Returning To School: Essential Lessons From Apollo 13

There had just been a loud bang in the spacecraft and warning lights began flashing. It was 1970 and the Apollo 13 mission to the moon was in jeopardy. So were the lives of the three astronauts on board. An explosion damaged their oxygen and water supplies and rendered the electrical and propulsion systems useless. Jack Swigert was looking for help from the base in Houston. It would be challenging enough to solve this problem on the ground with their entire engineering crew and materials available. How would they get their team back safely when they were dealing with an unprecedented challenge, limited resources, and lives hanging in the balance.

Schools can relate. Faced with an unforeseen and unprecedented challenge, limited resources and the health of children, teachers and families hanging in the balance, educators all over the world are trying to decide how to get children back to school.

In crises like these, our brains often react in very unhelpful ways. In response to stress we become hyper focused and, as a result, our thinking becomes significantly less flexible. Our brain’s stress response was built to deal with an imminent threat. Flexible thinking isn’t that helpful when a swarm of bees is chasing you — it’s best to take off running rather than stop to consider the options. Although we have had the last few months to make decisions about how to educate our children during a pandemic, our brain’s stress response continues to want to be laser focused on discrete options. Problem solving, however, requires cognitive flexibility. Especially in a crisis. How can we keep our brains open to possibilities when they continue to want to narrow our focus.

We can learn some important lessons from the NASA team. They were flexible in their thinking in two important ways. First, they redefined their mission. Their original mission had been defined 8 years before when President John F. Kennedy boldly proclaimed that we would “go to the moon” for the purpose of knowledge, and peace, and adventure. That mission worked beautifully for the earlier Apollo missions, but in crisis, Apollo 13’s mission had to change. Once the mechanical systems began to fail, a lunar landing was no longer the goal. Their goal was the safe return of the crew.

Second, they redefined their resources. There is a term in psychology called “functional fixedness” which refers to a cognitive bias that limits our ability to see an object’s usefulness beyond the way it is traditionally used. Let’s say that you are putting books from a crate on a bookcase and can’t reach the top shelf. By imagining that the crate has a use beyond being a carrier of books, you could flip it over and use it as a stool. McGuyver never struggled with functional fixedness.

For Apollo 13, a damaged air filter caused the cabin to fill with lethal levels of carbon dioxide. The NASA team rethought the function of all of their resources. In one of the iconic moments of creativity in crisis, engineers on the ground at NASA frantically grabbed every item that existed on the space module and put them on a table. Using a combination of spacesuit hoses, plastic bags, duct tape and an old sock, they refashioned the air filtration system. The crew recreated the prototype in space and soon oxygen filled the capsule (here is a two minute clip from the movie Apollo 13 depicting this moment). Thanks to the Houston team’s functional flexibility, the crew splashed down safely in the South Pacific.

As educators, this is our Apollo 13 moment. What lessons can we borrow from NASA? How can we avoid falling into the trap of functional fixedness?

Redefine The Mission

Like the NASA team in 1970, we need to redefine our mission. Under stress, we tend to see solutions as being discrete and dichotomous. To address the pandemic, almost all schools are considering only three possibilities: (1) full time return to school with social distancing, (2) full time remote learning and a (3) hybrid of the two. Can we focus instead on the values that drive our need for children to return to school? The core values driving the conversation are students’ need for academic engagement, social interaction, physical activity and supervision. A redefinition of school, then, could be to provide children with experiences that meet each of these needs.

Redefine Our Resources

Next can we redefine our resources to better address our values? Can we think differently about our buildings and grounds, our staff, our community partners, our parent community and our students to create new possibilities for school?

Academic enrichment. Given the limitations of both in-person and remote learning, how can we be flexible about the delivery of our instruction? Trying to learn two new instructional settings (remote and in-person, social-distanced) is unwieldy and will likely result in poor quality in both formats. Can we learn to excel at remote learning and identify students and lessons that may require more in-person focus? Can classes meet in person once a week for a short period of time for discussion, connection and for lab activities while the rest of the learning is done online? If students are struggling with the material, the technology, or academic engagement, can other support staff reach out (instructional assistants, administrative assistants, special education staff, parents, community partners, others)? My high school daughter and some friends recognized the need to support younger students during the early stages of the pandemic. In partnership with a community agency, they developed an online tutoring program with high school students tutoring elementary and middle school students in all academic subjects (and music) so that children can still get academic enrichment during remote learning and over the summer. Over 100 tutors signed up. Of course, these weekly tutoring sessions also provide wonderful social and mentoring opportunities for both the older and younger students. (here is the website: https://sites.google.com/eths202.org/at-home-tutoring/home?authuser=0). The teenagers redefined themselves from student to tutor. There are many other resources in our community — can we identify them and harness their power?

Social Interaction. Social interaction is tricky because any increase in social interaction increases the likelihood of transmission. We are learning a lot about the places where children can socially interact while reducing the associated risks. Outdoor activities or large indoor spaces with good ventilation allow for the best opportunities for social connection. Summer camp programs are figuring out how to engage children in group activities safely. Can we learn from their experiences to provide interactive opportunities for younger students in our gyms, common spaces and fields? Could we even hire older students to be counselors for younger students? Could we partner with parent volunteers or summer camp staff to augment student experiences? Could we create gap-year experiences for college students whose schools are not reopening? With the increased flexibility of the remote format, can teachers and assistants find ways of connecting with students individually and in small groups?

Physical Activity. Although we may see going to school as providing greater physical activity, school plans to reduce transitions and have children wearing masks may mean that they feel more confined than they have at home. The camp opportunities above are one way that students could be active with others. As parents, it is our responsibility to also be creative about getting our children out of the house and into outdoor activities. This doesn’t have to happen during the traditional school day. Family walks, picnics, sports, or lawn games could become part of our new family routines. Perhaps our children could get us all outside more often.

Supervision. Finally, there will be some parents with young children who need to go back to work. Everyone’s story of this pandemic is different and given our school and parent community, we have the opportunity to work together to meet the needs of our neighbors. If we identify the students with the greatest need for supervision, we have the resources to provide full-day programming for the smaller numbers of students who require this level of supervision. Large rooms in schools could allow the space for them to access remote instruction with social distancing under the supervision of school, parent, and community staff. There is no better time than now for booster clubs and PTAs to redefine how they can partner with schools to provide resources for our most vulnerable children and families.

Historians have marveled at the NASA team’s ability to address the Apollo 13 crisis through flexibility and creativity. Like the NASA engineers, if schools free themselves from the chains of rigidly thinking about traditional school buildings, traditional school days, traditional classrooms, traditional lessons, traditional job descriptions, and the traditional roles of community and parent partnerships, we will discover a wealth of resources that we never knew existed. Imagine what we can create.