Lessons from Lockdown

It’s no secret that education has changed (probably forever) as a result of the multiple lockdowns throughout England, and the forced move to online learning for the majority of students. Here I’ll discuss some ideas I’ve had about how my teaching has changed, strategies I would keep, and a couple I hope I don’t have to use again.

What changed?

A multitude of things had to change. In the initial stages of lockdown, we sent home series of booklet type lessons for KS3 (including a series of questions as part of each task). There were often links to YouTube videos, but otherwise all the information was there for them, and it was effectively a comprehension task that asked them to apply their knowledge to some sort of project-style task afterwards. I’m not convinced that a lot of students did these; the ones who did (and submitted their work) generally produced some relatively high-quality stuff.

For KS4, this consisted more of textbook-style work (but not always just using textbooks. As time went on, we started to do one lesson per subject per week ‘live’ so that they were given guidance. We also collected their work each week and provided a bit of feedback – the students that partook in this found it useful I think. (The live lessons started for KS3 too shortly afterwards).

This academic year (2020-21) was a different ballgame though. We started after Christmas with a full timetable via Teams from the word ‘go’. Whilst this was initially quite challenging to keep up with (since all our resources needed adapting) we did get used to it relatively quickly. This is what has led me to most of the ‘keep’ things.

Resources & strategies I (hopefully) won’t need again

To be honest, whilst this isn’t teaching related, I don’t think I enjoyed teaching online much. It was fine to ensure that students didn’t fall too far back, but since we’ve still got time in our teaching schedules to cover everything, there’s no talk of ‘catching up’ which is great. I will say though, on the rare occasion I did have a PPA period, I enjoyed the freedom to organise my time how I wanted (e.g. having the PPA ‘off’, and doing the work later in the day).

In terms of specific strategies, with KS4 we started to use Nearpod a lot. This was an absolute life-saver, since it allowed some form of AFL, and allowed us to see who was actually participating in the lesson. If we (God-forbid) do go back into lockdown, I’ll use this again for sure. However, there’s no substitute for being in-person, and using a mini-whiteboard. I appreciated Nearpod at the time, but I hope I don’t need it again.

What am I keeping?

The booklets we made to be part of KS3’s offer, I hope, won’t be wasted work. I think that on the whole the students enjoyed them, and so I want to make sure we keep them. Maybe they’ll just be useful for cover work, but if not then I would suggest that they could be introduced for use in ‘normal’ lessons. Perhaps they could each form a (albeit rather short) topic. I think they were great for seeing how science is being used on a day-to-day basis in the real world, and we need more of that in the curriculum generally.

One of the things we pushed in our Science department was the use of Microsoft Forms. We used them initially for informal assessment of students, but later we also started using them for more general quizzing, and as an alternative form of AFL, allowing us to see how classes were doing, and where misconceptions where emerging. The multiple choice questions were particularly useful for this (and the fact that they could be used to self-mark was an added bonus).

Our department has always been pretty good at collaborating on planning. When we started to do full timetables online, we had a lot of adapting to do (which I mentioned earlier); this could’ve become an impossible task, but collaborating & sharing all the adapted resources we were making, it massively reduced our planning load, and therefore allowed us a bit of time to give feedback. Continuing with the collaborative planning now we’re back in person I think is paramount.

Lessons from lockdown

The school as a whole is still thinking quite a lot about what lessons we want to take forward, what new technologies we’ve found that we’re going to continue using, and what we’re definitely not keeping. I’ll probably come back to this topic again.

In terms of my own teaching, I definitely want to focus a bit more on feedback that students are getting. I think this will be mostly in the form of suggestions for improvements (and acknowledgments of the good stuff too) rather than simply giving marks or targets. Anything to get them thinking would be useful, and something I definitely need to work on.