A scroll through my timeline is full of tweets with yet another great idea … so much so, that at times I seriously can’t keep up and I’m finding it all a little exhausting and some of these are making me feel a little inadequate. Which is why I’m sharing this … not in a “look at me” kind of way but to show some of you that we aren’t all doing new and exciting things and changing what we do wholesale. It’s only been four weeks (I know it feels like months) and after the first exhausting week of trying to reinvent the wheel out of sheer panic I suppose I came to the conclusion that the amount of planning and prep that was going into each lesson was (a) unsustainable and (b) not allowing me to see if it was actually working. I was also feeling the impact, physically – after 5 hours sat at a desk peering into a camera I was wiped out … I’ve now decamped to the kitchen and spend the time stood up!

What’s important is that you find what works for you.

In terms of delivery of lesson content, we are using TEAMS and my lesson structure has now settled into a routine i.e. retrieval starter within the first couple of minutes of starting and then “I do – you do” with check-ins along the way. There is now much more revisiting (and checking) previous lessons learning so that I’m not assuming what students can or cannot do and I’m taking much smaller steps in a lesson than I would take face to face. Additionally, we’ve rejigged the SOW for some groups so that we are avoiding anything that needs printed sheets or equipment such as graph work or constructions. When it comes to the worked examples I’m modelling them and sharing my screen on my iPad so that it’s almost like using the classroom whiteboard (I have just bought a visualiser too so will transition to that this week … I share a classroom so couldn’t bring the one we have there home with me! But that brings with it issues too: have I got printer ink? Paper? Or will it be handwritten? Argghh!! Maybe I’ll just stick with the iPad!?!?) I’ve also logged on through my phone just to check what our students see … and it was obvious that there is sometimes a lag between what students are seeing on screen and the words coming out of my mouth .. so I’ve learnt to take everything a little slower. If you haven’t checked what students can actually see for themselves yet I recommend you do … it actually helped me speed up the lessons as I stumbled on the idea of having the chat open on my phone which means it doesn’t interfere with my screen on my laptop.

I think I have a good understanding of what works for my students, in my context and so my philosophy about the transition to teaching remotely is now very much about “evolution” and not “revolution”. Basically, the idea is that every week I’m trying to focus on just one aspect that the previous week I wasn’t satisfied with the aim of having a focussed approach rather than a scatter gun approach where I could potentially throw the baby out with the bath water. I hope/think that I am now at the point where I can review what I tried last week and the plan is that I will now decide to focus on something new or tweak what I tried last week.

Let me explain a little more … after my initial headless chicken couple of days. I settled on making the first week about getting myself and the students comfortable being online and also clear expectations; then spent some time reviewing where we were at with attendance and chasing and feeding back to heads of year as necessary. There is only so much I can do as a classroom teacher with regards attendance … one thing that is helping with TEAMS is a quick register at the start of the lesson (hands up/chat or open mics) and then whilst the other students are getting on with some work I take a couple of minutes to “invite” students to the lesson – not ideal as I suspect many of the harder to reach students are still in bed and accepting the invite to placate me. Many students quickly cottoned onto the fact that if they make an appearance at some point in a lesson they were likely to get their attendance mark and so this needed addressing which is why using the attendance list wasn’t working for me.

From the second day of remote lessons I concluded that there was a big elephant in the virtual room that no one wanted to admit – just because a student is “attending” a virtual lesson it doesn’t mean they are actually listening/doing any work and so this was the area that I felt that the needed more work. Attendance is one thing but are students really (no “really”) doing the work?

Routines and consistency remain my pillars on which I hang my hat on and I knew from day one of this new “normal” that I wasn’t prepared to just set them work on an online platform (Each to their own of course and I’m not judging) but we did this in Lockdown 1.0 and the engagement wasn’t great. I also quickly concluded that students submitting work through TEAMS/email/one note was going to create even more work – I am not averse to marking but the idea of monitoring and chasing up work from students who fail to send it is for me, unsustainable (and what do you do when they don’t send it). Without knowing that all students have the ability/technology to do this it wasn’t an avenue I wanted to go down.

Like I say, I’m all about routines and our year 11s are used to our “bread and butter” starters so we trialled using them just through screen sharing but the danger is that students pay lip service to it and I think we need some honesty with ourselves here … just because a student is saying they’re doing the work because they aren’t in front of you there really is no way of telling that they really are engaging with it. On a couple of occasions, I’ve caught students out by cold-calling and there was no response so I’ve started using teachermade where I can use my existing resources (so as to not have to reinvent the wheel – after the first couple of days of having to redo everything from scratch I just knew that couldn’t carry on … I’ve not done that much planning per lesson since my NQT year!!) and can assign the worksheet as a link in the chat at the start of the lessons. It enables me to build up a body of evidence of who is and isn’t engaging … setting up the “worksheet” is really easy and you can input the correct answers (or variations) so that it auto marks for you.

Once the assignment is set up and students have the link and they start doing the work you will seeing their names and “waiting to finish” as the status and then by reviewing one students work it is easy to toggle through the rest of the class by using the arrow on the right hand side and because you’ve set the answers up you can see which they’ve got right / wrong and I’ve been verbally saying “Billy – have another look at question 2 … your rounding is out”. It’s like I can virtually look over their shoulder and give them advice and yet also collect evidence of engagement or non-engagement as the case may be.

I should add that not all the work is being set like this for all my year groups – my year 9’s have had some kahoot quizzes on key skills and the information from that fed back to the main teacher of the group as a diagnostic tool. With regard teachermade, I feel that there are so many more features of this that I haven’t explored yet and we’re definitely not where we need to be but its becoming manageable. The student’s response has been brilliant and many of them overwhelmingly welcome the feedback “live” so to speak. There are other methods of doing this kind of thing (forms/polls etc)and I’m sure you’ll have found (or will find) a way that works for you.

Teaching remotely is a new way of working and won’t be forever so it’s important that we adapt and find ways that are sustainable for each of us.

All that aside … is it half term yet??

EDIT: Just so Seager doesn’t feel left out I should add that we share groups so he’s also had a hand in this! When I wrote it originally it was written as “we” but then that felt like the “royal we” … so I changed it. Soz Seager!