Finally, after two years of pandemic and in many cases a disastrous situation in the education field, things have started slowly to go back to normal. Kids and students in general are returning to their classrooms; some of them fully, some divided in rotating or segregated groups, using face to face or hybrid modalities and experiencing the relief of retaking their habitual practices. Nevertheless, what we have been hinting in this space all along is that not all has been dreadful during this period and that the worse thing we could do would be to go back to the old ways forgetting everything about this “harsh experience,” without reflecting that we have been able to learn lots of things that can benefit our teaching.
Difficult times usually surface great behaviors in people, discoveries, inventions, new ways to face and solve things. This pandemic period has been trying for teachers but has also brought the best in so many of them. Faced with difficulties they have made twice the effort to reach their students and do the best for them. For so many it was an alarm ringing to wake them up from stagnation and lethargic teaching practices. If we look at a classroom from 100 years ago, we will not find a great difference with a teaching space today. We should wonder if pedagogy has followed a similar path.
The experiment with virtual teaching, for which the majority of teachers were not prepared, allowed us to experiment instead of doing things strictly “by the book” as usual, and discover the things that engaged the students most and produced the best results. This was active teaching and not a mechanical repetition year after year. And this is the attitude we should maintain.
It is true that innovation is most usually not welcomed by school authorities. Frequently it is criticized even by fellow teachers and parents. Al those three groups unfortunately many times erect themselves as defenders of the pristine way of educating, forgetting that the world and the students with it are in constant evolution.
Our invitation to teachers is to continue using all those things that we discovered and learned during the period of distant teaching that can be helpful in a face to face situation. Continue to explore new ways and methods, continue sharing with colleagues devices, methods and mechanisms you have acquired (something seldom done before the Covid), keep mitigating teacher’s anxiety, beefing up teamwork and task learning, use all the technology you can get your hands on available in your school and to your students. Also provide facilities to your students to use technology in their class presentations, they love it! We also recommend, besides using technology in your, your class, and your students’ favor, to save didactic and other pertinent materials in an institutional account. 
There is a lot of advice in previous articles by my colleagues in this blog about virtual teaching that you can use now in face to face and hybrid lessons.
To finish, an idea: you can record your classes That would be very useful for students who couldn’t attend and for review purposes. In the past it was very complicated and you needed costly equipment and know-how to do that. Now any student can do it with a cellphone and a tripod and they love it. Some instructions will usually suffice.
Remember that humanity has effected great leaps precisely in difficult times. That is what we teachers are in position to do now.
