Reconnecting Classrooms

We’ll be welcoming all our pupils back into school after this latest lockdown soon. Many, of course, will never have been away but for a majority of our pupils this is their second return after long periods spent learning at home.

We all want to move on with our planned curriculum – we are worried about gaps that will have opened up between those who have excellent resources and/or support at home and those who do not, we know some areas of maths have proved easier to teach online than others, extended writing may have taken a hit, we’ve been looking forward to doing that project on the Romans/volcanoes/Antoni Gaudi for months and now we get to actually DO it!

In the rush to get back to all that glorious teaching we mustn’t forget that, through no fault of our own, lockdown forced us to break the covenant between teacher and pupil – that we would be there for our learners. In the work I’ve been doing to create a robust Learners’ Charter at Dartmoor MAT I’ve heard again and again how important the relationship between learner and pupil is. Children and Young people want us to pledge that learning will be situated in a relationship with a trusted adult. Yes – you can learn a language through Duolingo but, for the children I’ve been working with in the pupil voice work for the charter, it’s relationships that are key. For our pupils, learning without relationships is like mothers pride sliced white – it looks like bread and smells like bread but none of the goodness is there.

We mustn’t forget that part of our pupils motivation for participating in learning is their sense of being part of a community of learners Doug Lemov spoke about this in this fascinating chat with Tom Sherrington and Emma Turner – even the most pragmatic or instrumental of teachers and leaders will want to foster the rebuilding of that community.

So children are coming back into familiar classrooms but for some, certainly not all of them, a promise has been broken. Relationships that were just coming into flower by Christmas have been broken off and there is a job of reconnection to be done. Believe me when I say I’m not proposing a week of circle time talking about our feelings – that’s the last thing a child who is struggling to rebuild trust needs – nor am I suggesting that we hold back on catching up on lost learning or filling gaps, that work is urgent and it is necessary if children and young people are to feel that the return to school is purposeful. Instead I believe that we must press on with high quality teaching and our planned curriculum but that we must do it in such a way that mindfully seeks to reconnect.

For me this might look like a focus on oracy – so many children will have had very limited opportunities for good quality speaking and listening through lockdown that work put into that will certainly not be wasted and the conscious listening demanded by good quality oracy is a direct route into finding alignment and building trust. For me, if I wasn’t already doing it, I would be shaping my learning around provocative questions and using tools such as Philosophy for Children to get pupils speaking and listening at length. I know that some pupils who found it easy to participate in activities such as this in December might find it harder now – as they ease in the vast majority will start to reconnect and find the speaking and the listening easier. We are as much about reconnecting a community as we are about working with the needs of any particular child – oracy is how humans create and maintain communities.

The most vulnerable and disconnected children will need us to make dedicated time to reconnect. As my wise friend Chris Chivers writes “How much “teacher time” and I mean time with a teacher, do vulnerable learners get in a lesson anyway? I’ll just park that question for now, but it may become an issue in the future. Catch up will require, for some, very highly focused teaching, not just time with another adult.”

Enough from me. Here’s a bank of blogs, articles and thoughts loosely on the subject of a return to the classroom and reconnection. I hope you find something useful. Do let me know if you are aware of something I’ve missed.

Approaches

There has been lots of talk around 'lost learning' and extra lessons to enable to students to 'catch up' with their learning. Most of the talk around catch up is not though about which academic topics students have and have not learned, but about how students are going to work and play with each other again. When we are teaching students on their return to school we need to have this in mind. We need to welcome the students back in to the classroom and have some consideration for their emotional health and wellbeing. What we want to avoid is students returning to a diagnostic test to forensically detect exactly what they know and do not know. This will come in time and teachers have been diagnosing student gaps skillfully for years.

Resources

This excellent video from TeachFirst features Becky Francis of EEF, Alison Peacock of the Chartered College of teaching, author and researcher Pedro De Bruyckere and assistant headteacher Nathan D’Laryea talking about the subject of reconnection particularly in realtion to social inequity.

Sarah Dove is offering this free event and downloadable resources to go with it on the subject of research into what pupils are saying they need and how we can facilitate it. In addition, Sarah has shown enormous generosity and created these resources which teachers are free to use in class. It might be even more effective if they were used in an organised way across a school or cohort.

Register to join the Reconnection Hub
Downloadable resources for use in class.
Planning for return beyond 'Catch Up' and mental Health Resources.

Chris Chivers blog from last year has some thoughts on reconnection and cactch up and what we might do.

This short news story from the BBC looks at findings from the British Psychological Association on the damage that disconnection from teachers and school relationships can cause to pipils and young people.

These resources from the British Psychological Association are full of useful thoughts and information to inform your thinking around this issue.

Touchbase, a group working particularly on trauma informed practice have prepared some resources and can offer support. This section from their website looks at at a multi-faceted approach to recreating security Post-Covid

Training and resources for attachment and reconnection with a focus on parenting, ACES, adoption, fostering, asylum seeking and refugees from Safe Hands Thinking Minds

Oxford University Press have collected resources from a wide range of authors including Dr Hazel Harrison, Mike Armiger and Adrian Bethune. Good stuff on wellbeing, resilience and managing return to the classroom. Well worth a rootle.

Adrian and Hazel made this series of mini vlogs together thinking specifically about children coming back to school at the end of the first lockdown - it's very relevant again for our circumstances now. Looking at what we mean by trauma, how it might present in the classroom, what we, as teachers, can usefully do to help children whose lockdown experience has been genuinely damaging, the PERMA model of wellbeing (and why having a model mihgt be a good thing) and how teachers can take care of themselves. Very highly recommended.

This short piece from East Learning looks at how pupils have reported their experience and draws five simple but wiose conclusions about the experience our young people have been having - and maybe a little of what we can do to help.

Sarah Hjelm's website is one of the wonders of the internet, she collates and curates an unrivalled collection of blogs and articles relating to matters educational - this page is her collection on the topic of building and maintaining positive relationships in the classroom.

There is a Children's Pyschological First Aid course you can attend for free. This has been written with students returning from lockdown. You can find out more information here.

The Association of Educational Psychologists (AEG) have produced some resources around supporting students after a critical incident and in particular how to support students when when they return to school. There is information here about how to support students with SEND and also look after the well being of parents and members of staff.

Place 2 Be are a children's mental health charity who organise events such as Children's Mental Health Week. They have produced some ideas for both primary and secondary resources that teachers can use both for assemblies and follow up tutor times to address students' mental health need.

There are some specific resources produced for students with SEND on how to reintegrate them back in to the classroom by SEND Success. Their resources are here.

The National Centre for Excellence in Teaching Mathematics (NCETM) are a society that we are currently working with as a Multi-Academy Trust. They produce lots of resources and proffessional development opportunities. They have a section on their website looking at how you could look for gaps and support teaching mathematics to students returning to school here. These resources are for both primary and secondary teachers.

Babcock LDP have produced resources to support young people with their mental health on their return to school. You can find the resources here.

Post 16

Eat That Frog are a company who provide courses for young people, 16-18, who are not in education. They are providing a LEAP course for any 16-18 year old looking at Lifestyle, Employability and Progression. It's an online course and may be appropiate if you have any students who have decided to leave sixth form and not come back.

LEAP into the future!

Lifeskills, Employability & Progression

FREE programme designed to support people aged 16-18 (or aged 18 on 31st August 2020)

Exploring skills, interests, training, apprenticeships and employment opportunities with the aim of moving forward.

• 18 hours per week for 8 weeks.

• Includes employability skills, independent study, teamwork activities, health & wellbeing sessions.

• Personalised support and advice to overcome individual barriers.

• Investigating entrepreneurship and talking to local employers

• Shaping and planning future training and employment options for young people.

• Discovering future opportunities with the Prince’s Trust.

• All sessions and mentoring delivered flexibly and safely via online sessions and phone/email.

Get in touch to refer or find out more:

hannah.rendle@eatthatfrog.ac.uk

or call 01803-551551

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