Since Covid came and disrupted life as we knew it, I have found myself in a position where I have needed to teach my students online on multiple occasions. I have just got a temporary Secondary English teaching position for Term 4 and I will, once again, be teaching online. So, this, to me, felt like the perfect time to go back and reflect on how I prioritised inclusion whilst working from home. The demographic of young people I will be working with will be starkly different to Bristol, yet there are bound to be takeaways I can use to help me.
When I think back to how we structured our online learning in March 2020, when we were succumbed to the complete unknown, it makes me proud to remember how much progress myself and my amazing team made over the next year or so, with regards to learning from home. We started by having weekly sheets, with 3 or 4 lessons on them and that had changed to differentiated lesson worksheets, set for the time they would normally have a lesson.
It’s at times like these when technology can really come into its own and our department used a range of things such as loom, voice recordings attached to Google Slides (we used Google Classrooms and slides integrates much better for the students!), interactive docs (I’ll explain later!), my personal favourite Google forms and much more to help make life easier for both the students and us, with the intentions of creating resources that would return in maximum pupil progress.
My lovely head of department Sue, @SusanSEnglish on Twitter, has an amazing blog and has already covered a lot of things we had done. On there, she has explored some of the things we did during remote learning, with this fantastic blog being particularly useful, as she has noted some of our best practice on there already – I won’t restate what has already been put perfectly! My other colleague, @katiesuther on Twitter, also shared with us this amazing blog she had stumbled across and it completely reformed the way we structured our documents.
So, rather than going over the same things Sue has in her blog, I am going to focus on how what I have learned from my old colleagues and through online learning in England can inform the next few weeks of working from home in Australia.
So, firstly, to no surprise to anyone who has worked with me over the past few years, I am starting with my favourite online resource – the ✨Google Quiz!✨ I don’t know much about my new classes, as I’ve never met them – and I won’t until our first Zoom! However, luckily, their previous teacher has written me an incredibly detailed handover sheet, which is going to be my holy grail for the first few weeks as I find my bearings. On a first look, the classes are very different to my previous classes. I have access to their previous work but, honestly, it will be far too time consuming for me to go through and look at their work individually. This is where the quiz comes in. My year 8s, 9s and 10s are all midway through poetry topics and need to revise the core poetry/ songs they have studied already. I have created self-marking quizzes with them, where I will be able to then get statistics on what individual students, as well as the whole class, are strongest and weakest in. This will then inform my following lesson with them, in which I will complete a Zoom.
Here is an example of the sorts of questions I am going to be setting:
Low-stakes quizzing is something I have been using a lot in my teaching practice, since using Howard-Jones’ Evolution of the Learning Brain (2018) during a curriculum research project at university. The aim of this particular quiz is to give the students some confidence – I want every student to feel like they are able to answer most of the quizzes, therefore it is mostly multiple choice (this also helps me from a data perspective). I will then go in and have a look at their longer responses, checking both their content and to also get a general feel for SPaG.
As well as helping me prepare for the beginning of term, I am also able to differentiate these quizzes by adding in non-compulsory challenge questions. I like the idea of allowing all students the chance to attempt these questions, a s I have often been surprised at the quality of them in the past. One thing working from home threw up for me, was that I had a lot of lower and middle attaining students putting in a lot of extra effort, resulting in them making excellent progress. However, on the flip side, some of my highest attainers put in minimal effort and I was often a little disappointed with the quality they produced. What this did mean, however, is that I knew which students I needed to prioritise for contacting home. More often than not, it was the names I wasn’t expecting!
I realise now that this is probably just a random garbling of my thoughts, as usual, but the process has been rather helpful to me!
The Road to Inclusion 