Resuming Face to Face Teaching

Remote Learning has been a real challenge and, although we are incredibly proud of how our students and teaching colleagues have adapted, we are looking forward to resuming face to face teaching next week. All students gave us their feedback in Tutor time at the end of Half Term 3, which has given us some really useful insight into their experiences, which can help inform our planning for a return to face to face teaching.

Feedback for our live provision and the techniques used within our Google Meet Lessons has been very positive from our students. In fact, responses showed that 78% of our students positively agreed that, as far as possible, we have ensured remote lessons have had a ‘normal feel.’ One student commented: “it’s almost the same as normal school and the teachers are working really hard for our education and I think that they are doing amazingly teaching us.” (Brayden in Year 8).

However, we acknowledge that our students have found many aspects of remote education hard.  When asked, our students most commonly told us that the thing they have found hardest was:

1. Not being in school with their friends (23.8%).
2. Not being with their teacher to ask questions if they get stuck (18.5%).
3. Being at home, on a screen, which made it hard to keep focus (12.8%).
4. Not being able to discuss work with a teacher or other students (12.2%).

Great teaching is responsive teaching and so over the coming weeks our colleagues will respond to our students’ feedback by:

1. Maximising our students’ social interaction opportunities and focusing on the return to school, alongside mental health and wellbeing in our PSHCE curriculum focusses.  
2. Checking the understanding of all of our students.  We will do this in lots of ways, which are not designed to make students feel under pressure to perform, but to allow students to show their understanding so we can find and fix any misconceptions or go over learning which is not yet secure.
3. Boosting the participation rates of all students in a range of ways which mean we get them to engage and think hard.
4. Focusing on oracy to encourage students to discuss, debate and elaborate on their learning and put things into their own words.

These are our key priorities for the next few weeks to support our students’ return to school.  Our colleagues and classrooms are ready, and we look forward to our students being back at the centre of our school next week.

Miss A Cortizo , Assistant Headteacher