Research School Network: Improving Engagement in Remote Learning Some suggestions for meeting current engagement challenges

A pressing concern from teachers is that some pupils are not engaging with remote learning, and this was recently shown when the Sutton Trust published their ​‘Learning in Lockdown’ report. Using data from a range of sources, such as TeacherTapp and YouGov, they paint a picture of the current situation. For example, perceived reasons for not engaging with online learning (secondary):

You may be nodding along. So, how can we get pupils to engage with remote learning?

Identify and address the real problems

There are multiple explanations for each of the broad reasons above for lack of work completion. ​‘Limited or no parental support’ doesn’t mean that parents don’t want to support, for example. According to the report, 61% of parents of secondary age children, and 23% of primary, say that they have not very much or no time to support with remote learning. But there will also be parents who are willing to support, and have availability to do so, but who are not sure how best to do this.

Similarly, we can bemoan ​‘a lack of independent study skills’, but this could mean one of any number of issues. It could be organisation, motivation, ability to use technology, time management. Different issues will require different solutions. Our solutions could be to take time to explicitly teach these things in live lessons, or provide checklists and other metacognitive scaffolds to support.

Keep as much as you can consistent

The more consistent an experience we can offer, the better. This might include common teaching routines, as we wrote about last week. If every lesson, live or otherwise, has consistent approaches, there are fewer distractions from the content of the material, and fewer barriers to engagement.

This also includes the way messages are conveyed. Every teacher, parent and child needs to know the process for communicating work. If emails come from teachers at random times, and also through your remote learning platform of choice, and through texts, then messages can become confusing. We can easily create a situation where instructions are lost. So try and keep the channel consistent. And even the format.

Like much of our advice here, we see no uniform solutions, but context-specific ones. For example, Teams might be the best way of sharing assignments for some, but another system that everyone is familiar with may be the best solution for you at the current time. Even when you acknowledge that another system might be better, consider whether introducing it right now will be the best decision.

Messages to pupils and parents

Even if we get the means for communication right, we need to ensure the right messages come across to help the completion of work. Managing the communication from the school is crucial in tackling some of the barriers. If we want to ensure a higher take-up of engagement in remote learning, we need to get these messages right. Clear, simple, consistent messages will cut through.

Parents

The EEF’s Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning guidance report, has several recommendations about the kind of information we should give to parents:

• Parents can help by encouraging a regular routine, and good study habits
• Parents can help by knowing about homework, showing interest and encouragement
• Be cautious about encouraging direct parental involvement in homework tasks (especially for older children)

So messages which are clear about what is happening and how parents can support will be of most use. The EEF has a number of resources available to support here.

We should also make the return channels of communication clear: who do they contact if there are issues with work completion and how should they do it?

Pupils

For pupils, instructions should be very clear and should include steps for how they can get help, common problems to troubleshoot. (We know – you can write the clearest instructions in the world but there will still be questions.)

Remember your audience and how they experience the instructions. Secondary pupils will have to juggle the demands of multiple subjects. Primary pupils might need more support from parents. But also remember the issues around screens, distractions, technology. If instructions are held in one place and the task somewhere else, we will increase the cognitive demands due to split attention.

There are also very careful considerations to the messages you send about work completion.

We highly recommend Peps Mccrea’s Motivated Teaching, a book that can help with some of our challenges to do with motivation. In the section on ​‘nudging norms’, he writes about the messages that we give about the ​‘norms’ in schools:

So if, for example, we have low completion of work or low attendance in live lessons, we might be tempted to send an email bemoaning the lack of engagement to all pupils. This may in turn have the unintended consequence of reinforcing this kind of behaviour as normal and the completion of work as unusual. Thus not improving engagement.

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