I love reading about how other people are approaching home learning and I’ve learnt a lot from reading other people’s accounts and experiments via Twitter, so I thought I’d write about how I’m approaching it. I don’t for one minute think this is the perfect way of doing things, but writing gives me the time and opportunity to think and reflect. Working in an independent school, we taught to timetable through the first lockdown last March, so I learnt from that experience, keeping the positive elements and trying some new ones. I know I’m very fortunate to work in a school where I’m trusted to be a professional and make decisions about methodology for myself, and also that, on the whole, my students are very motivated and hardworking.
Keeping up my pastoral responsibilities from home:
I meet with my Year 7 form live, every morning on Teams at their normal registration time. Registration starts at 8:45 but I often start the meeting a little earlier as it’s a nice chance to have a chat with the early-birds as they arrive. Sometimes they will start the meeting before me and chat to each other; it’s a recurring meeting each weekday and they’ve become pretty adept at clicking the correct link in their calendar. The 7JEM form Teams chat stays busy all day (though I’ve muted it for my own sanity) with them helping each other with Zoom codes, lesson timings and how to do the work. I try to send them a little hello at lunchtime and at the end of the day to see how they’ve got on.
Twice a week they have whole school assembly, via a pre-recorded video. It’s nice to maintain that sense of unity as a school and often gives us a theme to talk about in form time. On the other three mornings we do a quiz (Quizizz is great), carry on with our reading book together, or some other little puzzle or activity. Today we did a “show and tell” of things they’ve been working on outside lesson time. Form time is usually 8:45-9:10, but I usually only do 10-15 minutes remotely as I want them to have breaks between video calls.
I saw someone last week on Twitter furious that his son was expected to attend form time on top of lessons each day, but in my opinion it’s the most important thing I do each day. I find it hard as a tutor not being able to spot the normal little indicators of issues such as students being less chatty, or shifting friendship groups, but I can check on their organisation and have a quiet word with anyone who is struggling once the rest of the form have left. Teachers have been great at emailing me with any concerns from an academic point of view, and their parents stay in touch with any well-being issues. I can keep an eye on the feedback they are getting on Firefly (which is the primary platform we use to send and submit work), and I keep an eye on the length of their tasks list and closely monitor the few that struggle.
Live or Pre-Recorded?
Obviously, there are big debates as to which one is best, but I really do believe there is no “one size fits all” answer to this question. It very much depends on the school, the class, and the age and maturity of the individual students. We taught to timetable during the first lockdown, using a mixed diet of live lessons, pre-recorded ones and independent work set on Firefly. I think this mixed diet is best; it gives students some social contact with teachers and peers, but not a full day of intense video calls. I know my Year 12 and 13 co-teacher is doing all of his lessons live with our shared class, so they see someone each day if they need that interaction.
I understand that sometimes parents might believe live is best, but I really think some flexibility around screen time is important (especially when the weather is so rubbish and students might want to catch that quick hour of rain-free outdoor time). I have some Year 10s that would prefer to do my work at 6pm the previous day to give themselves a lie-in the next morning. One Year 12 girl told me she likes to complete the work early so she can enjoy some more outdoor time in the middle of the day and enjoys going for a walk with her mum. I know they would be working ‘school hours’ normally, but we are not in normal times, and anything we can do to give students a little bit of control over their lives during lockdown is surely a good thing? On the brightside, by offering students a little more flexibility, I think we can better develop their independent study skills ready for university.
I also think the live / pre-recorded debate depends on your subject or topic. A lot of my Biology lessons at the moment are just about explaining a concept, whereas when I teach Psychology I do live lessons because that requires much more discussion. Every four to five lessons I’ve had my Year 10 and Year 11 students on a live Teams session to consolidate what we’ve covered, have a chat and do some quizzing.
What do my pre-recorded lessons look like?
All tasks are set on Firefly; students are encouraged to stick to timetable and they must submit the work by the end of that day. I’ve experimented with adding a video then summarising the instructions as to what to hand in underneath, but I actually found that system worse; some students tried to cut corners and jump straight to the questions without listening to the lesson. Now I say everything within the video, explaining which pages of the booklet they need to work on and submit. Underneath the embedded video lesson I have a “resources” heading with any images, websites or documents they might need.
I start each task with a little reminder image explaining they can work ‘live’ with me on Teams or complete the work in their own time, as long as they meet the deadline. So far I have only taken this privilege away from two Year 10 boys (who quickly earnt it back) and two Year 9 boys who continue to need the structure. I only teach Year 9 upwards this year, so my students are predominantly pretty mature and independent. With my Year 9, I meet them live on Teams at the start of every lesson and then they work through the material with me in the background, unmuting themselves to ask questions or using the chat box.
My video lessons are 20-30 minutes long on the whole. I record them using Zoom and use the screen share function to show me explaining the concept for that lesson with my existing PowerPoint if I need diagrams or animations. I will un-share the screen frequently, so they just see and hear me explaining something. The rest of the lesson is spent doing something to check understanding; most often this is past paper questions (as all of my students are either studying GCSE or Alevel courses), but I’ve also used Seneca quizzes, or sometimes they just need to upload an image of their research or notes.
As I’m explaining a concept, I ask frequent questions to check understanding and tell the students to say the answer aloud as they could in class. One of my Y13s said I remind him of Dora the Explorer with my questioning! Reflecting on this, I guess I don’t know if they’re all doing this but then again, how would this be different in a live lesson? I could use cold calling to check everyone is paying attention and understands, but I would only receive one person’s answer per question. I’ve seen a few people using the Teams chat box, so the teacher asks a question, everyone types in their answer and then presses send at the same time.
The huge, huge advantage to pre-recorded lessons is the ability to let the students work through them at their own pace. Some of my Year 12s said they re-watched one of them a couple of times until the concepts sunk in, and others I know will have understood the content immediately. I wish real lessons could be like this! I’m definitely going to use some of these strategies when we’re back in the classroom.
Once the Zoom video is complete and processed, I upload the file to my YouTube account and save it as an unlisted video. I’m trying to make sure the file names are clear so I can re-use them again if needed. There’s no time spent cropping and editing; what you see is what you get.
When do I record them?
I’m usually record lessons on my laptop with the Teams drop-in meeting running beside me on my iPad. I have learnt not to flap if someone drops-in and just say “I’m going to pause recording now as one of my Year 13s has come online to get some help” and then start again later. It’s only the same as in a real lesson when another teacher or technician pops in to ask a question, plus I think it’s good for them to see that people are using the drop-ins. If it’s a longer video, such as a practical, then I’ll sometimes do this before school starts or at lunchtime.
I never record more than one lesson in advance for each class. I wait until I’ve had a full set of work in from the class and the record the next lesson for them. I always start with any feedback from their last piece of work, be it praise, clearing up misconceptions or going through a mark-scheme.
Teams Drop-Ins
Each lesson has a Teams meeting calendared to go with it. I’ve told my students I want to see them at least once a fortnight to check in (although all of them submit work and get feedback every lesson). We’re three weeks in now and I’ve seen all of my Year 9s, 10s and 11s, and the vast majority of my Year 12s and 13s. There are two girls in Year 12 who I haven’t seen face-to-face but they have always submitted work and chatted via Firefly, and one Year 13 girl in the same position. The drop-ins are well attended; students will often just pop in and say hello and chat for five minutes, or pop in and ask a quick question. Some of my Year 13 students just enjoy the company, so I’ve had them working beside me; I had a lesson last week where I was marking, one of them was doing some maths and the other was doing some Spanish. Yesterday I had virtually all of my chatty Year 13s come on for a catch up; they did no work they just wanted a chat. One of my Year 12 boys likes to complete the work “live” so he works away in the background.
What do the students think?
My Year 10s and 12s were unanimous in their preference for pre-recorded lessons with drop-ins. I try my hardest to remove any potential bias from my questions when I ask them for feedback.
My Year 9s were very mixed in terms of what their preferences were; some wanted live, some wanted pre-recorded but with me live in the background, and some wanted entirely pre-recorded with no requirement to be online. I’m hoping my system of pre-recorded but all working together on Teams is a good compromise for them.
This is the feedback from Year 12:
Some interesting things I’ve tried: Year 12 past paper questions
I think I am guilty sometimes of setting quantity over quality when it comes to past paper questions with Year 12. This week I decided to try something new; I’d planned a lesson to look at some vaccination questions with them, but rather than beast through lots, I picked out two tricky questions about vaccine development with a lot of AO3 content in them.
I videoed myself reading though the question stem, explaining how I would tackle the question, highlighting key points with smiley or sad faces such as sample size, representative sample, bias etc. I then told them to pause the video, time for 10 minutes and attempt the question, then when they un-paused, they could watch me talking through the mark-scheme. They then uploaded a scan of their work and I could identify where their weaker areas lay. A few of them came online to check the quality of their marking. At the end of the lesson I asked them how they found it; whether they preferred to submit work for me to mark and then feedback to them the next lesson, or whether they preferred to see the mark-scheme straight away. Their feedback was really useful and made me reflect; this is something I will definitely do with some homeworks in future (though not all the time because I want to be able to mark key pieces myself)
“I think that I prefer doing it all in one lesson because the questions are still in my head and I haven’t forgotten all about them.”
“I’ve found these two last lessons really helpful by going through the markscheme- I think it really helps ”
“ I think at the start of a topic I prefer having the questions marked by you and then receiving a grade on homeworks from you so that I’m not worried about whether my marking is correct or not. I’d then say that this lesson style works really well for me at the end of a topic once I fully understand all of the content so that I can put more effort into improving my exam technique :)”
“I think it’s quite useful to be able to do the questions and then mark them straight after like this, and I think I get more out of annotating it myself sometimes, especially with the longer ones”
“i liked the all in one lesson idea! i had a separate page to mind map all the things to improve on and it was easier to find general improvement ideas with a range of questions at the same time if that makes sense! ”
Some interesting things I’ve tried: Year 9 Teams Chat
Last week I made a pre-recorded video for Year 9 with lots of instructions in it to pause, do a task, and then press play again. There were instructions throughout the video to type the answer to verbal questions into the chat box, along with any questions they had. At the start of the lesson they were all pretty much at the same point, but the further into the lessons I could see that some were taking more time to complete the work. I spent the whole lesson responding to their questions while the others were working in the background. The vast majority did as instructed (one student with ASC said she didn’t feel comfortable speaking or using the chat box) and two other students submitted the work but didn’t use the chat – I followed up with them later on. This method allowed students to work at their own pace and I could spend much more time than normal going off on various tangents with other students who asked insightful questions. I had one extension task up by sleeve for the most able students who finished quickly.
Workload
Using this method, the first week is tough but once you’re ahead of yourself it’s fine. I currently have lessons recorded for the next four days, and I spend the day recording the next set of videos and marking work as soon as it comes in. I have been inefficient in terms of marking; it’s much faster to rattle through a full set of the same piece of work, but at home I’m marking pieces as soon as they come in so the students get immediate feedback. My sixth form are great at not marking their Firefly tasks as “done” until they’ve received marked work and feedback that they can then action. But over all I find that once I’m in my stride, I could make my day fit into 7am until 5pm (although it doesn’t, because I’m terrible at switching off!)
For clarity – I have been writing this in my own free time (not during school hours) over the last few days.
Pedagoggles 