Research School Network: The importance of the spoken word: How lessons learned in lockdown will shape my future teaching Debbie Eades reflects on what she has learnt since lockdown began.

Back in March, when Covid19 led to school closures, decisions were quickly made and disseminated about how we would continue teaching and supporting the students in our school – we would teach remotely via Microsoft Teams. As a mature teacher and a relative technology dinosaur, the prospect filled me with panic and far more questions than answers!

However, my fear of technology quickly faded and soon I was delivering live lessons using a graphics tablet, 2 screens and a flexicam! So technology – tick ü

Gradually, remote teaching has become the new normal (although it really is getting old now. I’ve gained half a stone and permanent neck ache from sitting in front of my laptop all day!). Workable solutions have been found to problems as they have arisen – how to check student engagement, how to encourage teacher/​student and student/​student interaction, how to carry out achievable yet effective assessment and feedback – and while not perfect, I feel on the whole that I have been able to make the absolute best of an imperfect situation.

Now that the end to this strange new world is hopefully in sight, I have been thinking about how what I have learned from my remote teaching experience will change my future practice.

This has been brought into the spotlight especially in the last couple of weeks. I have been trying to teach my year 10s how to draw a tangent to the curve on a Distance-Time graph and calculate its gradient, something the students always find tricky. However, I was so NOT prepared for the extra hurdles put in place by remote teaching, even after 3 months of experience! I have always prided myself on my clear explanations in the classroom, presenting new material in small steps, providing models and so on (following Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction). However, I had never really appreciated how many facets there are to communication – verbal, written, demonstrating on the board but also body language and facial expression. Success in drawing tangents to the curve involves acquisition of new knowledge, application of that knowledge, and both graphing and maths skills. Trying to convey such a complex and multi-layered idea to the students stretched my ability to communicate over the internet to its limit! We had hit the wall…

Now, this particular issue of DT graphs will be resolved once we’re back in the classroom but it has forcefully brought home to me the importance of communication. Remote teaching has been the equivalent of an exercise I often use in the classroom to illustrate this – sitting students back to back, one describing something and the other drawing what they hear but with no eye contact or verbal cues. When the spoken word is all have you have to use, the careful choice of your language is everything.

So while it will be a relief and a pleasure to get back in front of the class and to be able to use ALL the tools of good communication – body language, facial expression and best of all, being able to see and read my audience – I will be giving much more thought to what I actually say. Is my choice of language clear? Appropriate? Concise? Presented in small enough chunks? Am I asking the right questions to check learning? Am I equipping the students with the right language to ask me questions? Can my students achieve success?
Could my students successfully ​“draw the picture I’m describing” if we were sitting back to back?