Emma McCrea
In this episode, we discuss a variety of teaching techniques that help to “bring the curriculum to life” and how encouraging imagination and engagement from children can support the development of key skills. We talk about different ways technology can be used in the classroom as well as how reading, writing and speaking skills interrelate.
As well as the video and transcript below, you can listen to this and other episodes by going to the website, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, or Google Podcasts.
Emma: Hello, I’m Emma McCrae. And I’ll be your host for today’s episode of the Brighter Thinking Pod, brought to you by Cambridge University Press. Today, I’m delighted to introduce our primary special episode.
We’re going to be focusing on some of the key topics relating to primary education – from teaching techniques, to bringing the curriculum to life, to the development of key skills, including reading, writing, and speaking.
We hope you find our conversation today useful. Our discussion is also going to touch upon the impact of the COVID 19 pandemic. Specifically, looking at the long-term influence it might have on education. The sudden collision of technology with teaching and learning, resulting in online teaching, life lessons and home learning, has a lot of us thinking about how education will evolve in the future.
We’re really pleased to welcome two brand new guests to our virtual studio this morning, who we hope will be able to bring their unique insights into these areas of discussion.
Gill Budgell, a Consultant Publisher, Researcher, and Writer specialising in early years and primary English language learning. Gill provides support and expertise for publishing in the education sector, as well as writing experience with her business for Frattempo.
Gill is also the author of stages one and two of our new Cambridge Primary English series, as well as our successful long running handwriting series, Penpals for Handwriting. Gill, would you mind giving us a quick introduction to Frattempo, your work as an education consultant and an author, and your connection to the Press?
Gill: I’d love to, thanks very much for inviting me. I started life as an early years teacher and a primary teacher, and then quite quickly developed some additional expertise in working with bilingual pupils and those learning English as an additional language.
I’ve always been interested in developing the very best resources for teachers and pupils. That was my inspiration for setting up Frattempo because it allows me to work alongside publishers – big and small – to really help me to carry out research and support and work alongside them. And I’ve absolutely loved doing that over a great many years.
Additionally, I’m a primary school governor and I’m a trustee of a multi academy trust quite locally. So I still get into schools at lots of different levels, both classroom and from an administration point of view as well. My involvement really in education is long and wide in terms of experience. And I’m delighted to be here today!
Emma: Thanks for joining us Gill. We’re also joined by Martin Bailey, Director of Animate 2 Educate and Digital Enrichment Leader at Lanchester EP Primary School in county Durham. He also lectures in primary computing at Durham University. Martin, good morning to you. I wonder if you can perhaps give us an overview of Animate 2 Educate and your work as a digital enrichment leader and lecturer please?
Martin: Thank you for the opportunity to be involved in the podcast this morning! So first and foremost, I am a primary school teacher – I have been for 21 years now, with various schools in the Northeast of England. Currently, I’m employed at Lanchester EP Primary School, where I do have this rather glamorous sounding title of Digital Enrichment Lead. And basically I got the opportunity to teach and deliver computing to all year groups from early years foundation stage to year 6 within the school.
I’m also responsible for how technology is embedded across the curriculum in all subjects throughout the school. Within my time as a full-time teacher, I really did enjoy using technology in the classroom. I brought from my own personal experiences. That was how the business first started. And for a year or two I was going and doing workshops in the likes of animation, hence the name of the company, Animate 2 Educate.
Over the last eight or nine years things have grown, developed and diversified. Now you would refer to me as a Primary Computing Advisor, Primary Computing Consultant. And as well as doing computer workshops, which I’m still doing in schools all over the world, I now do a lot of work directly with staff – doing staff training, insight days, and speaking at conferences and courses all over the world.
Since last academic year, I’ve also been delighted to be a lecturer at Durham University where I deliver the computer element of the training for the PGCE students. It’s lovely to have the opportunity to inspire and work with the next generation of teachers too.
Emma: Excellent, thanks Martin. Thank you also to our listeners for joining. Do remember that all of the important links and information we discuss in this episode will be included throughout, if you want to refer to them. And if you want to get in touch with us, please tweet us at CUP education using the hashtag #BrighterPod.
What or who inspired your imagination or encouraged you to read or write?
Emma: We’re going to kick off today’s episode with a fun question just to get the conversation flowing. One of the key themes of the episode is imagination and bringing the curriculum to life. We’d like to ask both of you to cast your minds back to your own experience of learning as a child, what or who inspired your imagination or encouraged you to read or write? Gill let’s start with you.
Gill: I had to think about this because it was a very long time ago! I was a little girl who really liked reading. I’m sure that will remind people of many children they have in their classrooms.
I had a little cubby hole by my bed and I always had a lot of books lined up in there. I had a little light that I could put on and a torch, so I used to go under the covers and read when I was supposed to put the lights out. I often used to just pick up the dictionary and go through and sort of find words and practise saying them. Quite strange, really! I always loved poetry and I can actually remember age eight, my teacher, Mrs. Gilette, who was reading Stig of the Dump. I really remember loving that and listening, desperate to hear the next episode.
In terms of writing, I loved writing, I loved doing handwriting patterns and I loved filling in little pictures. I was also very inspired by holidays. We always had big camping holidays, not expensive, but fun. So I would always be encouraged by my mother, who was also a teacher. She always inspired me to write a holiday diary. It was my job because my brother wasn’t so keen to do it, so I had to do it.
The other thing was I used to spend a lot of time playing. I used to play a lot either with friends or on my own playing teachers, playing shopkeepers, writing things out, looking through catalogues, pretending to take orders on the phone. I think I honestly was very interested and very naturally interested. I just found those things very easy to do.
Emma: Oh, that’s lovely! I think it’s clear to see that you started on your career path quite early in life.
Gill: Yes I did!
Emma: That’s really nice. Martin, same question to you please.
Martin: I was the exact opposite! As a child in primary school, I was much more into the maths, science, history and technology. While I enjoyed reading as a child, certainly writing was not something I was interested in at all.
I really did see it as doing work and the idea of writing for pleasure would have never crossed my mind as a child. But I remember starting secondary school and was probably the equivalent of what’s now year seven/year eight in secondary school. I had an experience where the local press gave a page of their newspaper to my school to write a blog.
That’s one of the first times I really remember being inspired to write because suddenly we were allowed to choose the topic about what we were writing. I’m a big sports fan, particularly football. So I wrote an article about a local football team and I was delighted when my article was one of six or seven to be chosen to be published. That idea of writing for an audience, not just writing for school or for the teacher, I think that’s really interesting.
Emma: Hearing both of you answer that same question, really highlights for me that in the classroom, as a teacher, you’re dealing with lots of different children who have different motivations, different interests, and it’s trying to find, as you say, Martin, that one thing that they can hook onto get excited and enthused about. I couldn’t have asked for a better answer to that question because it brings that to life so beautifully.
What teaching techniques help to bring the curriculum to life?
Emma: We’re going to move on to today’s main questions. We’ve taken insights from the Cambridge Panel to inform the questions we’re going to ask you both today. And we’re going to start off with a question which nicely encapsulates our key themes – what teaching techniques help to bring the curriculum to life and encourage learners to use their imagination, to develop key skills such as reading and writing?
There are a variety of different techniques we could touch upon in this question, from active learning to using technology in the classroom. Marian from the Cambridge panel who’s based in Egypt has also asked about the effectiveness of five sense stimulation. This technique encourages the use of various stimuli from listening to music, to using visual problems, to inspire and support learners. Thank you Marian for this suggestion. It’d be great to delve into this discussion around different teaching techniques, which help to bring the curriculum to life. Martin, I’d like to start with you this time.
Martin: The strapline of Animate 2 Educate is ‘bringing the curriculum to life’. I’m a firm believer that we do have to get children hooked into the theme, the topic, the book, whatever it is that they are studying in order to inspire them and make them want to write.
Once children are immersed in an activity, then suddenly the creativity comes and the writing can come from that.
For me, I particularly love things like virtual reality or augmented reality. It allows children as near as possible experiences that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to give them. During the pandemic, that’s ever more key when we can’t physically take children on school trips and visits and everything else.
Imagine you’re studying something like dinosaurs, it’s impossible for children to travel back in time to see these things. But if we can have a dinosaur augmented reality walking across the classroom then the language that comes out of that – maybe describing the features that make it suited to its habitat – are going to be far greater than if you just look at a picture in a book or watch a video.
We use a product at Lanchester and in my workshops called now>press>play, which is an immersive set of headphones that enable children to have 20, 25 minutes experience where they relive what it was like in the blitz and going into the Anderson shelters, for example. I think children need to have the physical experience because that very much leads into language.
If you just give a child a blank sheet of paper, they’re not going to be able to write, they need as much stimulus as possible. We may not be able to invoke the sense of smell too much, but I think the sense of touch and hearing, anything we can do, will really hook children in. Great writing and great learning will come from it.
I think communication is key as well. I mentioned about my own experiences as a child – until there was an audience for my work I didn’t really want to write. And nowadays, I’m very passionate about that still because too much of children’s work, has an audience of one – the class teacher.
There’s no way for it to be viewed. But if you think about the digital communication we’ve got now, particularly social media platforms, children can instantly start to share their work with a real worldwide audience and you can get children hooked in a way that was never possible when I was a child.
We regularly have authors as part of our lessons now because we’ll tweet them a question and the author will become part of that lesson for the week. We’ve had athletes and astronauts as well. One of the standout ones I remember is when Tim Peake was on board the international space station.
We did a bit of writing about that and Tim Peake was replying from the international space station! How much of an amazing hook is that to get children into writing?
And I often present around the theme of let’s get phygital – combining the physical and the digital. Thankfully I don’t dress up like Olivia Newton John!
Often, there’s this stereotype that the digital works against the physical, we often talk about how children are just sat in front of a games console at home and not getting out and about. But actually, if we use digital technology correctly, it can really inspire writing or getting children phygital.
We’ve spoken about augmented reality and virtual reality, so if I’m doing a bit of superhero writing, for example, then I’ll use something like augmented reality and suddenly the children will have superpowers! If they are acting that out, then that language comes into their writing. Because they’ll talk in similes and metaphors as to how their super powers are working and everything else.
Also, with green screen technology you can get the children to act things out. It’s this idea of read, write, perform. People talk about doing the reading and the writing, but we do want to give children the opportunity to perform the work and begin to share it and get it out there. I think if we combine all the technology that’s available now, not overloading the curriculum with it, but using it at the right times to give that hook, to give that stimulus, to give that end product, writing for a real purpose can bring amazing benefits to those reluctant pupils.
Emma: Thanks Martin. I think that’s a really interesting perspective. I see with my own children that they are naturally curious and it’s finding a way to spark that curiosity and build that to really engage them and hook them in. And I can imagine that can be quite challenging in a classroom situation when you’ve got many pupils.
Gill, as a researcher and writer specialising in early years education, what does bringing the curriculum to life mean in terms of early years education and young learners?
Gill: Following on beautifully from what Martin’s been talking about, I absolutely love the idea of ‘phygital’ because I think that’s what we’re all aiming for – this combination of physical and digital. It’s really a misunderstanding to think that technology is about just sitting there and being passive. It absolutely is not when it’s done as brilliantly as I know Martin does it.
Just to pick up on something else Martin was talking about – now>press>play, which I’ve used and seen in use. I love it because it brings in the audio and a lot of digital stuff doesn’t necessarily do that. The power of oracy from the very beginning is huge. I’m going to talk about that a little bit later in response to questions, but I think now>press>play is just fantastic because the children are listening and they’re responding physically. I think it’s hugely powerful.
Early years teachers are so expert at harnessing children’s natural interest and curiosity – learning to let go and intervene and facilitate at the right point in time to really capture the best opportunity that the children themselves are often creating.
I’m reminded of the famous quote: ‘tell me, and I will forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I will understand.’
And I know we’ve used that a lot in education over the years, but it is true. It is so important to involve, particularly very young children, in their learning.
Some of my favourite recollections in early years are things like the mud kitchen. It isn’t just about letting children go out and make a mess and talk to friends and have fun, although yes, all those things are happening, but in itself it is an environment.
And in fact, only today I was reading an article about how the mud kitchen is constructed. If it’s constructed on a level or at the top of a slight slope, or it has cabinets within it where things are stored at different heights, or if there’s a little writing corner within the mud kitchen, they might be wanting to write their recipes down. These are the things where we’re seamlessly weaving oracy and reading and writing.
And there’s just two other things which actually aren’t early years, that I really wanted to mention. There’s somebody on Twitter called Johnny Walker, who actually takes disadvantaged learners away into the forest as a poetry retreat.
He manages to inspire the children, or perhaps the nature inspires the children, to write. He doesn’t make it explicit, he just takes the children to an environment where they feel relaxed. They can share what they want to share or not. They can write what they want to write or not. Even at the end of the session sometimes, he inspires the children to write something for themselves to help them to understand that writing doesn’t always have to be for an audience. Actually, sometimes it can be for yourself to help with your own peace of mind. So that’s really inspirational.
Emma: Excellent, thanks Gill. It’s really interesting to hear you talk about how something as simple as being in the mud kitchen and playing and learning. Young learners are getting to grips with language and they’re also developing their motor skills, which as you know, much better than I, is really important for good handwriting.
I think sometimes there is a danger that teachers possibly find that sort of learning a challenge. They can’t say to parents ‘your child has learned this, this and this today’ because there’s no explicit output. And I wonder if sometimes that can be quite difficult as a teacher – to feel that you’ve got that freedom in the classroom and you can let a learner develop, explore, do what they want to do and understand that actually that’s just as valuable as more formalised learning.
How does the development of reading, writing, and speaking skills for primary learners interrelate?
Emma: Now I’d like to dig a little bit deeper into this topic of key skills development. Michael, who is based in Ghana and teaches primary, has written in on the Cambridge Panel, asking about the interrelation between speaking and writing. I’d like to ask you both, how does the development of reading, writing, and speaking skills for primary learners interrelate? So Gill, if you could start us off this time.
Gill: I’ve decided to start with talking about reading for pleasure. From the earliest possible age, even babies, as we know, are capable of enjoying words and sounds and pictures. And so this idea of reading for pleasure, sharing books, loving stories, loving information, and finding out things is absolutely critical for our young learners.
There are lots of people I follow on Twitter who I would love to recommend – Theresa Cremin, the Open University, and Nikki Gamble. These are people who spend day in and day out looking for wonderful books to inspire children.
My own particular interest is picture books and wordless books, because I think whatever the age, these are the books that enable you to talk, to share, and to read. You can read the pictures, that’s a real skill, and then to write your own words for the pictures. So they really open up fantastic opportunities.
It is absolutely critical that we give children the tools to enable them to both decode for reading and encode for spelling and writing, and the two go together like two sides of a coin. So obviously those are also interdependent.
I’ve left speaking and listening to my last point, but not because it’s less important by any means. It’s actually something we find very difficult to teach and in a structured way.
I recently came across a charity called Voice 21, which provides a really useful framework for oracy development, which I’ve become very interested in. They’ve recently run something called Oracy October, where there were tens of fantastic free online workshops to explore this idea of oracy development. I would recommend having a look at that.
I would also say, apart from the obvious thing about children speaking and listening to each other and to sharing ideas and developing, I think oral feedback is a critical element of effective formative assessment. I was recently listening to James Clements and he was talking about his experience in school of a feedback funnel.
And I love this idea that you start with something very broad, like proofreading independently, and then you might do an oral feedback on some of the small things in the piece of work, then perhaps doing some peer working while you’re focusing on some secretarial aspects of their work, becoming more and more refined.
Then perhaps giving them some quality written feedback as the teacher to the learner, and finally giving the learners a chance to go back and improve their writing. I love the way that this includes that oracy into writing and then ultimately rereading your own work. I think for me, that’s a perfect example of how these skills interrelate.
Emma: Excellent, thank you. I love the idea of that feedback funnel! Martin, do you have any insights to add on how technology can support all different learners in a variety of ways as they develop these skills?
Martin: Firstly, I completely agree with everything Gill was saying about how the skills do very much interlink.
Just following on a little bit from a technology point of view, there’s no doubt that reading plays a major role in the development of writing. If we go back about five years ago, I think lots of people thought digital eBooks we’re going to take over education and be everywhere. That hasn’t really happened, it’s still a really underused resource. I’m beginning to wonder now, as we look to the next five to 10 years, will it ever really be utilised and used in the way that people maybe previously thought?
Children do learn things from what they read – if they haven’t had that experience of adventure stories then they’re not going to be able to write an adventure story. And so it’s really important that through whatever medium it is, whether it be through a physical book or digital eBook, that we make sure that children have the experience of reading so that they can then apply the work and the skills of those authors into their own work.
When we’re thinking about reading resources, it’s not just as tech stimulation. It’s not ‘will children respond better to a digital book than a physical book?’ We’ve particularly got to think about SEND children. I think this is where digital resources have had more of an impact in recent years because that easy ability to change the size of a text on a digital book is an absolute invaluable resource.
We can change background colours and stuff like that to make them more accessible to dyslexic learners. These things are not just about making the curriculum accessible for a few, they’re about making the curriculum accessible for all. And actually, these are little skills that we shouldn’t just focus on Child A and B, but actually things like enlarging the text and looking for all pupils what background colours do the pickup on best.
We often leave it too late in the child’s development before we pick up on these things, rather than giving individual children, individual teachers, the ability to have a large piece of text.
I’ve made some notes for this session, I’ve got them on my iPad next to me, but I’ve blown them up to a 20 point font so that I can easily see them. Things like that are so pivotal and easy to use, but we are completely under-using them in the classroom.
Gill spoke about speaking and listening skills and obviously this is where technology can play a major benefit and can give a real purpose to what children are producing and writing.
I love audio recording apps and there’s so many out there. And obviously I’m a particular lover of animations; they really lend themselves to that because suddenly those characters in a book that children are studying, or those that they’ve created, you can suddenly give them a voice.
I remember working with a school in the Midlands just before the summer holiday. They were looking at the Titanic as a topic. So we looked at Captain Smith who was the captain aboard the Titanic. We used an app called Morfo Booth to bring Captain Smith to life. And the children had to give a voice to the captain and think about what he would be saying to the crew those moments after the Titanic struck the iceberg until it sunk.
Something like that, when there’s suddenly a character as an animation, makes it much easier for children to develop a voice and to think about the words that somebody would be saying. When something is physically happening, rather than just asking children to write down in their exercise books what Captain Smith would have said, it suddenly changes the dynamic of everything.
I’ll look back to when I first started teaching, I often used a puppet because I used to find that certain children in the class would talk to the puppet, but would never speak to me or they would never talk as part of a group. And what I’ve actually found in recent years, quite surprisingly in some ways, is that those same children will often speak to a digital device, rather than share their ideas in a group or speak to the teacher.
If they’re in their own little world sometimes they are quite happy speaking into an audio recording. Particularly in early years children, I have gone into a classroom and I’ve played something back on the iPad and the teacher at the end of the day has said: ‘is that little Jessica? I’ve never heard Jessica speak before.’
Suddenly these devices can give a voice to children that might be afraid to speak up in the classroom. Spoken English at all levels does come before written English. So we think about English as an additional language, for example, then it’s even more important that we use an audio recording device, we use animation, etc. Because the more opportunities we can give children to practise the spoken English, then the written English will come too.
If they are used to using the devices, then the natural next step is using things like voice to text. That is not so much tomorrow’s world because we’re using things like Siri and Alexa and stuff like that in our home. So if I teach us to embrace that technology, it hopefully feels a little bit more natural.
We’ve experimented at a teacher level to try and use voice to text a little bit more now for emails and messages. We wrote our reports in the summer using voice to text and it suddenly made the reports far more personal. We got far more time-saving out of it.
I think if teachers use things professionally, then the next step is they’ve got the confidence to use it in the classroom. And then it builds up to children being able to independently write – from voice recording, to voice to text, to actually them themselves entering text. Obviously, you’ve also got things like translation facilities, you’ve got sort of predictive texts and stuff like that that can help children to develop the right experience too.
Emma: Excellent, thanks Martin. I think it’s really interesting that you pick up on technology’s ability to level the playing field and to introduce learners that might previously have not engaged with an activity or who might have found it really challenging to get involved, to help them bring their voice into the classroom. I think that’s really valuable.
In what ways will the recent home learning experience influence primary education?
We are almost coming to the end of today’s episode, but before we do, I’d like to spend some time thinking about the future and potential further impacts and influence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Martin, in what ways do you think the recent home learning experience will influence primary education in the future?
Martin: To some extent, only time will tell. It’s probably a little bit too early at the moment to make that prediction, but there’s no doubt that 2020 has brought about some element of change.
I think lots of schools that were maybe reluctant to use and to embrace new technology have been forced, for want of a better word, down that routine in recent months. I think in many ways, we’ve had like six years’ worth of CPD in the last six months in terms of how we’ve developed the use of technology!
What would have taken ages to be implemented through staff meetings we’ve had no choice but to have a go. Ultimately, like everything in life, that is how we learn. Hopefully a lot of what has been implemented in recent weeks and months will carry forward and will start to make a difference. Technology does enable us to take a blended approach to learning when we combine face-to-face sessions with the best of online learning.
As we speak today, our Year 2 bubble at Lachester, my school in County Durham, went down last week and we had to instantly flip to online learning. That’s now 50% of our Key Stage One and Key Stage Two pupils that have had a period of self-isolation.
I think it’s pivotal that we do have really good and productive online learning in place. There’s no doubt about it, it’s different greatly from school to school around the country. What we’ve tried to do is to combine Zoom for an element of live teaching, so we’re going online three times a day to give that introduction still to the start of each lesson to model something like writing, for example. But it also gives a bit of structure to the day. One of the things that we reflected back on in spring and summer when we were just putting things online for pupils and parents to access, a lot of it was just maybe before 11 o’clock in the morning, so it was almost like a bit of a token gesture.
I think it’s important for the pupils, but particularly for parents who are maybe trying to work from home, that we give that structure to the day. But also there is that live element of support. We introduce the lessons on Zoom and we use something called eSchools, which is our learning platform, which work is shared onto.
We had an insight day at the start of September about blended learning and how we wanted to develop our own learning policy for 2020/2021. We decided that we must give pupils feedback and comments on the work. And again, that was something that wasn’t necessarily happening in the summer term.
It was almost like it’s a bonus if they access to work and that was down to the parents to support them. We want to make use of the technology there. So again, each school’s pupils can upload their work. Teachers will comment on it and then it gets resubmitted back to the pupils, but also making use of that new technology.
So through the likes of Purple Mash, which we use a lot for issuing work to children and getting it back, you can audio record the feedback. A couple of weeks ago, when our Year Fives were in self-isolation, I was doing a lesson with around 60 of them online. It would have taken me a long time to give written feedback on 60 bits of work. And it would’ve probably been lost because by the time they looked at it, the lesson would have gone, but I used an audio recording.
The children were submitting their work to me, I was reading it, but using audio recording to suggest improvements. It was going straight back to the children and then I would see the work where they had reflected upon my comments.
It’s important that we take these ideas on board, we develop, but actually they can have long-term impact. We often complain about teacher workload and it’s important that we give feedback to children, but nobody’s ever said that that feedback has to be written. So moving forward, through the use of QR codes and stuff like that, we can give audio feedback, video feedback, and it can have a real benefit moving forward.
We often hear about this approach called flipped learning where the learning about the topic has been done in advance. You might share some video content and some reading and children come into the classroom having had that pre-knowledge already.
So I am a firm believer that the term ‘teacher’ should go out the window, because it almost implies that we are this fountain of all knowledge that children must listen to for 15/20 minutes, absorb everything straight away and then get on and produce some work. Whereas the term ‘facilitator of learning’ – and I’m not saying that it’s going to be embraced as a job title – but I think we should view our role in that way.
It’s not to just provide children with all the knowledge, but it’s to facilitate the learning of the experience that might have actually happened through watching some videos in advance, or we actually record the content, which we’re doing a lot more now online.
Everyone learns at their own pace, so in the classroom maybe we do need to give children a tablet that has our slide deck or a video on it so they can rewind it, pause it and look back over things. These are things that I sincerely hope that in the coming years will transform and develop the classroom. While Covid has obviously been horrendous in many ways, it might actually finally be the stimulus that makes that happen.
Most importantly, from a child point of view, I think what it’s done particularly at the primary level is that it has made children more independent learners. I think we’d maybe had a generation where children needed to be spoon-fed a little bit too much, whether it be by the teacher or by the parents at home.
But now because children are having to access online content at the same name as maybe parents are at home working from home as well, I think children are developing that little bit more independence and managing their schoolwork. That didn’t come until a secondary education previously.
And in terms of the physical devices themselves, I think in 2020 for the first time, we’re actually seeing that devices are being bought by parents where the primary function of that device is in order to enable learning from home to take place. Quite clearly into 2021, this is still going to continue. I’ll look with interest as to what the future beyond that will hold and I hope that whilst we can return back to much more face to face learning, that we will not just forget everything that we’ve learned and developed during the pandemic.
Emma: Thanks Martin. And Gill, same question to you, please.
Gill: What Martin was saying there really resonated with me. In particular, I love the way you link back there to the idea of feedback and how important technology can be in that sphere. I think that’s a really interesting area and so critical for ensuring consistency of teaching and learning.
I’m also really interested in this idea that the pandemic is really showing up the gap between those schools who’ve engaged with technology or not. And even in my own experience, I’ve got one primary school that was really not very well equipped to cope with a pandemic. I mean, let’s face it, probably none of us were really well equipped, but, you know, from a technological point of view. They didn’t really have systems in place. They’ve had to learn on their feet super quickly at a very difficult time.
And I think that’s put huge pressure on that school who were having other sorts of challenges at the same time. My experience there was that they quickly got to grips with Zoom and they were running weekly whole school assemblies where there was a platform for us all to go on and to talk about what each class was doing and for children to share their work. And often you could see parents were sat with their children at home, and it was a really effective. But yes, a fast learning situation for that school.
Now, for many schools, like the sort of school where Martin worked, that would be a basic provision. But that’s where many schools are – probably even now. They’re really just coming to terms with learning technology for those very basic things.
Also for admin, many schools are using technology for the running of the school effectively. We want it not just to be about admin. We want it to be, as Martin has just wonderfully described, about teaching and learning.
My secondary school is a Google school, so all the students have their devices. They’re familiar with logging on and accessing work and challenges online and exchanging their work. So I had two really contrasting situations.
One that was really at the beginning of its tech journey, and one that was really very proficient. Actually that secondary school also helps the primaries within the multi-academy trust (MAT). So that’s been really interesting for me to see how those different schools are engaging. I think the other thing I’ve noticed is that it’s highlighted the differences for home provisions.
Many families might be sharing a smartphone and if mum and dad are working at home, or one parent is working at home, and the child is trying to access something using the phone, that’s really putting pressure on everybody in the home environment at what is a very difficult time. I know the UK Government has talked about making devices available for those disadvantaged families and we look forward to that really coming in and strengthening, let’s hope over the months to come.
I think these disparities are bound to affect the response children can make to work that’s being set at home. We also know of course that the government have recently announced if schools close, learning must be immediately available online. And again, I think that this will have thrown a lot of schools into panic, quite frankly. But I think it’s important to have both online and to have ‘go-home packs’ – ready work for children to pick up at home.
Searching for the free quality resources and making sure parents are aware of those is a really, really important thing in the short-term response to the pandemic. I think there are a couple of things that we really need to bear in mind. Time is critical. We can’t all be online all the time. We can’t be communicating with those families all the time if they’re at home.
So I think making sure that we use time to the best possible effect is so important, whether it’s face-to-face learning or whether it’s online; we have to really make sure that time is well spent because it’s very precious at the moment. Children are struggling a bit with concentration and stamina because they’ve been out of school, then they’re in school then perhaps some of them are being sent home again because there’s a flare up somewhere.
And I think just having a concentrated period of time where they can look at what they’re supposed to be doing and they’re not with their friends and they’re not necessarily with their teacher. Being aware of shorter, snappier activities for this period of time is probably really important.
I think also students will be less familiar with talking in a ‘schooly’ way – not really using the language of school, but more the language of home. And it’s an opportunity to reflect on what those differences are, but they are quite different. And rightly so. I think some children, when they come back to school, may have forgotten about the language and the specialist terms we use when we’re doing maths or English or reading or whatever.
And a little plug for handwriting here, because as you mentioned at the beginning, Emma, obviously I’m the author of Penpals for Handwriting. Actually, transcription while you’re based at home is probably a little bit difficult. Particularly, as Martin was saying at the beginning, if you’re somebody that doesn’t think about writing for pleasure.
Handwriting can be a fantastic take home activity and it’s a really good physical activity to practise, relatively easy for parents to monitor and for children to deliver on. So I do think actually transcription in the form of handwriting is probably a really useful one.
Finally, what will the longer-term impact be? I think all schools, as Martin was saying, will be smarter and more prepared already. I hope that this there’s a better sense of blending and a better sense of balance.
That’s what I really hope comes out of this. My school, that was less well-prepared, let’s hope that it will be better prepared in the future. And I think that gives us real hope.
Planning for the unexpected and retaining the high-quality teaching and learning, with effective assessment and evidence of impact, has always got to be our focus. It doesn’t matter if there’s a pandemic or not. That is what we’re in school or out of school trying to do. And so I think that’s the challenge, whatever the means of delivery. That’s our challenge – to ensure that as far as possible, we can maintain this very high quality of teaching and learning.
Emma: Thanks to you both. There were some really interesting insights that came through in both of your answers. One of the things I’ve taken away from this, one of the few positives of this situation, is that although it’s a really challenging time for teachers, learners and parents, is getting parents more engaged in their child’s learning.
Unfortunately, that is all we have time for today. So I’m just going to wrap up and say, thank you again to both Gill and Martin for joining us in our virtual studio. I’ve really enjoyed today’s conversation. I hope our listeners will take away some great ideas.
If you’re listening through iTunes, please do leave us a review. We love hearing your feedback.
Or if you would like primary resources, blogs and information, check out our primary hub page. Thank you so much for listening.
