During the pandemic, my confidence in delivering online webinars soared - as it did for many others, I am sure.

And as this confidence grew in our school, we started to think about how we could use this new-found expertise to further benefit our school community.

One idea that hit us was that webinars offered a great opportunity to explain to parents about the pedagogical approaches we use to educate their children.

This is especially important in an international school as we have more than 50 nationalities of families in our community, meaning there is a huge range of schooling experiences and learning methods that parents have experienced.

So, starting in September, we introduced a regular cycle of webinars. Sessions typically last from 40 minutes to an hour and are held in the morning or at a lunchtime, to fit with parents’ schedules.

This has been a great way to show our methods to parents and to explain the underlying pedagogy, with sessions covering everything from phonics to maths to relationships and sex education (RSE), and much more.

The interest has been enormous. For example, a webinar on the use of CPA (concrete, pictorial, abstract) in maths had more than 70 participants. The key stage 1 leader was able to take the parents through a range of ways to use concrete resources to underpin mathematical concepts practically.

She also added some helpful video clips filmed in school to demonstrate the relationship between and progression from concrete to pictorial representation and, finally, to abstract methods.

This practical, interactive webinar received a positive response from parents, generating high levels of effective questions, and proved an important opportunity for myth-busting.

For example, some parents believed the CPA method would not be suitable for older children, and yet we were able to demonstrate the importance for all year groups.

As a result, our parents have now reflected that they feel much better equipped to support their children at home, with many parents commenting that they found the teaching videos enlightening as they gained a deeper understanding of our methods.

We have also since hosted webinars on transition to explain how students move from one phase of learning to the next. Parents are now putting in new requests and letting us know where they would like additional support, which is helping guide future webinar topics.

One of the beauties of the webinar is that parents can attend from home or the workplace without the need to take time off work. Equally, the sessions are recorded so that a webinar can be shared after the event or watched again. This way, all can benefit.

Recording the webinars also means new teachers, who may not be familiar with our in-house style, can quickly get up to speed with our methods and approaches.

Overall, while the pandemic has been hard for us all, we should not overlook the new approaches to operating that have been revealed to us. Instead, we must recognise that some of them are worth keeping.

Claire Nuttall is headteacher at St George’s International School in Luxembourg

This article originally appeared in the 12 November 2021 issue under the headline “Webinars help bring pedagogy to parents”