The impact of COVID-19 on teaching and learning
In 2019 I was the recipient of the Staff Scholarship. My project was around Agile methodologies and schools. In 2019 I wrote, “an organisation can’t simply decide to ‘do’ Agile, rather, shifting to an Agile way of working typically requires significant cultural change in changing the way employees and employers think about work”. Well...
Despite the popularity of Agile (it’s graced as many business magazine covers as a 90s supermodel) and the different Agile frameworks, at its core I have come to understand Agile as frequent iteration and continuous learning and improvement. When COVID-19 suddenly turned our shared understanding of a current or present workflow on its head we were all forced to reckon with the fact that what’s true today may not necessarily be true tomorrow. Things were changing moment to moment. To quote from one of my favourites, “things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”.
In the face of shifting communication, a divided political landscape, uncertainty over the infectiousness of the virus and the need to prepare for a multitude of possible outcomes all while revising the schedules of our personal lives, we fundamentally changed the way we thought about work. We went Agile and I ate my words.
As Loreto Normanhurst, along with many other schools, made the gradual return to campus, staff and students remarked on what they’ll ‘keep’ from COVID-19. Students I have spoken with shared that they’d enjoyed additional time with their siblings as they were co-opted into the supervision space while parents juggled full households, one student told me that her mother had taught her the ‘family recipes’ and there was a general appreciation of the slower pace of life. Around the (physically distanced) watercooler, staff too conducted mini retrospectives on what they’d like to keep from COVID-19 and whether we’re all the better for it. I humbly narrow my focus here to whether teaching and learning might be better in a post COVID-19 world. We are nowhere near accounting for the toll this crisis will wreak.
Back to the watercooler conversation. For us in education, and I suspect this is true for many businesses across the country, the decision to close workplaces meant a sudden grappling with technology and its capacity to help us do our jobs remotely. But if we focus solely on technology, we will, to quote another of my favourites, have “had the experience but missed the meaning”. In almost all aspects of remote teaching and learning we used technology as a communication tool. Zoom video conferencing, the Canvas Learning Management System and collaborative documents are all means of communicating with our students and with each other. Loreto Normanhurst was already well-equipped with some of the necessary tools though we did have to learn very quickly to use Zoom in order to pivot into online learning effectively. Overall, the technological aspect was certainly a steep learning curve for many staff who were not yet plumbing the depths of the systems already available and as a result we have seen a marked improvement in staff and student utilisation of technology as a means of communication.
What I would most like to keep post COVID-19 however is the focus on continuous improvement. It's not just learning how to use technology, it’s changing our processes and communications. The highly physical processes that underlie the school day were gone and we couldn’t replicate the physical classroom in Zoom. In an educational setting there are contextual breaks as students move from learning space to space around the campus, at home they are suddenly plugged into their computer all day. A simple fix was to cut the lesson time down in order to allow students scope to leave their laptops. At school, when a teacher walks into the classroom she is communicating that the lesson is about to start, her expectations are then further communicated through body language and the classroom setup. The students and teacher are always present. Over Zoom (and particularly after using Zoom to set up a lesson and then signing out) we needed to trust that our students were indeed carrying on with the lesson. We needed to be more thoughtful and economic in our communication as we were mindful of allowing students time to simply carry on with their learning. We became cognisant of Zoom fatigue and so moved to peel away the layers of instruction to reveal the lesson or teaching intention at its most stripped back.
Zoom as a tool also continuously improved by adapting in order to communicate better. They added gestures like hands up, and thought about how one might walk into a meeting in real life by adding microphone mute as a default setting.
What we saw was a whole education sector engaged in change management, from classroom teachers to support staff to school leaders. Suddenly it was everyone’s job to be ready and able to respond and the only way that could happen is through teamwork, open communication and trust. These are the building blocks of Agile and why it abruptly felt like I was eating my words.
Reflecting on the lessons learnt I have turned my mind to what and indeed how we might ensure some of the very best of teaching and learning in COVID-19 might become permanent changes. There were five key areas that I focused on for my staff scholarship in 2019 when borrowing from Agile methodologies with Year 10 in Integrated Learning. No one could have imagined that 2020 would deliver a scenario where staff and students were asked to put into play some of the core concepts of Agile. Suddenly the abstract learning in the classroom had become a day to day reality.
1- Diverse teams
A core component of our 2019 Year 10 teaching programme was that students’ worked in diverse teams or learning squads to complete the goals defined in a Sprint. All students undertook DISC profiling and this information was fed into the formation of their learning squads. DISC is a behavior assessment tool based on the DISC theory of psychologist William Moulton Marston, which centres on four different personality traits which are Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. Helping students understand their own strengths and areas for development is a good way to lay the foundation for the self-reflection necessary for an attitude of continuous improvement. For our students, where perfectionism can be paralysing, adopting a ‘test and learn’ mentality shifts the focus towards feedback and incremental improvement. In a longer term view, it teaches a bias towards action and experimentation. In sum, just the sort of mindset necessary to be adaptable, curious, creative and well versed in managing one's own time and workflow.
When we lost the physicality of the campus we simultaneously gained additional insight into the daily rhythms of our students' lives. Many boarders were expected to help out on the family property, some students shared study spaces with multiple siblings and indeed limited internet access with a whole family attempting to work from home. Acknowledging and appreciating the diversity of the community became so important when designing the learning. In many instances it meant we were engaged in asynchronous learning as well as synchronous lesson times. Trust in one another is paramount. In fact many students who tend to fly under the radar in a classroom suddenly worked their way through additional modules or learning tasks as they were able to get on with their work in a time and space that suited them.
Personally, I saw great trust, empathy and compassion in the Zoom communications as we virtually met with colleagues nursing crying children or whose partners suddenly appeared in the background. My peers were humanised in new ways as snippets from their personal lives came into play. There was also no shortage of students wanting to show teachers their pets or backyards!
2- Feedback loops
In our 2019 programme students were given a delivery deadline and then worked together on short increments with feedback loops, by teaching students to apply sense checks early and often it is easier to adapt and respond to change. Students were also encouraged to run their own ‘stand-up’ at the beginning of each lesson in order to share what they’d done since the last lesson and what they planned to work on in the lesson ahead. A clear focus on the learning goals drove accountability for the team as a whole as well as the individual members.
In ‘doing’ remote learning, teachers have been acutely focused on paring back the curriculum to key learning goals only and many watercooler retrospectives have sung the praises of writing or making the learning intention of each lesson explicitly clear. Something you can reasonably only do when your focus is paired back and you're not trying to nail multiple outcomes in one activity.
As educators we also set shorter tasks, in many respects they were short learning ‘sprints’. Students engaged with smaller online quizzes and mini tasks where they could master a skill or concept before moving on. As a school we shifted our focus from summative assessment tasks to formative tasks where students received feedback along the way. They may well have been working towards a larger project over the course of the term but sense checks allowed them to check their understanding and pivot early and often.
The school has also been engaged in a number of feedback loops. Staff, students and parents were invited to participate in weekly surveys providing feedback on online learning. We used these surveys to respond quickly, making necessary changes and adopting a ‘test and learn’ mentality where we eschewed what’s been done before or what may have worked in the past in favour of meeting the needs of our community now. Since returning to campus these short feedback loops have continued. Most recently in the space of conducting Academic Plenaries via Zoom where one evening’s session led to incremental changes for the next.
3- Transparency
In the Year 10 unit, we hammered home the value of transparency to students through a series of challenges such as ‘Agile Art’ and ‘Fruit Salad problem sizing’. In both these games the key takeaway is that uniting behind a shared and transparent goal leads to better results. The largest gain we saw was around communication, a sharing of knowledge and cross pollination of ideas. Shared language and understanding leads to gains in velocity, the more trust and open communication within a team the better their velocity or output.
Students were also taught Kanban as a project management methodology (using Trello). Again, the core purpose was around transparency-- everyone in the team could see what the whole team is working on as well as the work ‘to do’.
With some students and staff still working remotely the importance of providing inclusive access is vital. Removing the barriers that prevented interaction with or access to online learning was a huge task for our ICT Department. There are so many takeaways here for how schools and businesses choose to move forward. Rather than returning to the way things have been done, how might we democratise education further to ensure access to everyone? Online learning may not provide the same type of value as being on campus but there may be scope for how the education system grows over the next decade. We’ve certainly seen democratisation from large universities and cultural institutions who have opened back catalogues and provided free access to online learning. How might secondary schools grow, either within their own cities or to encompass outreach opportunities with remote communities?
The school significantly changed the way we communicated with our community. We over communicated but under complicated. In such uncertain times we also needed to be completely transparent in order to keep all stakeholders on board even when it meant being forthright with the fact that we didn’t have all the answers or that what we communicated today may change.
4- Creativity
The Year 10 programme reframed creativity as a muscle rather than a beret wearing artist. Activities were built to underline the fact that creativity can be taught and that most problem solving is looking at something working in one context and applying that same idea in new and novel ways elsewhere.
As a school, we also used COVID-19 to consult distance learning professionals as well as how online learning has been delivered elsewhere. It’s an opportunity to look with fresh eyes, not just at the school up the road but at ‘not for profits’, big business and everything in between.
On the subject of creativity, I was bemused and delighted at the lengths our maths department went to incorporate numeracy around the house as students learnt from home. Our Head of Mathematics, Sally Brimfield, wrote in the school newsletter to not be surprised when your daughters started measuring and calculating the surface area of various packets in the pantry or measuring the diameter of the wheel of your car to calculate the distance travelled in 100 revolutions of the wheel. They even had Year 8 students looking for the different mathematics contained in bags of lolly snakes and boxes of smarties. Necessity really can be the mother of invention.
5- Retrospectives
In our Agile unit, reflection was rebranded as a retrospective and cemented as a vital element of the Sprint. Reflective practice is well embedded at Loreto Normanhurst, what we aimed to do with Year 10 was formalise some of the ways it can be practiced.
Our next teaching staff meeting is all about sharing those watercooler conversations and sharing what we hope to keep in the teaching and learning space in a post COVID-19 world. What better way to adopt Agile methodologies than to come together as a staff, look backwards and ask ourselves ‘what’s worth keeping’?
The second large scale project connected to the staff scholarship was the second iteration of Sprint Week where the students followed a Google Ventures Design Sprint methodology over 5 straight days in order to solve real business problems presented to them by our industry partners. Having utilised this problem solving method in Year 10 Integrated Learning in 2019, the current Year 11s could not be better prepared for the leadership challenge presented to them by having to discard the way things have been done in the past and reinvent Loreto Day afresh in the time of coronavirus. I have had the privilege of working with these girls again by taking them through a mini-sprint in order to help them grapple with what a school wide fete day looks like during COVID-19. How might we manage cash in a contactless world where not all students have debit cards? How might we have a communal lunch while observing restrictions around food distribution?
The Year 11s stripped back Loreto Day to its central aims, conducted research interviews to gather insights, sketched possible solutions and then undertook a gallery walk to vote forward the best ideas. They then quickly formed teams in order to bring their ideas to life. The students have been asked to pivot like so many businesses have had to do in order to remain viable throughout the coronavirus crisis. I don’t think anyone could have imagined 2020 would bring a more pertinent example of the need to rapidly change in order to survive. The Year 11s have had to be creative in how they might still deliver on the key aims of building community, advocating for the chosen cause and raising funds. They have also accepted that the day will look different and that more than likely things will go wrong but they will adapt and they will cope and they will be better for it.
While the education sector may not have chosen significant cultural change, cultural change was nevertheless hoisted upon us by a global pandemic. In effect, the world decided that we’d go Agile and I believe that teaching and learning is better for it. You can only have genuine organisational change if it first starts with the individual and then occurs at scale, in this crisis we have all had to alter the way we think about work. For most teachers that meant embracing a ‘good enough is good enough until we know more’ attitude. While a perceived loss of control of the classroom strikes horror in the heart of many classroom teachers, the flip side was the focus on continuous improvement as we learnt more and adapted our practices. It was uncomfortable but the discomfort is the part worth holding onto. Like the businesses we each saw in our local communities, we need to remain ready to change. It might not always be on such a grand scale but being ready to adapt a lesson schedule that’s not working or shifting into a new mode in order to meet the needs of a student is a grand scale to our students. Loreto prides itself on authentic human interactions and what’s more Agile than valuing humans over processes?