Back to School (Again): Priorities for Returning to the Classroom

Between reading Peps Mccrea’s brilliant book on motivation and last night’s #EdChat on the pandemic's impact on curriculum, I’ve started to consider what I might need to prioritise when students start to return to the classroom.  Now seems a good a time as any to bring those thoughts together (especially given that next week is likely to be taken up with planning in the wake of the announcements due to come out on Monday).

This blog is mostly to help me crystallise my own thoughts about the return, but I’m hoping that some of my reflections might be useful for others as we plan for this.

Welcome Back!

My first priority is going to be making students feel welcome when they return.  For my own classes, the ‘meet and greet’ that’s part of our daily routines will be key.  I’m also hoping that referring back to some of our shared learning experiences - like me reenacting ‘Macbeth’ with my wig collection and desk figurines - will help with a sense of camaraderie when they are likely to be feeling worried about both being back in school and also the upcoming GCSE/A level assessment processes.

I feel that re-establishing positive relationships will be especially important for those who didn’t engage with all of the learning over lockdown in order to make them feel at ease and motivated to engage with learning going forwards.  I worry about some of these students, as the potential for teachers to berate them for not completing tasks risks losing their engagement going forwards: having a go at them for not completing some essays is not going to encourage them to engage in learning when we return (especially if they had good reason, such as limited internet or helping with the care of younger siblings).

I’m also conscious of how I will help other students to feel welcome.  It’s going to be important for us to be visible around school to greet students and remind them that they are part of a wider community.  This will be especially true for some English classes whose teacher left at February half term.  As well as giving their new teacher an introduction in their live lessons next week, I’m planning on popping by their initial physical lessons too so that they recognise their new teacher as part of the school community too.

Work Over Lockdown: What Have They Retained?

As I mentioned, I still want those who haven’t accessed all of the lockdown work to feel motivated to engage with lessons going forward.  However, it’s going to be just as important that I retrieve and build on the knowledge that we covered in this period for those who did.  What we did was valuable and students need to be aware of that.

For this reason, there’s going to need to be a delicate balance between referring back to that ‘lockdown knowledge’ and subtly scaffolding for those who missed the knowledge (or haven’t retained it, due to the limitations of remote learning and students' specific contexts).

Formative assessment (and the subsequent responsive teaching) will play a big part in this.  I’m really glad that I managed to gather different strategies for assessment whilst keeping 2 metres away from students earlier in the year (the use of mini-whiteboards, as mentioned in this earlier blog, will be vital to help me see what students do and don’t know).  As with the return to schools in September, frequent low-stakes checks of what students do and don’t know will mean that my teaching can be more targeted towards any gaps in knowledge or misconceptions.

Back To Norms

Mccrea’s discussion of social norms in 'Motivated Teaching' really made me evaluate some of my own practice (especially when I consider how I used to react if a large portion of a class hadn’t completed homework).  Re-establishing these social norms will be the lynchpin of a successful return to teaching in the physical classroom.

In terms of behaviour for learning, I’m lucky that I’ll be supported by a school-wide briefing on the first morning back.  We’ve already decided that a significant portion of the first day will be used for all teachers to deliver the same messages to their classes to recap what we do in terms of social distancing/keeping safe and also in terms of what great learning behaviours look like at out school.  Returning to these in my lessons will be important to embed them (both for myself and to support staff across the school), especially in terms of modelling and explicitly teaching these behaviours.

Though behaviour for learning is incredibly important, I’m also very conscious of how I’ll be embedding resilience into my students as part of the process of re-establishing norms.  Many of the students in my Y11 class have struggled with extended writing tasks over lockdown and I’m concerned that this might be due to a lack of resilience and confidence.  For this reason, I want to ensure that I’m doing everything I can to support them so that they feel confident enough to write an extended piece without a detailed structure to follow.

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#EdCPDChat Reflections: Independent CPD

It was great to get back into the habit of #EdCPDChat on a Wednesday evening last week and discussing independent CPD seemed apt, given that the current situation has many of us working more independently (due to remote learning).

I was also grateful for this particular topic, as I’d reflected on the impact (and lack of impact) of my own independent CPD last summer (which you can read about in this previous blog post).

Q1: Barriers to independent CPD

@EnserMark mirrored my own concerns from last year at the start of the discussion, stating how ‘reading lots of ideas’ doesn’t always lead to us changing our practice.  In these cases, the extensive reading might not be seen as ‘genuine development’.

@Mr_N_Wood and Mark agreed that time is a barrier in bridging this gap between reading ideas and actual development, with Mark suggesting that reflection time is built into a school’s CPD provision and @DoctorPreece giving ideas of what this could look like (in the form of a coaching culture or reading groups).

Logistics was also seen as a potential barrier by @lcgeography, who has welcomed the growth in remote CPD, as it makes external opportunities more accessible (living and teaching in rural East Yorkshire, I can empathise with this).  Certainly, I’ve found that it’s been useful to access recorded sessions for my own CPD over the past few months (with @researchEdhome and @MyattandCo useful sources for this, alongside the database of online CPD collated by @TeacherDevTrust ’s @KLMorgan_2 - available at this link).  I’ve also found these resources very reasonable in terms of price (most are free); moreover, the quality is excellent- overcoming two additional barriers mentioned by @meredithfox22.

However, the vast amount of CPD available perhaps makes another barrier more problematic: where do we focus our efforts? @EnserMark pointed out that we often ‘don’t know what we don’t know’ and @m_chiles also suggested that knowing where to focus our CPD efforts is a barrier (with both suggesting the value of feedback in finding these out, through external expertise or in-school coaching processes).

Q2: Does remote learning support independent CPD?

@DanHudson84 responded to Q1 with the idea of using recorded online lessons as a self-evaluation tool to help us identify a focus for independent CPD, something that would not be as easy to do in ‘normal’ circumstances.

However, others argued that the current situation makes independent CPD more difficult, as there’s not as much time for this self-evaluation (with @EnserMark arguing that the current  remote learning training for staff is likely to be more ‘procedural’ than ‘developmental’).

@dnleslie also pointed out that we need to bear in mind that CPD after-school will be coming at the end of a long day (certainly more screen time will not be conducive to staff concentration at that point) and @greeborunner highlighted how collaboration over virtual platforms won’t be as ‘natural’, making this crucial element of successful CPD more challenging too.

From my perspective, I also think that whether or not teachers have the ‘head space’ to work on their independent CPD will depend on their personal circumstances.  A teacher who is simultaneously teaching full-time and managing the home learning of their own children might not have the same capacity to reflect on their practice as someone who does not have young children to support.  Leaders need to be mindful of this with any CPD being delivered at the moment (especially given that it can be trickier to support staff wellbeing when many of us are working from home).

Q3: Leading and supporting independent CPD

I thought that @lcgeography ’s point about independent CPD not needing to be done in isolation was important here, as he highlighted that it’s more about staff having ‘agency and choice’.  This chimed with my own experiences,  as my team have benefited more from sessions where they have structured reflection discussions on a chosen focus area than earlier sessions where I just collapsed an entire meeting as ‘independent CPD time’.

In my opinion, though, the best summary of what leaders can do to support independent CPD came from @greeborunner , as she stated that they need to ‘value it, invest in it, model it, recognise it and value it some more.’  @EnserMark followed that excellent advice up with the suggesting that the ‘value’ element is likely to be best supported by leaders having conversations about independent CPD with staff and ‘being human’.  In this sense, we can also get informal feedback on where staff’s interests lie which - in turn - will help us develop a more personalised CPD offer overall.

If you are interested in hosting an #EdCPDChat session, or have any ideas for topics, then please use the link on the @EdCPDChat pinned tweet to submit your ideas.