Sometimes it feels like l’m the only teacher who finds the edtech element of the Covid-19 teaching regime stressful. 

At this time of year, huge swathes of my work is one-to-one. I lead on the action research on the PGCE and Cert Ed at my college, so I am busy either having one-to-one tutorials with those finishing, or with those who are just starting. 

This is still the teaching that I love and I spend many happy hours on Skype, Zoom and Microsoft Teams with a cup of coffee and a notebook, chatting people through their projects, talking about possibilities, soothing worries and helping them to overcome unforeseen problems. 

In this respect, I am a tech fan. I can see and interact with my students, I can smile at them, I can see when they look happy or concerned, I can read them, I can pick up cues just like I do in my real-life classroom.

But I didn’t realise how much this constant observation of others was a part of my repertoire - just how much I relied on this kind of sense-making in order to judge how well I am getting across a concept or communicating with my audience - until it was taken away. 

For me, it is taken away in those sessions where I present rather than work one-to-one, where I can’t see or fluidly interact with my audience. These are the sessions that rob me of my comfort blanket and leave me feeling exposed, vulnerable and probably pedagogically underdeveloped.

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These sessions feel unnatural - you prepare your slides and talk to a screen. And yet, behind that screen are all the responses and cues that I feel, as a teacher, I need: it’s all the discussion and questions I want to encourage, and yet sometimes feel I fail to get at.

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I leave space for questions and try to use apps like Mentimeter to learn more. I have even opened up asynchronous discussion spaces but it still doesn’t feel right to me. The truth is I miss the face-to-face interaction between teacher and students - it helps me to make sense of my classroom and I struggle to make sense of my practice without it.

This is probably no bad thing for any teacher educator: to be returned to a condition of learning, to enter a learning space without feeling overly confident in my practice is something my students deal with every day. To think my way through my practice, to begin to learn again to interpret student behaviour, methods of promoting discussion and developing really great learning experiences is a good thing to do: cognitively it is a lot of work, emotionally it reminds me of the vulnerability of the developing teacher.

I have come into contact with new pedagogies that I have really enjoyed being a part of. I have had my first experience of a thinking environment in lockdown and I can see times in my practice where I could use this pedagogy. I have also had pedagogic experiences that have been much more unsettling to me, that take away the human interaction in learning which I have become to realise is such a big aspect of how I make sense of my classroom and my students’ learning.

One thing that being exposed to this vulnerability has taught me is the importance of dialogue around the development of teaching. The importance of giving someone the time and space to consider what is going on around them. 

The genesis of this article was a tutorial with a new student. We were just getting to know each other and talking about our Covid teaching experiences and I was talking about a keynote I’d given and how nervous I was because just talking to a screen leaves you unable to see your audience, and then “bam!” - all my concerns began to make sense. I make sense of my classroom through my student interactions. I take cues from these interactions, take them away, and I am struggling to find cues and so am left feeling vulnerable. This dialogue allowed me to suddenly understand something I’ve been grappling with since March. 

So, in a Covid world, without my comfort blanket, I am left looking for new ways to make sense of my practice but with a renewed sense of how to help others to make sense of theirs. It is probably going to be, at times, a rough ride for all, but that’s the thing to recognise about practice development - it isn’t easy, it isn’t instant and you need others to knowingly or unknowingly help you on your journey.

Sam Jones is a lecturer at Bedford College, founder of FE Research Meet and was FE Teacher of the Year at the Tes FE Awards 2019