It was the American educational psychologist Lee Shulman who said "After 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching...is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that our species has ever invented" (P504).
Teaching is a hugely complex affair. When making his comment, Shulman was actually comparing the fields of medicine and education. Whilst admittedly medicine can be much more high-stakes at a given time, doctors are often only treating one patient at a time. In our classroom we have potentially 25-30 young people, each bringing their own unique cultural and educational backgrounds, emotional realities, subjective perceptions and variances in mental maps in long-term memory when they walk across the threshold of our classrooms.
There is no 'magic wand' to teaching. Yes, there is most definitely a solid conceptual framework, most robustly defined in Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction, including recap, retrieval, effective questioning, the power of modelling and worked examples, explicit explanations, scaffolding and independent practice. This framework can act as an important roadmap to efficacy and impact. However, we know that there is also much more at play at any one time which can either hinder or expedite the potential for impact: the emotional baggage a child brings with them on any one day, the subjective perceptions of your subject, peer pressure, cultural values at home including the level of support for education, the relationship between teacher and pupil, the teachers' subject knowledge and the teachers' ability to predict and identify misconceptions and respond accordingly.
And whilst we were grappling with all these issues in a physical classroom, all of a sudden one year ago the whole art of teaching was turned on its head when we were obliged to turn that very art into an online craft.
I would happily be the first to admit that one year ago, the term 'Google Classroom' would have been completely alien to me. If someone had said the words 'MOTE', 'Nearpod', 'Jamboard', or 'Loom' to me, I would have looked at them as if they were speaking another language.
As a teacher of three classes, alongside my duties as Principal, I have been obliged to up-skill quickly, to become familiar with what this 'new-fangled' terminology and technology means and to make hopefully discerning decisions on whether I think it will make an impact on my students during remote learning.
I have often been reminded (and heartened) over the past year by David Didau's excellent book 'Intelligent Accountability', and in particular Chapter 1, where he discusses the need for school leaders to 'embrace uncertainty'. There is no doubt I have been obliged to do that over the last year, and to lean heavily on the collective knowledge of my excellent team.
So after a year, these are the 6 things I think I have learned most about remote learning.
1: The core conceptual pedagogical framework is still very possible in the remote world
In my physical classroom before lockdown, I would have often used a retrieval roulette or a short A4 page low-stakes formative assessment activity as a recap or 'entrance pass'. Similarly, at various points during the lessons I would have introduced 'hinge questions'. I have been really taken by the potential of things like Google Forms to create retrieval quizzes which are dynamic and which give an instant snapshot of a student's understanding. My students now fully expect the 'routine' of a Google Form entrance pass at the start of each lesson. It also includes a spacing section, alongside well-honed multiple-choice questions with distractors. Answers allow me to identify misconceptions and respond accordingly through whole-class feedback in the Stream Room. An example of one of my Google Forms retrieval exercises for Year 8 French can be found here, for anyone who is interested. https://forms.gle/AtrFHZgGtdGnVMvG8 . Some of my colleagues have used other resources such as Quizizz for similar purposes.
The need for strong explanation and exposition, modelling and worked examples also does not dissipate in the world of remote learning. If anythng, it is even more crucial. My school is in a fortunate position in that we have more or less a visualiser for each member of staff. Teachers have been using these to a great extent, recording explanations, models and examples for students, as well as exam 'talk-throughs'. Such pre-recorded assets have the advantage of being very fine-tuned, as staff will often hone them to the needs of the class in question, and may take a few goes at recording them to get them absolutely nailed. The advantage for students is that they can then watch them at their own pace, pausing and rewinding as necessary. A disadvantage is that such pre-recorded videos can be time-consuing for staff, and that is where live lessons may come into their own. Equally, students' access to technology gives them access to a whole new world of powerful online exposition and explanation, if well directed by the teacher. For example, Physics was never my strong point at school. I struggled to grasp it. However, it only took me to watch 5 minutes of Professor Brian Cox explaining entropy by comparing it in a very visual manner to sand and sandcastles in the desert, and I had it grasped. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00wv834
Whilst explanation in my own subject of French is a very different beast to explanation in other subjects, I would still send my students off to listen to and watch relevant media which will act as explanation, such as songs. The latter not only aid exposition, but also help to chunk linguistic structures in memory.
2: Live lessons have advantages, but are not the panacea
During the last lockdown between March and June 2020, my school did not do any live lesson. However in the first term of this year we took the opportunity to up-skill and to put in place our live streaming policy. I would say that - at the start - such live lessons were probably embraced tentatively by many staff, but are now definitely on the increase, perhaps because staff see some benefit.
In my school they have helped to tighten up on 'engagement'. Students are expected to be in live lessons as far as possible. They allow for teacher explanation and exposition. They allow teachers to ask questions and check for understanding, and to glean some instant feedback. They have the potential to cut down on workload if things are 'live', including teachers having to prep and upload resources to within an inch of their lives before a lesson.
I use live streaming with my own three classes, particularly to introduce a topic, to offer explanations, to give instructions, to model an answer and to give whole-class feedback.
However I don't use it all the time, and definitely not for a full 60-minute lesson. The reality is that there will be times when other means may be more appropriate, such as sending them off to watch that powerful visual explanation by someone else, to complete that retrieval quiz, to view that pre-recorded asset or asking them to engage in independent practice offline. Apart from anything else, I am not convinced that it is good for our students to be sitting in front of a computer all day everyday in live lessons, as some schools seem to want to subscribe. The Education Endowment Foundation is right when they conclude that "teaching quality is more important than how lessons are delivered".
That said, I really enjoy the social aspect which live lessons afford. They help to maintain that sense of class identity, and can help to maintain that rapport between teacher and class. With each and every class, a teacher has a particular unique rapport. A (somewhat silly) example of this is with my Year 7 class, with whom every lesson I end up having a 1-2 minute game of word tennis on the topic of chocolate bars! And it all stemmed from the word for 'March' in French, which is 'mars'. When I randomly ask that question in French during the lesson, and a child replies with 'mars', I will say 'Bounty', he will reply with 'Twix', and so it begins. It has become a bit of an in-class 'joke' with this particular Year 7 class. Bizarrely, I look forward to it, and both I and they have a bit of a laugh about it for a moment or two each lesson. And I can't help but feel in these difficult times that the retention of that social aspect to our jobs which live lessons afford, including the potsntial for a little humour, is a good thing.
3: Engagement matters, but the pedagogy must come first
There is a lot said and written about engagement. What worries me is when teachers feel they must opt for the most 'gimmicky' and even 'game-like' online resources in order to endeavour to engage students during lockdown. I was quite taken by the Rapid Evidence Assessment on Distance Learning from the Education Endowment Foundation which stated For example, games for learning were found to have a high impact on vocabulary learning in foreign languages, but there is less evidence related to their use in other subjects.
The reality is that engagement is something which teachers will never have anywhere near complete control over when children are sitting in their homes. Whilst it is therefore right that we consider how we can develop maximum engagement potential with the learning itself for the many students who will indeed engage, through our explanations, questioning and even through the live modelling in our remote lessons, I think OFTSED has it nailed when they conclude the following: While it is important to engage pupils, this is only a precondition for learning, not the thing itself. There is only so much a teacher can do to engage pupils remotely. We need therefore to make sure that efforts to engage don;t distract us from teaching the curriculum. We also need to check whether pupils have actually learned the content we want them to through assessment.".
4: Feedback remains vitally important
Remote learning can be a lonely affair, for teachers and pupils. It is easy to imagine how some pupils can feel 'at sea' given that the opportunity for feedback may become so much more limited during a time of lockdown.
More perhaps now that ever, our pupils need that feedback. Not just to give them that bit of reassurance that they are on the right path, but also to steer them back on course if they have started to wander off-piste.
There is however a delicate balance between good feedback and staff workload. As I continue to gain experiences with remote learning, I am convinced that this is a balance which can be amicably struck. Some things which have worked for me include:
* whole-class feedback in the Stream Room;
* marking only a particular aspect of written work such as an introductory paragraph;
* using MOTE to give detailed audio feedback to students;
* choosing 5-10 students per week for more detailed written feedback;
* using Google Docs to monitor their writing 'live' and to give feedback 'live' by typing back to them in the same document during the lesson.
5: Organic is best
As a school leader, I believe that school development is often at its best when it is somewhat ‘organic’, ie when a general steer from the top is married by organic approaches being developed within subject departments. In an excellent recent article by Tom Sherrington, called ‘Autonomy with accountability. Implementing change from the ground up’, he concluded that ‘whole-school teaching and learning programmes need to combine general principles with strong ground-up implementation’.
I suspect this applies to remote learning, too. Telling staff things like they 'must' do live lessons every lesson, or that they 'must' get students to 'submit' a piece of work each lesson is plain wrong, as is the requirement that teachers mark every single piece of work on a regular basis. In a period of unparalleled challenge, including for many of our teachers who are juggling professional lives with the stringent demands of home and family lives, including potentially the homeschooling of their own children, we have to put trust in our teachers to decide for themselves, alongside departmental colleagues, what strategy is going to be most impactful for their students within their subject context.
So in my school, the general steer is that was ask them to use Google Classroom as the modus operandi, simply to keep things consistent for students, we ask them to build in some strategies of their choosing which will allow them to gauge the potential progress of a student a few times per month, including low-stakes quizzing, and we ask them to offer some feedback. For the latter, we encourage strategies which will not increase workload such as whole-class feedback in a Google Meet session.
We have found that, often through a mixture of some training, word of mouth and by trial and error, staff have come to find a routine for their lessons which they feel works well both for them and their students, and the use of a shared area for sharing practice helps us as a school to learn from each other. Organic.
6: Pay heed to staff workload
Staff are our most valuable commodity. The bad press staff have received about 'having it easy' during lockdown is very far removed from the reality. The planning and preparation for remote learning, coupled with the intensity of actually implementing it, are immense. It has the potential to have a great toll on staff up and down the country. It is incumbent on leaders to look after them very well.
As a school leader myself, I cannot help but feel that I could be much better in this regard, especially as I have an absolutely fantastic bunch of staff. However, some rules-of-thumb I think are important are these:
* don't expect the burden of chasing up pupil work and pursuing lack of engagement to fall solely on teacher's shoulders. The Senior Leadership Team must be seen to be supporting staff in this regard, by making phone calls home and sending out texts as and when necessary;
* pay heed to staff wellbeing. In my school we recently had a catch-up day for students where no new work was set. Staff were encouraged to step away from their screens for the entirety of this day, to spend quality time with family and to do something which they enjoy;
* put in courtesy calls to staff as and when you can, to offer support;
* keep the communication regular and frequent. For me, this normally includes a daily check-in by e-mail, when I can manage it.
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Nothing will ever beat the physical classroom. Quite simply, that is where the vast majority of students learn best. I cannot wait to get them back. But I don't think things will go back to entirely the way they were before the first lockdown. Our collective experiences of remote learning over the past year will mean that some aspects of educational service will never quite be the same again when we return to school. And perhaps for the better. I suspect any of our children off school due to long-term illness or other reasons in the future will end up having a much better educational experience than they would have done previously.
References:
Shulman, L. S. (2004). The wisdom of practice: Essays on teaching, learning, and learning to teach. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Didau, D (2020) Intelligent Accountability: Creating the Conditions for Teachers to Thrive John Catt
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