Reflections on Pandemic Learning: Part 2 “He’s dangling, he’s dangling!”
Throughout my teaching career, motivating learning and raising self-confidence have been at the very heart of what I do. I came into teaching with a heart to help young people and spent twenty-two years doing just that.
The year 2020 will be remembered by us all for all the worst reasons and not least for the disaster it was for education. We were contacted by countless parents whose children were dangling in front of an educational drop. I could almost hear Corporal Jones shouting;
“He’s dangling, he’s dangling!”
Each student who came our way was assessed in a free half hour consultation and the biggest and common problem they all shared was a loss of self-confidence. Certainly the ability was there but the lack of confidence seemed to saturate it. This was made worse by some schools sending constant schoolwork electronically without ever actually teaching it. I was contacted by panicking parents sending me examples of homework their children had been sent. Both the parents and children had been confounded by the jump in both the amount and the content of the maths. Some teachers were clearly expecting the children to know what to do, though have also never taught any of the skills needed to solve such mathematical problems. So each new student who came my way was assessed.
I followed the same maths topics that each student was doing at that time in the curriculum in order to reinforce any gaps or difficulties the student was encountering while learning at home. For other students it became clear that learning at home alone was too distracting and thus focus was going to be hard to maintain. For these students our 45 minutes online together became a new routine and a bond was able to be built.
A bond between tutor and student is key here. It didn’t take me long to get to know each one of them and find out just what they were good at and what was more challenging to them. As the lockdowns continued I found my students were pushing themselves harder within their work. As the achievements grew then so did the self-confidence too. I was, in most cases, able to gently take them into higher mathematical levels and show them that, actually, they could do it!
Alongside Maths I also teach English. The best thing about teaching KS2/3 English was that I could use whatever texts I deemed useful to learning. I chose lots of Dahl (nothing new there) and added different books and authors such as ‘The Silver Sword’ by Ian Serraillier. ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ by Barry Hines. ‘The Pit’ by Reginald Maddock. ‘Fattypuffs and Thinifers’ by Andre Maurois. ‘The Hobbit’ by J. Tolkien. Memorably, it was ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens that really pushed their imaginations. I covered the book in the run up to Christmas 2020 and then even better in the run up to Christmas 2021 (Those lessons deserve a separate explanation at a later date).
The combination of a set online lesson, a brief ‘catch up chat’ and then tackling the subject matter together was a great success and before long parents were commenting on how they were seeing huge improvements in both learning and yes, confidence too! Children would be looking forward to our online lessons.
In all, the panic of that first 2020 lockdown, led to an approach to learning that I had always advocated, CHILD-CENTRED. Indeed just before I finally retired from the classroom in the July of that year, I had been teaching a ‘bubble’ of eight children of mixed KS2 ages. I simply asked them;
“What do YOU want to know?”
From that question came all sorts of topics. In my final weeks at school I followed their lead. Whatever the children asked to know about, I would teach it! We found out about the American Apollo space programme and studied the missions of Apollo’s 8, 11 and 13. We found out if the Millennium Falcon, from ‘Star Wars’ could fly in air…..yes it can! These were worrying times for adults and children alike , but when learning is both fun and enlightening, then anything can be achieved, not least the re-building of self-confidence.
