by Charlotte Weatherley, Assistant Head, Knighton House School, Durweston, Dorset
The lockdown has put school, the physical space inhabited day to day by teachers and pupils, into pause mode. Reassuring parents with the cry of ‘distance learning’ as our new normal, teachers have been hard at work mastering online platforms and signing up to megabytes of free online resources in order to make the transition from school to no school seem like no biggie. But while teachers have responded with extraordinary speed to seismic changes in their working life – demonstrating again why no one is in teaching for the cash, only ever for the children – in such testing times, we must accept that it is helping our children to a knowledge of themselves and the way they learn which will get them safely and positively through this crisis. And, if we are lucky, emerging with such wonderful self-knowledge that they might keep the rest of humanity from the oblivion towards which it has been so casually heading.
In our little community, pupils are already familiar with the vocabulary of how they learn; so, optimism, independence, self-evaluation are terms with which they are very comfortable. All our learning is predicated on concepts (the learning dispositions) providing the strong foundations on which to tackle your times tables or your knowledge of how the semi-colon engages the reader. The Covid-19 outbreak has not changed that. What the crisis has done is reinforce their importance at such a time and reinforce what we do not want the period of lockdown to be: the period of lockdown will not be spent solely in front of a screen; the period of lockdown will not be spent competing with Mum and Dad for a device; the period of lockdown will not be spent trying to connect and finding you cannot and the period of lockdown will not be a permanent blight on all their future attitudes to learning.
So, what will our learning be? It will be a series of tasks clearly linked to how they learn and set against real life assessment; our learning will involve children self-evaluating and parents evaluating too; and our learning will be a little bit competitive – ‘cos that’s fun and motivating. All the tasks are practical and reassuring at time when no school means gone the routine of daily contact with teachers and friends and the stability of lessons and playtime; however much it may sometimes frustrate and enrage, these challenges remind pupils of all that they love about where they learn.
Our pupils’ days will be divided into challenges, some skills based, but many which are not. We also have a You Tube channel (fondly called KH TV) which we will be populating with How-To clips over the holidays, in time for family viewing in the summer term. We are encouraging pupils to keep a record of all their challenges (more opportunities for points and prizes there) and we are setting up a weekly session on Teams for tutors to chat about progress and what’s next. Pupils will receive the information about challenges, assessment and self-evaluation in booklet form, carefully organised into what would be the normal weeks of our summer term calendar. The assessment criteria has four levels, from Stage 1 level up to Jackpot (level 4) and we hope to engage children and parents in evaluating the progress of each challenge they attempt; in folders which each child has available to keep a record of their work, teachers will be able to view all their data online.
The assessment criteria for Co-operation at Level 1 recognises that a pupil will ask for help but will not recognise the synergy innate in a co-operative relationship; the Jackpot (Level 4) reads ‘develops and works with a household member on a joint challenge, allocating tasks and taking the challenge forward.’ Challenges encourage children to go back to their learning and even to have another go at a challenge; the challenges are expressed in language with which they are familiar and show our incredible knowledge of the concerns, passions and talents of our pupils. We cannot know what education will look like, after the virus has run its course, but we can know that our cohort of children will have a set of learning dispositions (or dispositions in the making) which will adapt them to whatever is all our new normal.