A young woman is standing at a whiteboard. She is eager. She is kind. According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, she has had some of the best training in the world.
She is the last teacher in England.
Turning to look at you, her expression is puzzled and hurt.
“Why did you not want me to teach your children?” she asks. “Why did you prefer virtual reality or an unqualified facilitator with an iPad?”
As we enter our third national lockdown, the second in which schools have shifted predominantly to online learning, this is a scenario more likely to become real than ever before. Why is that the case?
Perhaps we will feel that there is no alternative to the rise of edtech in whatever form it takes. Schools are expensive buildings; online is so much cheaper. School is fraught with the behavioural problems posed by bringing a lot of young people together; online is so much more manageable. Transporting young people around the streets is dirty and time consuming; so much better to keep them at home, safe from traffic fumes and road accidents.
Perhaps we have been persuaded that our desire for a face-to-face conversation, for a guffaw by the coffee machine, is outdated, that we are outdated? As teachers, our instinct to seek out real-time experiences is anachronistic. We just don’t get it, as our pupils are fond of saying.
Sara de Freitas, executive director of education at Wey Education, an online learning provider based in London, believes the future of learning is flexible and that, for all its devastation, the pandemic has paved the way for greater use of edtech and online schooling.
She suggests that we have already seen significant benefits from online schooling during the first lockdown, including students becoming more self-assured learners from having taken greater control of their learning experience.
Shane Maguire, founder and chief executive of training platform Skilly, also sees significant advantages in online learning: rates of learning can be measured; activities tend to be better structured; and students can learn at their own pace. There is also the potential to use multichannel content, such as film, worksheets or audio podcasts.
But all is not lost. For as much as the pandemic is highlighting benefits of online learning, it is drawing attention to its problems, too.
Maguire is concerned that online learning is unlikely to foster the same feelings of connection and empathy with fellow students. The lack of body language when you are positioned awkwardly in front of a machine interface also curtails the scope of communication available to learners.
These intimate, day-to-day problems of communicating in a virtual world are not immediately addressed by the companies and government departments rushing to embed virtual-learning platforms in our schools.
As teachers, we too have recognised the countless problems, and we are experiencing them again now.
During the relentless days of lockdown, crouching at home with Zoom, Teams or BigBlueButton has felt so much safer than face-to-face teaching, and we couldn’t have done without them. And at first we were a little enthralled. We had been catapulted into a new, shiny world. And, as a profession, we had survived.
But then we realised that it was a poor substitute for our real jobs. Unlike office work, or even interview work with adults, teaching children and young people requires something personal to be going on. It is visceral, it can be terrifying and it can be breathtaking. But not on Zoom.
And the students recognised the problems, too. In a BBC interview, Nancy Rothwell, the vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester, told us that a survey carried out as freshers arrived on campus in September 2020 showed that the vast majority “prefer face-to-face teaching to online”.
So, do we worry about a digital takeover unnecessarily? Phil Smith, headteacher of the City of Derby Academy, explains that while he values the physical space of the institution, he worries that financial pressures may mean that schools will be seen as too expensive to run.
“We made the transition to online learning at a great pace and with a lot of success in 2020,” he says. “But, as more of schools’ budgets are diverted into the technology and processes that ensure this remote learning is effective, the need to invest and develop the physical space and ‘presence’ of the school may be overlooked. Relationships are key in any school and I believe that they are developed when members of the school community share the same space.”
Creating space for informal, relational moments that complement the formal organisation of each day is incredibly complex online.
The importance of this should not be underestimated. Samuel Roberts at Liverpool John Moores University and Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford followed groups of students in their final year of school and their first year of university, and questioned them about the emotional closeness they experienced within their social networks. One of the findings was that Zoom and Skype offer relatively weak shared experiences. They cannot replace real-time face-to-face contact.
Although recent Oxford research shows how video games played with friends can promote feelings of happiness and goodwill, male students in particular experience closeness by actually sharing physical activities.
Of course, teachers need that interaction, too. Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella suggested in a New York Times interview that although we appear to have made the transition to digital interaction relatively easily, we may be burning through the capital gathered through real social interaction built up over years.
This may explain why adults can cope with digital learning whereas children will not flourish in this system - they have no bank of social skills to fall back on. And, of course, if Nadella is right, adults will soon have used up their resources in this area. He suspects that because of this, social bonds will start to evaporate; he describes his own experience of missing the informal interactions that take place when a group of people are gathered together prior to a meeting.
Even during a meeting, the physical presence of every member makes a difference, as Mary Anderson, a senior medical educator in a Midlands NHS trust, explains: “You know when you are in a room and you are having a training session? You know each other and the conversation is like the flow of music. One person leans forward and you know that’s their sign that they want to say something. You get to read those messages so the music almost flows. It’s what keeps you going. That flow - it’s the glue. Without it, we won’t get through.”
Roberts and Dunbar further found that for A-level and first-year university students, face-to-face meetings and shared activities are the social glue that helps to keep relationships alive. Zoom and Skype calls are relatively weak forms of interaction and may fail to support a long-term sense of connection.
The truth is we are physical creatures - as aware of the smell, scent and hormones of those around us as any other social animal. Touch itself triggers profound neurological responses and can lead to the release of endorphins. Social touch reduces stress by directly reducing cortisol in the bloodstream. Passing a cup of coffee, holding hands in a game: all contribute to the sense of wellbeing that touch promotes. Words, even kind ones, have been seen to have far less effect on the reduction of human stress than touch - even ephemeral, brief touch.
Another way in which real communication through shared space does its work is through the many interactions that take place on the way to lessons or meetings. That barista who makes your coffee, that person who moves out of the way to let you get by, the school caretaker who helps you find your coat peg: they all contribute to your sense of wellbeing.
Psychologists Gillian Sandstrom and Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia found that these small, weak but multiple positive interactions contribute up to 50 per cent of our feelings of wellbeing and happiness. Without a queue for coffee in the staffroom or the school dining room, these informal connections are far harder to strike up.
However, for our children, it is the deeper relationships that are created during the real-time lesson that may be our greatest loss in the move to digital learning.
As Sandstrom and Dunn write, you can snack continually, but at some point you are going to feel unsatisfied if you do not have a full meal. More worryingly, our children will not know what a full meal tastes like if they are offered only digital snacks of relationships. What effect will that go on to have on their long-term wellbeing?
So, as we get used to this third lockdown, let’s remember all the above alongside the benefits of digital.
David Robson, author of The Intelligence Trap, tells us that, from our closest friends to our casual acquaintances, there has never been more reason to recognise the importance of the people around us and our need to cherish those relationships. That is a lesson well worth remembering, long after the Covid pandemic has faded away. There’s still time to save the last teacher in the land from her lonely fate.
Fiona Birkbeck is a teacher of A-level psychology at a school in Derbyshire and a researcher at the University of Nottingham
This article originally appeared in the 15 January 2021 issue under the headline “We are Zooming towards a dystopia”
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