must recognize that each parent has specific needs, based on two primary categories: 1) the age of their child and 2) their time flexibility. (There is a third category based on a parent's level of confidence in their ability to lead their child's learning. That will be covered in another post.) We must also consider how to re-engage children in their own learning. Let's discuss each one below.

Parents with Young Children

Generally speaking, the younger the child, the more individual support they will need for their learning. However, most parents imagine homeschooling (home learning) as a seven-hour series of lessons, activities, and projects that must keep the child's attention all day long. Let me debunk that myth now.

NO student needs that level of management. Of course, for safety reasons, a young child needs to be monitored throughout the day. However, there is no reason a child's day needs to be managed like they are in a school. Remember, schools have 20 - 30 kids in a classroom. If students are not heavily regulated, they will tear the school apart like a pack of wild dogs.

But home is an entirely different environment and, as a result, far less minute-by-minute-management is required. For a young child, daily academic progress is essential, but it should come in small increments. Each hour, a young child should spend 10 minutes working on reading or math. This will require one-on-one time. The rest of the hour, however, the child can be involved in "free play" where the child decides how they will use their time with limits placed on them by their parent. An example of a "limit" could be as follows:

1. No screens during free play

2. All toys must be put away before starting a new activity

3. 15 minutes of each hour must be spent with a book

Once a schedule like the above is created, it will take about a week for your child to get with the program. During that week, however, the parent's job will be to continually train the child on how to manage themselves.

The above structure requires parental attention and student focus during 10-15 minutes of each hour. If you have the flexibility to provide this type of regular but limited care, home learning is possible. If you don't, keep reading.

Parents with Elementary and Older Children

For kids who are age eight or older, they are generally mature enough to learn at home without any traditional school interaction. That's right; these kids are ready for full-time home learning. But again, let me debunk what home learning looks like.

Once a child can read the basics, an entire world of online learning opportunities open to the child. Most of these opportunities are free - or less than $10/month - and most have structures that can monitor the child's learning remotely. In other words, the parent does not have to look over the child's shoulder. The parent simply needs to confirm that the lessons were completed to a standard.

Real-Life Example

I know of one parent who assigned her 7-year-old child a daily reading assignment online. The online system tracked the time the child spent reading and required that the child complete a simple, five-question test at the end of each assignment. This test confirmed whether the child understood the material.

Because the reading assignments were tailored to the child's actual reading level, a poor test result usually meant that the child was not paying attention during the reading. So, before dinner each night, the child's mother reviewed his online report. If the child did not complete the text, the child was told that dinner would wait until he had completed his assignment. If the child scored less than 80% on the test, the parent would ask the child to immediately re-read the assignment out loud and retake the test.

Within a week, the child realized that his mother was serious about making sure that he read consistently. Not surprisingly, his consistency of completion increased as did his level of focus when it came time to read. She did not tell her son WHEN he must read. She left that decision to him. But she did require THAT he read and, on this expectation, she was unwilling to budge.

The child's reading consistency skyrocketed, and, over time, the parent increased the reading expectations while replicating this same approach with his online math. He went on to excel in both subjects.

This is an example of how a parent can use technology to extend learning without the parent needing to stand over the child's shoulder to make sure it gets done. This is home learning in the 21st century.

Parental Time Flexibility

The more significant challenge many parents face is one of flexibility. Parents who work out of the home, or parents who are unable to adjust their remote working, find it hard - if not impossible - to consider home learning.

But, all is not lost. Re-read the above section as I described the new possibilities of home learning. Ask yourself, is there anyone in your network who could help you create a home learning structure for your child. You may find is that there are friends, neighbors, classmate's parents, or relatives who may be willing to help.

Real-Life Example

I know a parent whose mother was a retired postal worker. When the mother expressed a desire to educate her kids at home, she asked her mother (the child's grandparent) to help. Initially, the grandparent was hesitant. She imagined "homeschool" as the 7-hour marathon that takes place in traditional school. The mother wisely reframed the expectations of home learning, which seemed more agreeable to the grandparent. Additionally, the mother proposed to test home learning over the summer months. During this time, mother, grandparent, and kids developed a rhythm and a structure that worked for them. Over time, they felt that this model was far more healthy to the family and supported the relationship between grandkids and grandparent. The children also saw immediate growth in their academic abilities because there was much more individualized attention provided through online programs, grandparent oversight, and parental monitoring.

So time flexibility is not always the barrier that it may seem. It can be a challenge to set up but most find that the benefits are worth the effort.

Below is a simple, three-step process we've been following over the last two months. The strategy hinges on student engagement.

In education, student engagement refers to the level of attention, curiosity, interest, optimism, and passion that your child shows when learning. The higher the engagement, the higher their motivation to learn.

Here's a test. Ask your child, "What are they curious about?" I'll bet you $1 that your child will not mention a single subject they are covering in school. I'll bet you a second $1 that your child has never been asked this question in an educational context. This is because school, FrankenSchool, or traditional, does not care what your child's interests are. State bureaucrats dictate School-based learning goals.

The 21st century requires that your child sees himself as a life-long learner. This identity begins now and will be central to your child's long-term college and work prospects. Colleges are increasingly ignoring standardized tests like the SAT and, instead, trying to ascertain if the applicant is truly skilled, passionate, and able to learn independently. And businesses realize that they need "problem solvers" more than they need "workers." From this point forward, the disruption will be the only constant in the workforce. Your role as a parent is to help ready your child for this new environment.

Step 1 to ReEngagement

I began by asking my kids to make a list of all the things they are curious about. This was hard for them initially, but once they got started, they enjoyed imagining areas for which they never were able to dedicate time. The kids are encouraged to add to the list as the spirit moves.

They listed several surprises like videography, photography, music (guitar and voice), baking, building leadership skills, acting, ending homelessness, and improving marine ecosystems, among others. This is a great list, and it's growing all the time!

Step 2 to ReEngagement

I then asked them to pick their two highest interest areas. For one child, that was baking and sewing. For another, it was videography and swimming. We then built a schedule that included doing something in each of these areas every single day-seven days per week. We set an initial goal of "30-30" (30 minutes per day for 30 days) at the end of which we agreed to reevaluate and/or chose another area to learn. This was their "curriculum," and it was based entirely on their interests.

Step 3 to ReEngagement

I then asked them to create a "Habit Tracking" form that keeps track of their daily progress in each of the areas. This tool is an important visual for the kids to see their daily progress.

But here's where something interesting happened. As they began to see how much unprogrammed time they had each day, I began to ask what else should be included in their learning. To my surprise, they were happy to add activities like math and reading to their day. Because they had more freedom to pursue their own interests, they were more understanding about adding important subjects that were not in their top choice. So, we added daily math and reading goals to their Habit Tracking form. Wow!

Step 4 to ReEngagement

We then set up a regular check-in time. Initially, it was every three days but has now become weekly. I ask them if they are following through on their agreements and, if not, how they plan to adjust. Again, they have shown a surprising willingness to adjust without my brow-beating or yelling. In fact, one child abandoned one of the areas she selected because she realized that she "wasn't as interested as she thought." She then picked another area, and we began the process again.

My kids have begun adding classes on Skillshare.com and Brilliant.com. They began incorporating music classes using Yousician.com and have hired a Spanish tutor from Panama ($10/hr) in addition to the free Duolingo.com lessons.

They are building their own educational pathways, and I am facilitating their journey. This is what engaged students look like... and I love it! So do they.

So that's it. COVID should call all of us to seriously consider throwing out the rulebook and to exploring more deeply what home learning could be. Honestly, it's difficult letting my children decide how they want to learn, but over the last six weeks, I've seen a change in my kids that caused me to see the long-term benefits of doing so. And the summer months are the perfect time to experiment without the stress of FrankenSchool breathing down your neck.

Lastly, none of the above is easy. There are risks to staying in traditional school, just as there are risks of doing something different. But everything I'm describing begins with a belief about the capabilities of your child. If you believe that your child is naturally curious, then help them tap into that curiosity by exploring a new educational model. If you think that your child is naturally lazy, then embrace the traditional school where they will be told what to learn. But, be warned, COVID will bring FrankenSchool to your home. And, when he shows up, I'd recommend that you not open the door.
Again, feel free to join the discussion on transitioning to home learning by participating in our monthly webinar.

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COVID Almost Killed Me and FrankenSchool Tried to Kill My Child's Education

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I am just emerging from two weeks on my back, racked with fever, headaches, and all the symptoms of COVID-19. I'll be honest. I underestimated COVID. As a very fit 48-year-old, I thought I could handle it, and I guess I did. But just barely.

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If you've ever received feedback that you "need to be more strategic," you know how frustrating it can feel. To add insult to injury, the feedback rarely comes with any concrete guidance on what to do about it. One of my coaching clients, Lisa, a vice president of HR, was in this situation and explains, "I was just told to think bigger picture and to be more strategic. It felt like I had been given the definition of a word by using the same word. It just wasn't helpful."

So what specific steps can you take to be more strategic in your current role?

Start by changing your mindset. If you believe that strategic thinking is only for senior executives, think again. It can, and must, happen at every level of the organization; it's one of those unwritten parts of all job descriptions. Ignore this fact and you risk getting passed over for a promotion, or having your budget cut because your department's strategic contribution is unclear.

Once you've accepted that it's part of your job, focus on developing four key abilities that demonstrate your strategic prowess.

Know: Observe and Seek Trends

Lisa wasn't seeing the big picture. Because of the amount of work she had and the pace at which she needed to get it done, she often took a "heads down" approach to her job and failed to "lift up" and observe both internal and external trends. She was missing key information that could help her focus, prioritize, and be proactive in addressing talent issues for her fast-growing company. Because Lisa approached her job in a transactional manner, simply getting the next hire, she didn't recognize that she needed a completely new approach to recruitment and retention.

In order to be strategic, you need a solid understanding of the industry context, trends, and business drivers. An intellectual appreciation of the importance of bringing in current data and seeking trends isn't enough. You also have to:

Make it a routine exercise to explore and synthesize the internal trends in your day-to-day work. For example, pay attention to the issues that get raised over and over in your organization and synthesize the common obstacles your colleagues face.

Be proactive about connecting with peers both in your organization and in your industry to understand their observations of the marketplace. Then, share your findings across your network.

Understand the unique information and perspective that your function provides and define its impact on the corporate level strategy.

Think: Ask the Tough Questions

With a fresh understanding of trends and issues, you can practice using strategic thinking by asking yourself, "How do I broaden what I consider?" Questions are the language of strategy. Lisa came to appreciate that her life and prior experience gave her a unique, yet myopic, strategic lens. So she pushed herself to ramp up her perspective-taking and inquiry skills. By becoming more curious, and looking at information from different points of view, she was able to reduce her myopia and see different possibilities, different approaches, and different potential outcomes.

For example, when working on an employee retention project she asked herself, "What does success look like in Year 1?" "What does it look like in Year 3?" "What could impact the outcome in a negative way?" "What are the early signs of success/failure?" "What do business partners need to understand to ensure its success?" and "Do the outcomes support the broader goals of the organization?" By asking these tough questions first, she recognized that she could better engage with colleagues and senior executives early on in ways that would benefit the project - and would help shape the perception that she was thoughtful and strategic.

Speak: Sound Strategic

Strategic thinkers also know how to speak the language. They prioritize and sequence their thoughts. They structure their verbal and written communication in a way that helps their audience focus on their core message. They challenge the status quo and get people talking about underlying assumptions. Those that are really skilled walk people through the process of identifying issues, shaping common understanding, and framing strategic choices.

If this sounds complex, that's because it is. But there are ways you can start honing these skills:

Add more structure to your written and verbal communication. Group and logically order your main points, and keep things as succinct as possible.

Prime your audience by giving them a heads up on the overarching topics you want to address so they are prepared to engage in a higher level conversation, not just the tactical details.

Practice giving the answer first, instead of building up to your main point.

Lisa didn't realize that the way she spoke created the perception that she was not strategic. She set about changing that. First by focusing her one-on-ones with her CHRO on higher level discussions and leaving tactical issues to email. She chose one or two strategic areas to focus on. and made sure to frame issues in the context of the CHRO's and the CEO's top priorities.

Act: Make Time for Thinking and Embrace Conflict

In the early phase of our work together, Lisa kept a jam-packed schedule, running from meeting to meeting. She found it difficult to contribute strategically without the time to reflect on the issues and to ponder options. Recognizing that she was not bringing her full value to the table, she started to evaluate her tasks based on urgency and importance as outlined in Stephen Covey's 2 x 2 matrix. She stopped going to meetings she didn't need to be at. She blocked out thinking time on her calendar and honored it, just as she would for other meetings. And she fought back the initial guilt of "Am I doing real work when I'm just sitting at my desk thinking?"

Lisa also practiced other key skills. She learned to embrace debate and to invite challenge, without letting it get personal so that she could ask tough questions. To do this, she focused on issues, not people, and used neutral peers to challenge her thinking. To manage the inevitable ambiguity that arises when you ask more questions, Lisa also learned to clarify her decision-making criteria, allowing her to better act in the face of imperfect information.

The quest to build your strategic skills can be uncomfortable. At first, you might feel like you're kicking up sand in the ocean. Your vision will be blurred as you manage through the unsettling feelings that come with challenging your own assumptions and gaining comfort with conflict and curiosity. Once the dust settles, however, and you're able to contribute at a higher level, you'll be glad you took the risk.

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4 Ways to Improve Your Strategic Thinking Skills

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If you've ever received feedback that you "need to be more strategic," you know how frustrating it can feel. To add insult to injury, the feedback rarely comes with any concrete guidance on what to do about it.

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Teaching for Meaningful Learning

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Free on-line courses are available in multiple disciplines and topics. The courses include videos, audio lectures, and notes given by professors at Harvard, Princeton and MIT, and may be accessed at:

Recommended: Produced by the MA DOE in conjunction with a statewide curriculum project, this video describes the UbD design process. View MA UbD Videos

A collection of UbD videos View Videos

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Grant Wiggins presents an introduction to Understanding by Design® - Part 1 - View video - Part 2 - View video

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Jay's author's page View

Grant's author's page View

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Teaching for Meaningful Learning Blogger, Jennifer Gonzalez, writes a cautionary article about the superficiality of "activity-oriented" units. Neurologist and teacher, Dr. Judy Wills, discusses how UbD reflects insights about learning from neuroscience. A summary of research on Transfer.

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