As winter approaches, so do the colds, sickness bugs and headaches. In the teaching world, this leads to one thing: cover.
Most teachers dread it when they’re asked to cover a class, but what happens when you’re the one at home, under the duvet, worrying about how your absence will stall the progress of your pupils?
Leaving behind high-quality, non-repetitive cover work is crucial for keeping pupils on track: but how can you create cover lessons that are ready to be rolled out with a day’s notice?
1. Practice makes better
The most common type of cover is leaving a worksheet full of questions on a topic you have recently taught to students. Despite this being such a common tool (because how easy is it for a colleague to just print 30 copies of a worksheet and leave them on your desk?), the extra practice that this involves can have real benefits.
If you have done all of your teaching and assessment for understanding in your previous lesson, then you are in a great place to leave a worksheet for the next lesson, to allow students to just focus on honing those new skills that they have learned.
It obviously isn’t possible to plan ahead for being ill, so you may not be in this position with your current topic. But in that case, pupils can revisit skills or knowledge that you covered with them in the past.
Do make sure that the questions are suitably difficult, follow on from what you have taught students, and, wherever possible, provide the answers on a separate sheet for the cover teacher.
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2. Memory dump
Alternatively, you could simply provide students with a topic, concept, phrase, book or whatever it might be, that you then want them to write as much about as possible. This could be in a grid format, notes, bullet points or a bubble map.
This strategy is a great revision technique, forcing students to recall information that they have previously learned. Where possible, try to leave a completed map/table/page of notes, so that students can compare what they can remember with what they ought to be able to remember. For a more challenging group, allow them to use their books so they aren’t too unruly when they’re stuck.
3. Knowledge organiser quizzing
So many schools use knowledge organisers now, and an unexpected benefit is how useful they can be in cover lessons.
If you’re using knowledge organisers within your faculty and school, then students should be well-rehearsed in using them effectively. Therefore, leave a knowledge organiser page for the students to revise from.
Students could test each other, produce flash cards, or fill in gaps. Hopefully, by the time you’re back in, students will have great recall of all of those objective facts that they need to remember.
4. Use lockdown lessons
Over the last couple of years, we will have all produced pre-recorded or annotated presentations for students to work through at home. Rather than doing this all again, why not look back through the lessons that you or other members of your faculty produced during the lockdowns, and find something that you’ve already made to a very high quality.
If you’re struggling to find a pre-recorded lesson on a particular topic, Oak National produced hundreds of high-quality lessons during the lockdowns. Where you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, don’t. There are already great lessons out of there that will allow your students to learn plenty while you are away.
5. Get the student to plan
One of my favourite activities, mainly because of the metacognitive benefits, is to get students to plan for their upcoming lessons and assignments.
For example, if students know that in the coming lessons they are going to be debating certain characters within a text, writing an essay on a scene or doing an oral assignment on the themes within a book, provide students with planning templates so that they can get prepared for these activities.
Within our own subjects, we’ll all have planning templates that work for us and for our students. Spend a bit of time at the start of the year going over those templates with students, along with your expectations for cover lessons, so they know what you expect to come back to.
Nathan Burns is an assistant progress and achievement leader for key stage 3 and a maths teacher
