“My diary for March 2020 was full and organized, with three days of ‘subject expert’ work for Ofqual, combined with two days of A-level teaching, pencilled in for each week. By the middle of week two, however, it was clear that forces far greater than school timetables and examination regulators were taking hold.
What happened in the remaining days of March was like nothing I’ve experienced in a teaching career of close on 40 years: school closures, the cancellation of public examinations and a rapid shift from face-to-face to distance learning.
The transition from the physical world of the classroom to a school’s virtual learning system of choice has doubtless been a turbulent one for most teachers – even those who are technologically savvy and blessed with a typing speed of 200 words per minute. In just five days, I went from being a fairly low-level user of digital technologies to someone whose work life moved from one communication platform to another (I clocked up four over one particularly stressful 24 hours). This brief period also saw me try out several of the affordances of the Google education suite, which I’d previously dismissed as either ‘not worth the effort’ or somehow inimical to my subject.
While it’s probably too soon to reflect in any meaningful way on this shift from a ‘close’ to a ‘remote’ pedagogy, I hope that my five-day account below might provide a starting point for further discussion on the topic amongst EA members.
Day 1
This was my second day of working at Ofqual’s Coventry offices and the first day it fully dawned on me that the Covid-19 crisis was taking everyone – educationalists included – into uncharted waters. With a full day’s meeting cut short by an announcement to all Ofqual staff that they would be moving to home-working, my journey back to London came earlier than expected. Checking school emails on the Euston train, it became evident from the numerous anxious messages from students obliged to self-isolate that the next teaching day would involve catering for those who were in school and those who weren’t – a daunting prospect bearing in mind that I had no free periods and a lunchtime departmental meeting (note to self: pack sandwiches).
Day 2
My usual 7.30 am check-in at the Staff Room confirmed that a substantial proportion of the work force were at home due to virus-related circumstances. Several of those present expressed concerns at having had to travel on crowded tube trains, questioning with some urgency when the SLT would announce the school’s closure. As this was the day scheduled for the English department’s oral feedback on Year 13 NEA drafts, I have to confess to hoping that school would stay open long enough for this task to be completed. As it turned out, with only around 60% of Year 13 in attendance, we had to juggle face-to-face feedback in lesson time with feeding back to absentees via email, ensuring parity of attention as we did so – something made all the more pressing by Ofqual’s recent ruling regarding a student’s right to appeal their centre-assessed NEA mark. Midday brought the news we’d all been expecting: the school would shut its gates for an indefinite period from 4pm that afternoon, with an announcement to that effect being made to all students during the lunch break. The period that followed was a difficult one for teachers and students alike. My second Year 13 group of the day came into the classroom in a state of some distress not, as I had feared, because they were worried about the teaching they would lose in the run up to the final exams (still not cancelled), but because they sensed that this would be their last English lesson ever. This rupturing of the usual rituals of leave-taking was something I’d not appreciated, preoccupied as I was with the uncertainties surrounding final assessment (note to self: in times of emergency, don’t forget to put yourself in the students’ shoes).
Day 3
With news of the cancelled public examinations having broken the previous evening, my first day of remote teaching started at the crack of dawn with a hastily reconfigured plan for Year 13 teaching. While the prospect of modified April ‘mini-mocks’ was still on the cards, the sudden freeing of Year 13 from Assessment Objectives, exam timings and quotation learning brought with it a feeling akin to floating in space: at once liberating and disorienting. Although we were adhering to the school timetable to keep a sense of normality, sitting silently in front of a laptop in my own study felt decidedly odd. It was, then, a relief to receive an email enquiry from a student, politely asking whether I’d omitted a sample answer to one of my questions on The Duchess of Malfi (I had). Reassured that there were real students out there in the ether, my spirits lifted. Rather pusillanimously, I avoided any synchronous teaching methods, fearing that much of the ‘lesson’ time would be spent fielding questions about how final grades were to be calculated, opting instead for a combination of screen recordings and structured questions posted at the start of the lesson, followed by suggested answers for self-assessment at its close. For my ‘Women in Literature’ group (one of the topics on OCR’s Comparative and Contextual component), I posted for close reading a sprightly piece from Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls, followed half an hour later by a screen recording of me talking through an annotated copy of the passage. What struck me forcibly in the process of producing this recording was just how much I missed the stimulus of classroom debate and the role it plays in renewing and reshaping my own thinking about a text. At the same time, I suspected that a few of the less assured speakers in the class might have enjoyed allowing their own interpretations to develop, without being swayed by the opinions of those peers generally regarded as ‘really good at English’. Taking stock as the timetabled day drew to a close, I noted how my laptop was beginning to feel like an additional limb and how preparing lessons for distance learning was more time-consuming than I’d ever imagined (note to self: learn to touch-type).
Day 4
After what the French so evocatively term a ‘nuit blanche’, I started my second day of remote teaching with new ideas formed in the small hours and a determination to experiment with a wider range of EdTech ‘opportunities’. One of my more rational middle-of-the night ideas was to make a daily screen recording of a staggeringly brilliant poem, short enough for students to commit to memory, if they wished. First up was Emily Dickinson’s ‘The Soul selects her own Society –‘, whose intriguing indeterminacy seemed guaranteed to keep them listening – and thinking. Individual responses to what was a relatively low-effort initiative were touching in their enthusiasm and it struck me that students were perhaps more likely to express this kind of appreciation from a distance than in the closer confines of the classroom, where it might well be deemed ‘sucking up’. Bolstered by excellent daily ‘remote learning tips’ gathered from across school departments by one of our SLT, today’s pedagogical practices were a good deal more diverse those of the previous day. Google Chat enabled one Year 13 group to respond synchronously to previously released extracts from critical writings on The Merchant’s Tale, and YouTube offered up a twelve-minute 1910 silent film version of Twelfth Night, which students responded to following a few guided questions from me, later submitting their responses for me to look over, collate and distribute to the whole class. A digital version of Woolf’s short story ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ (thank you Project Gutenberg!) shed an intriguing new light on the novel which grew from it. Having determined a set time for individuals to read the story (no easy matter, given the different reading speeds in the group), I set up a collaborative document, assigning to pairs of students a couple of specific questions about the story’s relation to the novel. As the reading time elapsed, so the written discussion started to appear on my screen. While I could have joined in (or interfered?) at this point, I decided instead to sit back and wait until the lesson was over, only then adding my own commentary; this was not in the way of formative assessment, but an engaged response to the story as a co-reader. Trying out this comparative exercise via distance learning made me realise just how creative and brave students can be in their interpretation when given free rein. Focusing for a couple of hours on an activity which, had we been working towards a final examination, I’d have dismissed as too time-consuming and peripheral, made me question how far I’d slipped into an exam-driven habit of mind and whether the pressure to end the course with starry ‘outcomes’ had made me a less adventurous teacher (note to self: incorporate this activity next time I revise Mrs Dalloway for the final exam) .
Day 5
Feeling considerably more confident about this brave new world of digital teaching, I scheduled my first ‘live’ lesson via Google Meet with my Year 12, a group small enough to make an online conference both manageable and productive (an unforeseen upside to the decline in A-level English Literature over the past few years). Heeding SLT advice that we should disable the video, I went ahead with an audio-only lesson, having previously asked the students to prepare responses to individually allocated questions on the text. The session went by much more swiftly than I’d anticipated with speaking time divided more or less evenly between individuals (me included). Leaving participants with the task of preparing their own questions on a given section of the set novel, to be distributed to the whole class, I was left with plenty of teaching and learning issues to store away for future reflection. First amongst these was my own listening skills: I’ve long been aware that these are not as good as they should be. I know that I’m too easily distracted by anticipating what needs to be ‘taught’ next, as well as by the low-level irritations that occur in any classroom – the clicking pen, the tilting chair, the slow perusal of split-ends. The invisibility of students focuses the mind intently on what they’re saying, with hesitations, repetitions and vocabulary choice taking on a much more crucial role in evaluating their understanding. Being able to jot down interesting points as students articulate them – a difficult thing to do during the to and fro of class discussion – helps the listening teacher formulate precise feedback and thoughtfully targeted reinforcement. The obverse of this, of course, is that, without seeing our students, we’re unable to pick up on those all-important verbal clues which, as experienced teachers, we use diagnostically without even realising it. My student might have sounded thoroughly engaged and on-board with the lesson while she commanded the microphone, but the others might well have been talking to the cat or swiping left or right on Tinder (note to self: consider remote means of gauging how bored they’re getting).
And a couple of weeks on …
If seven days is a long time in politics, then five days felt like a long time in the early days of distance learning, prompting many members of the teaching community to use that already over-worked phrase ‘a steep learning curve’. At the time of writing, I’ve no idea how long my remote teaching experience will last, nor what its long-term impact will be on my teaching practice and my students’ learning. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that, if nothing else, the recent transition from the real to the virtual classroom has concentrated the mind on what matters in English teaching: first and foremost, that we should place our trust in the resilience of our students and in their ability to respond to texts independently, bringing to them fresh, often acute, insights. Such qualities are all too easily subdued at a time when accountability measures threaten to drive pedagogy, rendering it assessment-driven and risk-averse.
Remote teaching has prompted me to reconsider the place of technology in the English classroom. In addition, it’s reminded me to think carefully when timing student activities, to guard against closed questions about the text, to listen more carefully to what students say – and to talk a lot less (note to self: read the previous sentence on a daily basis when school reopens).”
Jenny Stevens has taught English at both undergraduate and secondary level. She currently combines part-time teaching with academic writing and editing. Her publications include Faith, Fiction and the Historical Jesus (2010), a study of the mid-to-late Victorian novel. She is co-author of Essential Shakespeare (2013) and Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama (2016) and is currently working on Shakespeare adaptation for a forthcoming Arden publication. She is also a Founding Fellow of the EA (since 2000).
