While the Covid-19 Pandemic brought about new ways of thinking, the “new norm”, as well as the rethinking of the modus operandi of many organizations and institutions, there was a stronger undercurrent happening across the globe, namely, a greater need to think of operations and how to maintain them in light of a crisis.  While all countries have faced conflicts, illness, wars, and staggering health issues at times – the United States and world had not seen anything close to this Covid-19 pandemic since the outbreak of the Spanish Flu in 1918.[1] Many educational institutions who may not have had programs of study in risk management or crisis management started to investigate and create ones to use immediately after this historical period of time in global history.  In particular, the field of education was impacted greatly with a change from Face-to-Face (F2F) learning environments (live classrooms) to be transitioned over virtual (online) classrooms with no regard to previous education debates by various educators, researchers, and writers as to whether online learning was equal to the same level/quality of learning.  Consequently, these new series of events, array of stakeholders, and educational needs changed the horizon of the field of educational offerings to such a proportion that many in education soon realized what was held as the vision of the next wave of educational movement, was also soon acknowledged by even the tough opponents over the years who fought against online learning.  Consequently, in Tuckman’s 1965 article on "Developmental Sequence in Small Groups" was quite popular in the last century and into the early part of the 21^st century, the Covid-19 pandemic period over the past two years reinforced Tuckman’s model.  Tuckman’s "Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing" model of group development helped to explain how groups are formed and what could happen from one stage to another in a group’s development, if certain condition are present and other factors such as the actors (stakeholders), events, and business conditions work either together or against each other.[2]  No matter what the events, thinking, or needs were in terms of education for all, it should be noted that the education mission and visions of many educators, academicians, and researchers/writers on all educational levels still knew it was up to them to help sustain the educational process and build new Educational Continuity Plans (ECPs) in order to capitalize on the lessons learned during this critical time in history.  Finally, this paper will focus on how various educational stakeholders approached this educational endeavor and succeeded.  Thus, it should be noted that the effects of the pandemic period caused a rethinking of workers, educators, and other professionals to decide whether to quite their current jobs and perhaps pursue new avenues for job or career exploration.  Professor Klotz at Texas A&M University deemed this upcoming period in the following terms.  “…the great resignation is coming.” Klotz contends, “When there’s uncertainty, people tend to stay put, so there are pent-up resignations that didn’t happen over the past year.” [3] Thus, this historic period of time played a significant effect on high unemployment rates, massive closures of restaurants, schools, public functions, and more, which in turn caused many to think about how the future might look for them and their family, friends, and colleagues.  Consequently, this leads to the framework of this paper’s focus on Educational Continuity Plans in terms of their role and function in the New Norm.

Bibliography:

[1]          K. Robinson.  “Comparing the Spanish flu and COVID-19 pandemics: Lessons to carry forward.” Retrieved Comparing the Spanish flu and COVID-19 pandemics: Lessons to carry forward - PubMed (nih.gov).  National Library of Medicine, 2021.

[2]           B.W. Tuckman, “Developmental sequence in small groups”. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100, 1965.

[3]          J. Kelly, “Workers Are Quitting Their Jobs In Record Numbers, As The U.S. Experiences A Booming Job Market.  Retrieved Workers Are Quitting Their Jobs In Record Numbers, As The U.S. Experiences A Booming Job Market (forbes.com), Forbes. 2021.