Lockdown Learning

The Headteacher of Highgate discusses some of the lessons learned during virtual school about students’ independent learning capacity and what makes a real community

It has become something of a standard joke between me and my sonorously-voiced (Welsh) Head of Junior School that I could probably hear his voice without the aid of Zoom or MS Teams or Skype, given that he lives two doors down the road to me. In fact, I have found it comforting that he isn’t ever actually very far away even if we haven’t been allowed to meet face-to-face during ‘lockdown’! When a colleague suggested that we should re-name our remote learning programme ‘Highgate@Home’, I jumped at the idea: enforced physical separation shouldn’t mean that we feel remote when, in fact, technology is making it so easy to stay in touch.

What does Highgate@Home look like? Well, we use a learning platform which allows us to upload documents and user-friendly instructions, together with narrated PowerPoint presentations, quizzes and short videos, as the basis of the self-directed learning that makes up a proportion of each pupil’s daily diet. In a live lesson, pupils can switch from the learning platform to a virtual classroom environment. In the virtual classroom the teacher can speak to the entire class (muting the pupils’ microphones so that not everyone speaks at once) or to individuals. The teacher can take questions or invite them through a chat channel. Lessons are recorded, which means that late-comers or absentees can follow later on.

While Highgate@Home has been a temporary substitute for bricksand-mortar school, it has also been sharpening pupils’ understanding of what they can always do at home to optimise the time they spend with teacher. Homework becomes not just work you do at home but work best done at home, and work done in class is collaborative. Class work enables risk-taking – and teacher is there to guide, direct, prompt, challenge and, when necessary, rescue! Adaptive quizzes inject pace and palliative diversion and open children’s minds to the untapped potential of memory and brain power. In short, the lockdown-led need to harness technology is opening adults’ eyes to what may accelerate children’s independence.

Some may now ask whether coming to school will ever seem as important if so much can be achieved at home. What we quickly realised, however, was what would be missing if only lessons were on the menu. We have added a ‘daily dose’ of extra-curricular activities and tutor time, including chapel services, assemblies, suggested ‘shelf-help’ recreational reading, fitness and relaxation routines. Tutors clock in once a week with each of their pupils to check how things are going – the human touch still matters.

What is my take-away from the attractions and temptations of technology and homebased learning? Brilliant in an emergency; transformative in developing a child’s independence; exciting in side-stepping timefilling drudgery. But it is a complement to, not a substitute for, life in a community.