Bubbles, booklets and breaks — First impression of classroom teaching in the age of COVID

I’m writing this on a Saturday morning while my daughter watches Peppa Pig and thankfully I still feel vaguely like a human being after the first week of ‘proper’ teaching since March. In this post I thought I’d reflect on my first week in the ‘new world’ that we now inhabit in schools. Overall I think it’s not been too bad at all and there are distinct advantages to some of the changes that have been made that I’d consider keeping in some form in the post-COVID world (if we ever get there).

CHANGE #1 — YES TO BOOKLETS, NO TO POWERPOINTS AND EXERCISE BOOKS

In my school, we have each of the year groups zoned in different areas. This means teachers are obviously constantly on the move. The teaching day is slightly more squashed, but also staggered with breaks taking place in classrooms, and lunchtimes shortened to half an hour. Some of our lessons have been shortened to 45 minutes to accomodate these breaks, and one year group has a split lesson of two half an hour periods either side of a half an hour lunch. Teachers need to leave by 4.15pm in order to facilitate the deep cleaning required each day (and a shout out here is in order to the phenomenal cleaning staff at my school and the work they are doing to keep the show on the road). I personally have the added challenge of a longer commute having just moved house. This all presents some challenges to classroom teachers and has, in my view, given impetus to bring in some significant changes to how we teach in order to maximise teacher time and head space.

The biggest change we have made in the department was to bring in booklets and largely abandon the use of Powerpoints and exercise books. In my view, this has been really helpful in the first week and made my first full day of teaching yesterday manageable. What it means is that the time spent in school stood at the photocopier scrabbling to print out various bits and pieces for each lesson. It means less time lugging stacks of exercise books and textbooks everywhere (indeed, textbooks aren’t really an option anyway as we don’t have any class sets of good ones at KS3 and at KS4 we can’t swiftly interchange them between year groups — an issue when you teach Medicine in Y9 and the Western Front Historic Environment in Year 10, all in the same textbook). It means that you aren’t quite as frazzled at the start of the lesson when you arrive into a classroom with the students already there, and you have to log-on and do the register. You’re not having to set up the screen and scramble round for the remote to freeze the board and locate your different task sheets. Students aren’t wasting time writing the time and date and can get straight on with a retrieval activity instead. There’s less need to worry about ‘book presentation’ and more focus on ‘learning content’ from their point of view. It frees up a teacher’s cognitive load which I think will help make these intense five-period days more manageable in the long run.

It’s also enabled us to embed some changes to our practice that I think will improve teaching generally. Moving away from Powerpoint is helping to reduce the ‘split attention’ affect. It also stops us (me in particular) wasting time putting loads of slides together with pictures and text that many children simply don’t read. In short, it’s maximising my efficiency at a time when this is really important. It’s enabled us to begin to implement many of the strategies suggested in Judith Hochman and Natalie Wexler’s The Writing Revolution that I wrote about here and will return to blogging about in due course. It means I know that the department is all on the same page with regards to content, helpful in a world when doing learning walks and work scrutiny is more difficult due to lack of time. It’s also freed up me to think more about my questioning to ensure I’m including more students in contributing to the lesson and that the ‘quiet ones’ are asked to contribute in a more balanced way compared to the ‘dominant ones’. I can embed those practices from Teach Like a Champion such as ‘No Opt Out’ and ‘Right is Right’ that I flirt with on a regular basis but fail to consistently nail because I’m distracted by other aspects of the lesson, like when to give the next sheet out, or to get them to glue something in.

I also think it will prepare us well in the event that we have to return to some remote teaching, or where students have to self-isolate for extended periods of time while in-class teaching carries on for the rest. The lessons are easily uploadable onto Google Classroom and I think a reasonably intelligent adult could use common sense to guide their child through the learning (with the aid of the odd video from us) without too much trouble. I think our resources will be much better suited to that than the previous Powerpoint + various sheets model that our teaching looked like in the past.

I think our lessons are also becoming more ‘inclusion-friendly’ (a term I prefer to ‘differentiated’). It means they are really structured and the students know exactly the sequence of tasks that they need to be completing and in what order, something that is really beneficial to many students on the Autistic Spectrum for example (and I think is just good practice generally). We are doing loads more whole class reading rather than setting kids off with ‘read pp.45–47 and fill in the table’ which can be overwhelming for those who struggle with their literacy. Using ‘dotted’ lines for notes and ‘full’ lines for formal writing (as per TWR) also increases clarity of expectations. We’ve had a departmental issue of not doing so well for some middle and lower prior attaining students recently (a product of a strategy to ‘raise the bar’ to stretch the high attaining students who were floundering in History before I arrived in school), and I’m hoping this might address that over the long haul.

I do have a few issues still to think about. It is something different compared to other departments — how will that look if and when whole school work scrutinies take place? (I am asking GCSE students to buy a cheap folder for ‘storage’ to help a little bit). I haven’t explicitly put in space for DIRT tasks as yet (I have some blank lined pages at the end of the booklets that can be used for this) and need to ensure this is taking place. I think teachers not having to take the demoralising stack of exercise books home is a really good thing, but we still need to ensure that we are following the school’s assessment policy and I think I need to consider how to ‘show’ this in the booklets more clearly. I think there’s also a perception that booklets fundamentally are a bit boring for kids — a bit samey. I reject this and think that predictability is a good thing and I do think the students, so far, have been better focused on the learning (also I think the content of our curriculum is rapidly improving and that will drive engagement with the subject, as opposed to the way materials are presented or the nature of the task). In conjunction with the Writing Revolution tasks, I do believe they are thinking much more about the content than before.

In short, I am a firm believer that booklet-teaching is a real positive in the new world and actually might lead to just more effective teaching full stop — hopefully my repro budget can handle it!

CHANGE #2 — YEAR GROUP BUBBLES: A TENTATIVE ‘THUMBS-UP’ SO FAR

This is one that I’ve been pleasantly surprised about so far. That said we are still in the first week honeymoon period — let’s see what this looks like in the ‘dog days’ of November if we make it that far.

Our school site is such that there are some logical ways to zone as we have separate ‘blocks’ that can function as a mini-school building. For example our Year 11s are in the Science block. I thought they would really chafe at this but they have managed well so far — perhaps helped by the fact that they have to move around as they are in different option subjects. Years 7 and 8 are much more static and that may be where we see more restlessness down the line.

A real bonus I hadn’t considered was the way that this is helping us with pupil management. We are not seeing the ‘tricky’ pupils in a younger year group associating with ‘tricky’ ones in older year groups and falling under nefarious influences as a result (at least in school, anyway). It reduces the scope for some of the incidents you might occasionally see were breaks and lunches ‘normal’. It means we have to be sharper with our routines in terms of lesson changeovers, starts and ends, which I think can only be beneficial. It’s also ensured the staff presence is greater all round and I think that is so important to prevent things from bubbling up too much.

Again — I am under no illusion that it will always be like this. One week in much the same classroom is not the same as two months, and I might think differently in November when our current way of working has become normalised.

CHANGE #3 — INCREASED STAFF CAMARADERIE

I honestly thought I would hate moving around the school all the time. One of my previous schools was in a new-build PFI building where there essentially weren’t enough classrooms and it was really hard work. However, so far it’s been OK (again, the booklet approach I think will help our department here).

What I’ve really liked is getting out of my little History corner and being able to interact with more staff from more departments. I think fundamentally it is raising staff morale and the sense of team purpose. Where I’ve experienced this in the past, it’s been helped by things like well used communal staff areas, and a decent social scene outside of school. That’s a bit trickier in my current school due it’s more remote rural location and the nature of our building, but the current arrangements have fostered this. This is helped by being in the different zones, and needing to have each other’s backs as we grapple with staggered lesson times, different locations to take different year groups to lunch, supervised breaks and so on.

Unfortunately it probably also means more teachers get to be aware of how loud I can be. Ah well…

Don’t get me wrong, a part of me would welcome returning back to my old classroom with it’s lovely air con unit and ample space. But this has been a pleasant side effect of the different ways of doing things.

CHANGE #4 — REDUCING THE MEETING CLUTTER

We have had to basically abandon all face-to-face meetings in school. I think this is really positive. It’s forced us to really think about what we absolutely need to be discussing and I think will mean less time wasted on pointless data chat and more time spent on the content of the curriculum and History-specific teaching and learning issues. It hopefully means whole school CPD can be a bit more targeted and self-led rather than being too fuzzy and generic. Again, reducing the spare time in schools means there is less of it to fill with stuff for the sake of it, something that we have a horrible habit of doing.

One thing that I saw on twitter yesterday was something about Appraisal/Performance Management. A lot of PM is about box-ticking rather than genuine teacher development. I hope that making time more precious will mean that these meetings, whether via zoom or in person but socially-distanced, can be more about supporting teachers with their own professional and career development. The latter aspect in particular often gets neglected but I think is really important in sustaining a teacher’s motivation. I think some school leaders worry that if we talk too much about a teacher’s own career it might encourage them to leave — I actually think they’d be more likely to stay if they saw that their hopes and dreams for their careers are enabled and recognised as being important. In any case some turnover is good — we need teachers from other schools as much as other schools occasionally benefit from employing our own teachers. Schools benefit from the wisdom other colleagues learn from previous employers.

To support this, I do hope that organisations like ResearchEd and the subject-specific groups like the SHP and Historical Association will continue to provide excellent online opportunities. I think this has been such a bonus to come out of this whole sage for the profession. That’s not to say I want to see the end of the conference — I had a great time at T+L Leeds 19 and New Voices in 2019. But hopefully when the time is right both the online and face-to-face model can work side by side.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Again, I’m under no illusions that I’ll feel this positive when the novelty has worn off. But so far it’s been a solid start and the old saying that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ is perhaps apposite here. It’s good to have to think about things differently and while I wish I wasn’t living through a global pandemic, you have to seize the opportunities to do things differently, and better, when they come up.