Something interesting occurred. I knew it was interesting by the puzzled looks on the faces in the room. At first, the interesting thing was that people were actually trying to engage with the problem. Furrowed eyebrows, half-asked questions, probing looks and furtive glances between each other. This all told me that I was way off track – where had my mojo gone?
What was interesting is that we were talking about a taboo subject in schools – pedagogy. The ‘research’ shows that the use of the word has plummeted in the last 20 years. Even more interesting was the fact that we were trying to work out a signature pedagogy for working online with our students. This was hard and my usual ease and clarity around this subject just seemed to drain away like slurry.
Even more interesting was the moment when confusion, spurred on by curiosity and genuine concern, gave way to the hope of clarity. The penny dropped and the room went quiet.
Here is what we spoke about:
3 Perspectives of Lock Down Learning (Remote learning)
1. Student Perspective
2. Families Perspective
3. Staff Perspective
We reviewed our surveys and feedback where we asked three types of questions. (thanks Simon Breakspear)
As a result of our experience of remote learning in term 2:
a) What do we NOT let back in? ie: What is it that we didn’t even notice we weren’t doing?
b) What new stuff can we deepen? ie: What did we start doing that we want to keep on doing?
c) What did we let go of that we must hold on to? ie: What did we stop doing that we clearly need to start up again and keep on with?
All of these things can be identified in random ways or as discrete phenomena unrelated to anything else. The newsletter was clearly one of these items that people were happy to let go of!
The interesting learning for us, was viewing all of this through a pedagogical framework.
We looked at three signature pedagogies
Vocational / neo Classical
Liberal Progressive
Socially Critical
The task – in the end, was to match the learning from the feedback – to a signature pedagogy and incorporate that into our practice principles.
We popped a few though bubbles that day. And hopefully, just maybe, created a few more too!