As UK teachers return online, in an environment of even more uncertainty, I’ve been reflecting on my own journey with remote teaching. The last nine months have definitely been a learning curve I wouldn’t have wished for, but they have forced me to rethink some of my habits in valuable ways. Though I’m sure I’ve made many more mistakes along the way, here are three failures which have led to the greatest improvements in my online practice.

Live showtime 

One of the strange traps of live lessons is the temptation to feel that you need to be on camera for a full 50 minutes. When we moved online we reduced our timetable slightly and we saw lots of our teachers trying to compensate for this by filling a whole lesson delivering content on camera to students. We were making engaging resources, quizzing and questioning throughout but it was exhausting for everyone involved.

Instead of giving students a time limit to complete a task and letting them get on with it off-camera, I found myself talking a lot, then setting shorter tasks and watching them complete them. It felt reassuring, like I was still in control, but it wasn’t sustainable for me or the students. 

After a few weeks of this, I adjusted to what Doug Lemov has since called ‘semi-synchronous’. We tend to begin lessons live together, checking understanding of previous content or homework, then I will introduce new content or we will read together. After this initial live section students complete an extended task independently and can leave the video call to do so. This normally gives me 15-20 minutes of the lesson which more accurately mimics classroom practice. I can even look over their shoulders by dropping into Google docs while students write.

Students know that they can rejoin the call if they get stuck and I regularly invite them in for a check-up or support. Some weeks I have given over two whole lessons to independent work so that I can have one to ones with students and give individual feedback on their work, which also provides a good opportunity to check in on their wellbeing too. 

Too many tools?

One of the big temptations of remote learning for me was in trying too much too fast. Fantastic colleagues were introducing lots of new tools and platforms and I got pretty excited by all the possibilities. Some early lessons included as many as 4 or 5 different applications for students to use.

In one year 7 lesson last April, I started the lesson with a Kahoot played live on Google meet; showed them a video on Youtube; presented some slides; got them to annotate on Peardeck and set homework on Flipgrid. When I asked for feedback, one boy said “Miss can we just read the book together and write our answers down?” 

I want my students to be engaged, to be interested in what they are learning for its own sake, and I have always had a bugbear with equating ‘fun’ and ‘engaging’ in education*. (This might be further complicated by the very different definition of ‘engagement’ in the online world.) But in my excitement to try new things, I had been thinking only of the fun, not the engagement.

Although there are many useful online tools, I think we need to be careful not to overwhelm students. If they are trying to learn how to use a tool, they will have less chance to learn the content we are delivering. Narrowing it down to just Google tools and one other each lesson hasn’t affected students’ attendance or work submission, but it has given us more time to focus on what’s important. 

*This might be even further complicated by the very different definition of ‘engagement’ in the online world.

28 Takes Later…

It’s Wednesday afternoon. I’ve created a beautiful slideshow for Year 6 parents giving an overview of this year’s online transition process. Now just to record a video of myself presenting it:

• Take #1: Realise after 2 minutes that I definitely need to brush my hair. 
• Take #2: Stop to rearrange my desk lamp to try to achieve that glowy Youtuber effect. 
• Take #3: Get a full 5 minutes in but then stutter over a title and have to restart. 
• Take #4: Record the whole thing, but when I play it back my smile at the start is weird. 
• Take #5: Manage to make it nearly to the end without any mistakes but then the water delivery man rings our insanely loud doorbell. 
• Take #6: Complete the recording, but decide that it’s too waffly in the middle and try it again to get it down to less than 8 minutes. 

When we first moved online, I found the process of creating lesson videos and content for our parents or staff incredibly stressful. Listening to the sound of my voice brings me out in a rash and I hate having my photo taken. 

My students had said that they found asynchronous lessons helpful because they could pause and go back over things they didn’t understand, so I wanted to record more. After two weeks of recording and re-recording for hours, I realised that something had to change. 

I made a pact with myself to stick to one take, warts and all. Don’t get me wrong, I still spend a few minutes beforehand working on desk lamp positioning, but I don’t start again if I make a little slip. Real lessons are full of flaws and so, for that matter, are assemblies and parent presentations. Perhaps a far-from-polished video might feel a bit more like the real thing too?