Remote learning: lessons learned

My central aim today is to avoid using the word “unprecedented”. It is clear teachers find themselves in… Unusual circumstances. None of us signed up to a career spent sitting at a desk all day and communicating by email and phone. My overriding feeling right now is complete confusion as to why anyone would choose this kind of sedentary life, and I, along with many others, am very much looking forward to being physically present in a school again, ideally with some children and colleagues at a safe and social distance.

Much as I would like to pretend otherwise, distance learning looks to be with us for the long term – most educators consider that a significant number of children will have to stay at home with shielding relatives, as well as potentially having two weeks off school should they or a classmate show symptoms – at least deep into the next academic year. I’ve been excited to get to be a part of Oak National Academy, the UK’s online school, on its curriculum team, to learn more about best practice in this brave new world of remote learning, and I’d like to share some lessons learned along the way.

1. “Assessment for learning” (AfL) looks very different

Even where schools are providing online lessons for their own children, there are some strong arguments for these being pre-recorded rather than live – safeguarding concerns abound with live lessons along with childcare and related demands on teachers’ time making it tough to run lessons according to a set timetable.

Even in live teaching, traditional methods of AfL aren’t foolproof: it’s hard to raise your hand when you’re stuck in a classroom; harder still to do the waving required to make this visible across the internet in front of your peers. It’s easy to read faces in a classroom or hear that low mutter of dissent or see heads shaking when something isn’t clear; again, this is much harder with video conferencing.

Moreover, when students look at a screen, any screen, the default position is to be passive, and breaking the association is a challenge. Students could easily sit through hours of online learning and learn nothing, just as many teachers will have experienced lengthy online meetings they can’t quite recall at this point, along with the multiple TV box sets that have faded into the mists of time.

Online learning must repeatedly fight this passivity. At Oak, teachers have amassed a range of strategies to get children to do something with what they are learning. In primary, this is displayed most cutely through children shouting the answer at the screen.

In secondary, it seems less clear that adolescents would be willing to do this. All Oak teachers use “pause points”: following every new piece of information, a check for understanding – a quick “everyone writes” or multiple choice question to check they have understood.
The lesson is: any time you’d check for understanding with a class, make it a quick task online.

2. Less is more

The amazing Josie Mingay running form-time reading aside, it is challenging to get children reading a lot when they’re not in the classroom. Oak runs on the assumption that many children access lessons through a mobile phone, and they need to be as accessible as possible for all learners. In the flow of a lesson, it is certainly a challenge to student attention and to teacher delivery to read swathes of text. That is why, though it kills the English teacher in me, I’d advise that less is more when delivering online lessons. Having a large amount of text on slides is a sure fire way to alienate some children. Keep slides clean and keep wording minimal.

In an ideal world, every child would have their own laptop or tablet device from which online learning would be easily accessible. It seems likely that the funding and logistics of this mean it’s not a quick and easy answer. Our best bet – the one that is fastest as well – is to make use of the fact that almost every child will have a mobile phone. With this in mind, use slides judiciously to chunk new knowledge and present it cleanly and clearly, and deliver extended reading separately to new learning to ensure maximum pupil access to lessons.

3. Digital simplicity

Technology offers limitless solutions to the problem of educating children remotely, but that doesn’t mean we have to take advantage of all of them. The more complicated we make our lessons, the more hurdles we place in front of our children. Oak’s Head of History, Ben Arscott, described this approach recently saying: “every click is an opportunity for a kid to check out of a lesson.” Adding login details is another hurdle that could cause confusion and prevent access. Whatever you do, make it as easy as possible to access, removing every barrier that might prevent children engaging with the learning.

4. Be "pantomime"

One of my favourite pieces of advice on teaching was given to me by Barry Smith, who describes the process by which a teacher becomes larger than life, firing up the pupils through sheer force of personality, as “be pantomime”. This is good advice in the classroom, though it doesn’t work for everyone – we must also ensure we remain true to our teacher personas, as children see right through inauthenticity.

Normally I’m a fan of clear and simple delivery and no fan of gimmicks, but while we are delivering lessons on the very device kids are most often distracted by, a little gimmick goes a long way. I find the entirety of Oak’s primary team enchanting, but one of my favourite moments was watching the year 6 teacher add some jazz to a spelling test with his quizmaster jacket.

Oak National Academy is completely free to all students and teachers and exists to support teachers focus on the things a tech platform cannot do: the pastoral support of pupils. When professionals return to school, it’s a great resource to allow teachers to plan for the children in front of them, while being sure that the ones at home have something of quality to learn with. We’re improving all the time, and looking for new ways to integrate with existing systems so teachers can monitor the work their students are completing on Oak. With that in mind, do leave any feedback on how we could make the platform most helpful for teachers in the comments of this post.

Finally, some of Oak’s team of superstar teachers will be leading a Research Ed Home talk on 2nd June at 11am to share their own lessons learned, so tune in then to find out more.

This blog first appeared on Reading all the Books on May 24, 2020.