Amy Clark, Assistant Headteacher for Quality of Education, explains how The Bromfords School and Sixth Form College has used Microsoft Teams to support both students and staff – delivering remote learning, pastoral support and peer-led CPD.
Being thrust into the world of remote learning has galvanised us to dig deep as a profession and do what we do best: find ways to make learning enjoyable – even in the toughest of times. At The Bromfords School, a small group of us had already been trialling the use of Microsoft Teams with our sixth form pupils to enhance the provision they were receiving, with the focus on enabling students to participate in a learning-rich environment without having to be in the classroom. Students loved having access to a digital learning space, outside of school, that they could use to have academic debates on key topics, share links to wider reading or resources and generally support each other in a collaborative way.
We also saw Teams as a way for staff to share best practice CPD. We all know what happens when you attend an amazing INSET day or twilight session; you eventually find time to do planning and create some wonderful resources that you share with colleagues, but they get lost amongst the mass of emails, meaning the brilliant work done often gets lost. The plan was to use Microsoft Teams to provide a specific space for professional dialogue about teaching and learning, where teachers could share resources, upskill each other and continue to develop as professionals.
Then along came COVID-19 and thrust our plans forward…
Using Teams for academic, pastoral and peer support
Even though the timeline for rolling out Microsoft Teams across the school was sped up, our staff certainly rose to the challenge. Whilst Teams isn’t the only software we have used to communicate remote learning to students, it is quickly becoming a space that students use for both academic and pastoral purposes.
Tutor group channels were set up on Teams for every year group, where tutors have been able to ‘check in’ each week with pupils. This has ensured that students’ academic needs are met, that students have access to advice should they need it, but most importantly, tutors could keep track of students’ mental wellbeing. Open lines of communication meant that if a child was struggling, we could support them. Students didn’t know how to work remotely, how to organise their time or how to be self-motivated; our use of Teams has provided them with methods for easy communication with an adult they are familiar with on a daily basis.
We hope that by having the lines of communication open to students and having a compulsory check-in each week, the bridge between students working in isolation at home and returning back into the building is eased and that that we are able to lower anxiety for our students.
Our Teams CPD channel has supported staff not only in developing their IT skills to enable the best possible provision for students, but also in accessing a range of ideas they might not have come across before. Our channel has ‘How to…’ videos on topics including the use of narrated PowerPoints, quizzes or forms on Teams, how to use ‘assignments’ within Teams and mark these using a rubric to give feedback on the work completed, to name just a few. Staff have also shared information on how to create drop-down and tick-boxes in Microsoft Word, where to go to get icons for dual coding, methods for increasing student engagement and other concepts that will improve remote learning.
Even staff members who are self-proclaimed ‘technophobes’ have been able to develop their IT skills to ensure the digital learning process for our pupils is as strong as it can be. The channel has enabled everyone to feel like we are all in this process together, all learning together – and nothing is as daunting when you have others by your side.
Five core principles for effective remote learning
As a school, we were keen to ensure we were catering to the needs of all our pupils during this time, with our more able students being a key focus. We wanted to ensure the provision offered to this group remained high quality so they were able to continue to be challenged academically – avoiding the dreaded generic worksheet, a one-size-fits-all approach. We also found that many of our more able were struggling with managing workload, which developed increased levels of anxiety.
A group of leaders and I developed what we felt were the five core principles of remote learning and delivered this to staff through CPD meetings, to ensure our more able students were academically and emotionally supported.
We felt that remote learning should be:
- Concrete: it should have a clear purpose and learning intent that fits with the wider curriculum. There should also be clear timings for tasks so that students do not spend excessive amounts of time on projects.
- Inclusive: consider how you stretch your most able students by providing links to wider reading, podcasts, challenge tasks or breadth of choice such as presentation methods.
- Considerate: taking into consideration students’ learning environments and access to materials they could need. Also planning tactically so that students do not become overwhelmed with the sheer amount of work expected of them.
- Reflective: students should have feedback at key points and self-assessment opportunities through sharing clearly defined success criteria.
- Engaging: staff should incorporate a range of learning activities and software to avoid students becoming demotivated. Also focusing on mechanisms for praise so that students know their hard work is being recognised.
The concepts here are not new. But when staff are also dealing with the pressures and anxiety a COVID-19 teaching world presents, it is a timely reminder that the core principles of teaching must remain so that students can continue to succeed. The five core principles listed above all aim not only to enrich the remote learning a student receives, but also take into consideration students’ mental wellbeing too.
When we return to school, I hope the lessons learnt from using technology during this time do not get lost. Many members of staff have told me how much they have enjoyed using Microsoft Teams to support learning and how they will continue to use it moving forward, particularly to aid collaborative work with peers and to support home learning. Our eyes have been opened to the potential of this technology in supporting and enriching the curriculum for more able students though many of the methods listed above. It has certainly provided both staff and students with a very different learning experience, with the potential to continue to enrich learning beyond the classroom for students and increase enjoyment in developing pedagogy for staff.
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