Research School Network: Routines for Remote Learning Mark Miller, Head of Bradford Research School, on the need for remote learning routines

Routines play an important role in schools, and it is no different when it comes to remote learning. While we know that the current climate makes it harder to build any sense of structure, the routines we build into our approach can make a massive difference.

Peps Mccrea, in his excellent Motivated Teaching (a curated list of the research informing that book is here), highlights how important routines are:

Where should we focus our efforts when it comes to routines for remote learning? And how can we embed them?

Use routines to manage the unique challenges of remote learning

Remote learning throws up nothing but challenges! Routines won’t solve them completely, but we can anticipate certain issues and design routines accordingly. For example, many schools have routines for entering the classroom; these routines allow for a pleasant, productive focused start to the lesson. We know that pupils will have to ​‘enter’ live remote lessons, so we can design a routine that echoes the face to face version, and also takes into account other issues e.g. platform; poor wifi; pupils arriving at different times etc. A clearly designed, consistent lesson start makes it easier to deal with these issues, because everyone is clear what is happening next. Recorded lessons will also benefit from consistent routines to start them off too.

And there are of course so many other places where appropriate routines will matter: responding to questions; submitting work; collaborating in breakout groups.

For any routine to become embedded, we would always recommend teaching it explicitly and giving pupils time to practice. And if it’s a routine for teachers, the same applies. It may feel counter-intuitive to ​‘waste’ lesson time on embedding routines right now, but it’s certainly worth taking a little time to embed these new routines – or remote versions of old routines first.

Routines will embed themselves more effectively if there is a consistent approach across the school. When lessons across different teachers and subjects have similar routines, it helps the students to manage their attention on the content, rather than the process. And consistent routines will mean that they are regularly practised and can become automatic.

We like the naming of routines in books like Teach Like a Champion and Making Every Lesson Count. Doug Lemov’s Teaching in the Online Classroom does the same for the new situation. Taking time to consider effective teaching routines, what these look like in the remote world and naming them helps. You can see this kind of thinking in these blogs from Ben Newmark and Roger Higgins on their approaches to formative assessment.

Live lessons will certainly need routines. Recorded lessons can benefit from them too. Even when we are not looking to use digital methods, preparing routines that pupils can follow will be beneficial.

Help parents to build routines

Schools can provide materials that help to promote structures and routines that will support remote learning. For younger pupils, it may be prompts that help them with elements of literacy. For example, reading. The EEF’s TRUST is just one example of this, and you can find further resources for parents on the website here.

For older pupils, it can be the prompts that help pupils to self-regulate. We know we use this next bullet point list from Zimmerman (1989) a lot in our blogs, but prompts which help parents to support pupils to consider the following elements of a self-regulated learner are helpful:

• Setting goals
• Using appropriate strategies to attain these goals
• Monitoring their performance
• Restructuring their physical and social context
• Managing time efficiently
• Self-evaluating
• Attributing causation to results
• Adapting future methods

And helping to develop these routines with prompts will also help pupils to develop self-regulation skills, so that in time they can manage their own routines.

The Working with Parents to Support Children’s Learning guidance report isn’t specifically referring to remote learning, but the message is clear:

Metacognitive scaffolding can also help to prompt routines, as can resources such as checklists and flow diagrams.

I’ll end with the words of Doug Lemov: “…the power of consistent, familiar procedures is doubled when we teach online.”

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