If you’d listened to certain voices in the media over the past year, you would have an image of teachers rubbing their hands together with glee at the thought of school closures.
In this imagined world, the school gates are padlocked as staff sit on their sofas, drinking wine and watching daytime TV, occasionally remembering to send a worksheet to their pupils before returning to Homes Under the Hammer.
Sadly, the truth couldn’t be more different. As a report from Ofsted suggests, teachers have never been working harder. We are juggling the demands of being in school to look after an increasing number of children from key workers and those deemed as vulnerable with trying to teach those other pupils at home, often through a combination of live lessons and ones we have prerecorded.
Resources have needed creating, or sourcing, and work needs checking, chasing, and feeding back on; all in less effective and efficient ways than we would do in the classroom.
Teachers are not afraid of hard work, but this new way of working is a fateful combination of hard, frustrating and boring.
A lot of this frustration comes from having to break the habits of a lifetime (or a large part of my lifetime). As Hobbiss, Sims and Allen (2020) have shown, habits are incredibly important to teachers.
We find ways of working that are effective for us, and we stick to them. We ask questions in certain ways, set tasks in certain ways, introduce ideas in certain ways and then we keep doing that automatically until the day we retire.
Getting teachers to break habits is incredibly hard, and often not a good idea anyway. As Berliner’s research suggests, the automaticity that comes from falling back on habits is a feature that makes expert teachers so effective in the classroom.
The problem is, these habits no longer work when setting up remote lessons. In the classroom, I can identify who I should ask a particular question to by scanning the room and looking at their body language; I can also judge how difficult they are finding answering it.
I can check work as it is being completed and look for misconceptions. I can adjust the pace of the lesson and move the pupils along quicker or slow them down with a few well-timed comments. My way of working has been ingrained by 17 years of practice.
Making online learning more bearable
I can’t picture ever getting to the point where remote learning is preferable to being in the classroom, deadly pandemics aside, but I have found some things that make it more bearable.
Enjoy some live interaction
I don’t intend to rehash the debates about whether live or prerecorded lessons are better for learning, but whether they are better for learning or not, I do enjoy having a live session with my classes. It turns out, despite my grizzled and hard-hearted image, I quite like being around young people after all. It is nice to see their smiles and hear their voices.
I have found that insisting cameras are on for the register, so that we can check that people are who they say they are, has meant they are much more likely to leave the camera on for the rest of the session, and so make it feel less like I am talking into the void.
Find new ways to ask questions
Expert teachers ask a lot of questions. They ask them for a range of reasons and change how they ask them depending on their function. Asking questions remotely can be dispiriting. It drags down the pace of the lesson, and people hunt for the unmute button, then ask you to repeat the question because they had tuned out, then hazard an answer.
Using the chat function seems to help, especially asking all pupils to write an answer but then to hold off sending it until they are called on. This way everyone has to think and there is no waiting around for one person to answer.
Plan to address misconceptions
In the classroom, I can spot misconceptions by wandering around, asking questions, and in dialogue. This is harder to do remotely. I have found it has helped to start a lesson by addressing misconceptions I think pupils might have about the topic. This also saves time on giving feedback on misconceptions that arise in their work.
Talk to your colleagues
I am an anti-social creature. You won’t find me holding court in the staffroom or organising (or, for that matter, attending) the staff quiz.
But even I find the isolation from my fellow teachers and other school staff odd. I didn’t realise how much I relied on being able to pop into someone’s classroom to check on something or having a snatched conversation with a learning support assistant as we passed in the corridor. We need to find a way to keep this dialogue going remotely. Social media, Zoom meetings and email all help. We just need to find the time.
Work with your colleagues
A recent survey by the teacher survey app TeacherTapp found that most teachers are still preparing all their own remote learning materials. I can understand the desire to keep continuity for our classes, but it is clear that our current ways of working are not sustainable.
We won’t benefit them by burning out. If one person in the department has created a video lesson for their class, surely it can be used by everyone else? The personalisation and specific whole-class feedback can occur elsewhere.
Make the most of the benefits
As I think I have made clear, I think remote working sucks. But… I can use the time I would have been commuting in the morning to wrap up warm and have a coffee in the garden. I organise my day so that I get a slightly longer lunch break and go for a walk while it is still light.
I have to keep reminding myself that work will fill whatever time I allow it to. In the first couple of weeks, I was just working from 8 in the morning to 8 at night. Home and work combined even more than before. Now I make an effort to put work stuff out of sight.
Listen to pupils, not the press
On a recent radio call-in show, the presenter had a novel idea. Rather than members of the public phoning in to air their grievances about what they reckoned schools weren’t doing, based on what their mate’s cousin told them, they spoke to pupils.
Every one of them was positive about what schools and teachers were doing, the work that was set, the care given, the reasons they weren’t in school. It was a breath of fresh air.
My pupils and our wider community have been the saving grace during the past difficult few weeks. Their level of engagement has been incredible and the quality of their work excellent. They have been communicative, kind and mature. They are finding it difficult, we are finding it difficult, but there is a real sense of us being in it together.
A school is not a building of bricks and mortar, it is a community. You can’t close it by moving much of it online. If we can keep that sense of community alive in the weeks, and possibly months, ahead, we will get through this and find new ways to thrive.
Mark Enser is head of geography and research lead at Heathfield Community College. His new book, Powerful Geography, is out now. He tweets @EnserMark
