Breathe deep. Exhale.

“Here we go again” thinks the collective inner dialogue of the Melbourne teaching fraternity, as it is announced that the Australian city must return to lockdown - and therefore a partial return to remote learning - for the first six weeks of Term 3.

This was a shock. We had hoped like most teachers to be back in classroom for good now - but, as ever, the truth is more complex.

In many ways akin to our students navigating the online learning environment, some educators may be happy to return to remote teaching, having thrived in this set-up, while others will struggle.

Some of us will again clumsily stumble our way through, but a great many will come out the other side empowered.

Strings added to bow and a few more tools in the box. Agile and resourceful - the very definition of what it means to be a 21st-century educator.

Coronavirus: Schools return to lockdown

For many teachers, this new semester brings with it new classes, cohorts - and, of course, new challenges.

General student sentiment is that while remote learning has previously been an effective tool to ensure the continuity of teaching and learning programmes, Lockdown 2.0 will surely see fatigue set in.

The loss of daily interactions with peers and friends, various extracurricular activities and fleeting lunchtime interactions - having so recently been enjoyed again - are now absent from the mix of the average school day.

The very things that constitute the fabric of the school experience for many of our students are unable to feature in the present educational environment.

The impact on staff

Staff, too, feel the implications of this.

My own experience is that of missing the hustle and bustle of leading a large team - the energy present in the workplace from the moment one steps into the office and the connectedness that comes with working in a supportive professional environment, such as a school.  

Each teacher has their own story of the challenges of working from home - some tell of the juggling act that is supporting the learning of their own young children at home while themselves teaching classes remotely.

Others have stories of the fear-inducing levels of technology that must be navigated in order to effectively teach away from the physical space of the classroom.

And some tell of missing the sheer thrill of working with young people - the intensity, the unpredictability, the connections - the reason one loves doing what they do. 

In this teaching year, we have now spent more time teaching remotely than we have teaching face-to-face.

And still, with no end in sight, this should not be cause for sympathy, but cause to celebrate the resilience and utter professionalism that all teachers continue to demonstrate in these most trying of times.

Prioritising senior cohorts

One difference in this iteration of remote learning is that Year 11 and Year 12 students will still return to classrooms - a strategic move to ensure, firstly, continuity of teaching and learning programmes for our senior students soon to embark on various high-stakes examinations,

Secondly, with only schools within the metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire regions affected by mandated lockdowns, it ensures merit and equity in the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) - providing an even playing field for all Year 11 and Year 12 students across the state.

This is understandable but could lead to an unintended consequence of the perception of a two-speed education system where those on the cusp of certain exam periods are favoured over others.

Other education systems globally may find themselves in similarly tricky situations if a second lockdown occurs, forced to balance the needs of those at certain stages of education against others.

It’s not a situation any educator would really want to be in but this is the world as it is.

Finding the positives

But we can draw positives from this situation and that other schools can take heart from: we’ve done this before, we’ve built systems that work for remote learning - and no doubt so have you.

As a well-resourced regional Catholic college, with low-band Student Family Occupation and Education (SFOE) density and high levels of student connectedness to the college, we have been able to return to our strategic implementation of both synchronous and asynchronous pedagogical approaches to remote learning that had worked well in the first period of lockdown.

It should be mentioned that in order for this to be in any shape feasible, our model of remote learning did not require us to teach to our standard six-period-a-day timetable.

The benefits of which were wide-reaching, and while this did make the workload for staff (somewhat) manageable, one drastic departure from the norm was change to communication flow from students.

As they chose whether to engage with lesson content synchronously or asynchronously, email communication and submission of work would happen outside of allocated class times and working hours.

This arguably added to teacher workload, but the prerecorded and documented nature of lesson content helped facilitate various forms of differentiation, and, in turn, improved engagement and learning outcomes.

Students also greatly benefited from less rigid timetabling; their feedback indicating they did not feel overwhelmed with content, screen time or general workload, and in conjunction with the incredibly thorough wellbeing programmes enacted, our students were able to identify with each other’s challenges and form a sense of shared connection with staff - after all, we’re all in this together! 

For mine, these are our biggest wins; ensuring student connection and connectedness in a time where remoteness and disconnection are the norm. 

John Collins is director of music at Emmaus College in Melbourne, Australia