10 things I think I think about Remote Teaching in Lockdown 3
With apologies to the great American sportswriter Peter King of NBC Sports with regards to the title of this piece, here a few initial thoughts on remote teaching, mark 2, during Lockdown 3.
1. I think being prepared helped. As a department, we moved towards simpler lessons, using the ‘two-page’ lesson format (or, in reality, as we’re history teachers, it’s four pages) from September and abandoning, for the most part, the PowerPoint as the structure of the lesson (although it’s still useful as a way of projecting images). This was done to mitigate the constant moving around the school that we had to navigate due to the ‘bubbling’, and also because we anticipated this exact scenario was possible, indeed highly probable, at some point during the academic year. This has, I think, made it easier to transition to remote teaching because students know how the lessons work, the tasks are fairly self-explanatory (so no complex Powerpoint for students and parents to navigate) and you can put together a short accompanying video to go with if required. Using Google Classroom means you can make a copy for each student and away they go.
2. I think ‘mixed attaining’ classes require creative solutions for curriculum coverage in a remote context. I haven’t quite got there with this yet, but there’s definitely imperfections in terms of effective curriculum coverage with the type of mixed-attaining classes we’re generally used to in History. Having mixed attainment classes with mixed levels of online engagement means that very quickly you get some students streaking off ahead, and other students falling far behind. To mitigate this we’re building in lots of ‘recap, review and extension’ lessons in order to try to help the laggards catch up, while providing extension material for those well on track (this might be something like a link to a relevant In Our Time podcast or good YouTube clip or something of that nature that is minimal workload for staff). Using live lessons to support the delivery of these types of sessions has been quite useful, with the use of MCQs via Google Forms, or building in Because, But, So activities via same.
3. In general, I think students will learn new content a lot more slowly this way. Linked to point 2, is that I think we need to be realistic about the amount students will learn in this type of teaching. We need to really focus what we are doing on the core knowledge and skills we want students to learn. In live lessons in particular, I think it’s hard to imagine that you can get through as much as you could do in class. Even technical things for students like faffing around switching between different documents or the fact that they are slower typers than they are handwriters is going to be a barrier.
4. I think the idea that kids know more than adults about how to do ‘tech’ is a nonsense. I think there’s a little generational issue here. I’m in my mid-30s, my age bracket was probably the first to grow up with computers as a pretty standard fact of life. We had a desktop PC in the house from when I was maybe 8 or 9 or so, maybe slightly younger. We had the internet from when I was about 12 or 13 (strictly rationed half an hour via AOL with the funny dialup noise thing). I had a games console from about 8 or 9. I think that means (maybe) that I am reasonably able to adjust to online learning and figure out most basic things. A lot of our young people now though don’t tend to use laptops or proper computers apart from when they’re in school, and I would guess that is more likely to be the case especially if you’re from a disadvantaged background. Many don’t have great ICT-literacy (good luck getting kids to ‘email an attachment’). They’re excellent at using their phones in all sorts of creative ways, but still need a lot of hand-holding to figure out their way round a computer (ironic given the advent of ‘Computing’ instead of ICT as a school subject since 2010 — maybe we tried to code before we could walk?) Young people still need quite a lot of teaching and hand holding about how to use this technology. I am aware I’m generalising a bit here — I just feel that this period has exposed a higher level of computer illiteracy amongst young people than I had perhaps anticipated.
5. I think juggling workload is even trickier. There are a number of issues here. Firstly, and most importantly, the line between work and home is substantially blurred. My wife has been amazing at sorting out my Reception-aged daughter’s home school and looking after our nine-week old son. But occasionally there are tears or moments when an extra pair of hands is needed. When I have a ‘free’ period I try to step out and help if required. At school of course I’m unable to do that so I can focus on marking or planning or whatever it might be. Of course, in addition to planning the mix of synchronous and asynchronous lessons we have at my place, there’s also marking and Head of Department admin to sort out. This would normally be done either in frees or after school. But of course it’s hard to justify spending lots of after school hours on the laptop when I’m at home, when I’m already ‘absent’ during school hours. Assessment or other jobs that require a good solid couple of hours of concentration is also trickier when you’ve got the bang-bang-bang of alerts of student messages during the day, that make it harder to get a good run going on a task. As Head of Department, I’m trying to strip back my expectations to the basics — make sure lessons are happening when they need to, with solid curriculum content, and that feedback is being given as needed, and that’s it. That’s enough.
6. But I do think Mote is a real godsend. Mote, which is a little extension to Google Chrome that allows you produce a short audio-clip of yourself for 90 minutes, is a massive lifesaver.
It’s particularly helped in terms of rattling through some marking jobs a bit quicker than might otherwise be the case. It also enables you to provide more of a personal touch to students that they appreciate that is even difficult at times to do in person, and certainly doesn’t come off well as a typed comment. Even just a word of praise for engaging and completing this remote work is hopefully something that provides a bit of motivation for students when they can obviously feel quite distant from the learning process in many respects.
7. I think what remote learning for Reception-aged students looks like needs very careful thought. My daughter, who is bright and happy and well looked after, finds ‘live’ lessons a bit of a struggle, certainly if they start going on for any much longer than about 15 minutes. The idea that ‘live is better’, as the Secretary of State unwisely suggested, is a nonsense to me in this context. Some good remote learning activity ideas with flexibility built in to the schedule is preferred, because the home-school experience is a very intense and quickly tiring one with no other children to bounce off during the day. She also finds it incongruous that she’s stuck at home while some of her classmates are obviously in school. What my daughter needs is some actual contact with other people that she knows. Whether it would be a door-knock from a member of staff, or a changing of the rules to allow her to meet one other child with one parent each supervising, she is just massively missing that social interaction with other people. Seeing her being really isolated apart from everyone other than us is probably the hardest thing about lockdown.
8. I’ve been thinking about different formats for live lessons. So my live lessons are very much a mixed bag. I don’t do many full one hours where I talk through different bits and give students tasks at different intervals. Those lessons take a disproportionate amount of planning and I don’t think you get through as much actually. I do like using live lessons as a way of reviewing previously learned content — sort of an electronic version of flipped learning, of a sort. Google Forms quizzes are great for this. I particularly like how I can bring up very quickly questions that have caused students problems for immediate reteaching — see below:
I can immediately go to the question and see where students are going wrong.
It’s also useful to do the old trick of setting similar versions of the same question to really check if they’ve really learned something. For example, take the two questions below relating to John Iliff and the development of ranching on the Plains. Only 1 student gets the first question wrong, but 9 students get the second one wrong. Helpful, and I can immediately feed that back to the students. Such a handy little trick to use to check knowledge you instinctively know is not as ‘sticky’ for students (so, for example, I wouldn’t do this to check student knowledge of the uses of the buffalo by Plains Indians, because you can show students that diagram of the buffalo and they will literally know ALL the uses forever within 30 seconds of looking at it).
The chat function is also really helpful, and the trick of getting students to type in answers but not press enter until I say so is a great one. I also like to set students off on tasks but remain available for questions and comments as they work through it, either via the Meet or via the private comments. Another one I did was set an assessment on Medicine for Year 9, and add voice comments to their Google Docs via Mote as they were working to give encouragement and advice.
I’m not persuaded that live lessons are automatically better than non-live (particularly if, as a student, you are getting 5 live lessons a day, every day), but they are useful to have as part of the ‘diet’. My school has gone for a mixed economy approach and I do think that is sensible. You can have well crafted and thought through chunks of pre-recorded explanation, the deployment of pre-made resources, and blend in live feedback and explanation/support as students go.
Unfortunately, we have an arms race, fuelled by a combination of the private sector, right-wing newspapers, ed-tech so-called gurus, and politicians from across the divide, that says that live is automatically best. We have the usual situation where schools, warped by the competitive aspect that has infected education (not always a bad thing, but by no means not uniformly good either), try to out-do each other rather than collaborate. What is clear, is that there is no effective substitute for in-person teaching. But, failing that, a mix of live and ‘flexible’ seems to me to be the way forward. It will be interesting to see what the developing evidence base in this area suggests as we move forward.
9. I really think we need to consider ‘economies of scale’ a little bit. I can certainly see the appeal of continuing to attach teachers to their class group for this lockdown period. However, the longer it goes on, I think some rationalisation might be helpful. Attaching teachers to fewer, but a significantly larger share (or all) of whole year groups I think is the way forward if we’re looking at months of this, as I fear, rather than weeks. It helps reduce the planning burden, and I think it makes providing feedback a bit more efficient as well.
10. I think the DfE’s treatment of teachers and school leaders is absolutely shameful, demoralising and a national scandal. The behaviour of the Secretary of State and the political leaders of the DfE has been absolutely shameful throughout this whole period. From bungling last summer’s exam grades, to not having a backup plan ready to go for this summer, to giving tacit support to COVID-denialists trying to re-open schools without adequate protections in place, to the mass testing debacle over the Christmas holidays, to their failure to compromise over issues like the use of rotas as a way of reducing COVID transmission, to threatening to prosecute local authorities for reducing school opening only to admit there was a mutant variant and having to reduce school opening anyway, to denying teachers were at greater risk only to be shot down by the evidence, to their failure to deliver adequate computer facilities for disadvantaged students, to contradicting OFSTED over whether ‘live lessons are best’, to the catastrophe of the free school meal issue…I mean it just goes on and on. I just don’t know where they think the future teaching workforce is coming from if they keep treating the current one in this way. Anytime anyone in this government, or supporters of this government, says they care about the future of the nation’s youth, you can just point to the continued employment of the current Secretary of State for Education in that role and that should be just about enough to shut anyone up.
