“Stay positive and stay connected”
Working from home needn’t obstruct productive collaborations with teaching colleagues, says Jayn Sadler – in fact, it might actually help…
- by Jayn Sadler
At the end of last week, many of us will have downed tools and enjoyed a well-earned rest from the classroom – whether that be within school or a temporary online version – and were rewarded with beautiful weather.
Staring up at that azure sky, I struggled to comprehend how the globe beneath could remain in such chaos; how something so small, a thousand-million times smaller than the head of a pin, could have such devastatingly destructive power.
I’ve found myself turning to the AQA ‘Power and Conflict’ poetry cluster to help articulate how this pandemic has made me feel: ‘In every cry of every Man / In every Infant’s cry of fear / In every voice: in every ban / The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.’
Upon my eventual return to the classroom, I will, without question, use the experience of this tragedy to develop student empathy, and allow them to explore nature as a destructive force using their own first-hand experiences of it. I would also imagine (and hope) that Armitage, Duffy et al will have been busy with their quills this Easter.
Another first
Another first for me this week has been a small project that I’ve undertaken with other teachers in the local area. These are teachers I have enormous respect for, colleagues who have been a real ‘go to’ when it comes to sharing ideas and seeking advice. There are four of us in total – Angela, Matthew, Cheryl and myself – all based at different schools, and the idea we’ve embarked on is to develop a resource that can increase cognitive abilities in all students.
We began by mapping out our thoughts and suggestions via Google Hangouts, gradually refining our ideas before finally settling on a specific purpose and form for the tool we want to create. The end result of this has been to set ourselves the mission of designing a resource that promotes and enhances student thinking – what questions should students ask themselves when exploring a text?
The questions we came up with were levelled and delineated across four categories, our aim being to show students what their thinking should look like, ahead of setting out how their responses ought to be written. The four of us have been able to work simultaneously on an early draft document (thanks, Google!), from which we hope to produce a self-contained resource that teachers can use to support and to challenge all students when reading an unseen text or a novel.
Informal efficiency
Of course, I can’t yet vouch for the resource’s success, since we’ve had no classes on we can trial it on – trialling being, to me, absolutely essential before attempting to implement any new approach across a wider cohort or faculty-wide. Nevertheless, the positive, informal and efficient way in which we’ve been able to interact with one another in order to produce a quality resource has been a joyful experience during this outbreak.
The project has been a genuinely cross-subject, cross-school exercise in teacher planning that we’ve all been able to participate in without leaving our homes. We’re all very excited at prospect of starting to it and seeing what the results are – whether that be in May or September.
I’ve now been at home for five weeks, having already been in self-isolation before the wider lockdown measures took effect. I’ve found it heartening how the 21st century technology we have at our disposal has enabled us to maintain the progress our profession demands – even optimising it, in some cases – while also allowing us to continue socialising and interacting with each other. It’s enough to make me start thinking whether staying in may in fact be the new, improved, going out…
This increased amount of free time that many of us now have at our disposal is something we’ll likely never experience again in our lifetimes (at least that’s what I hope). We should perhaps remember that throughout history, triumph has always followed adversity – so to all of you, stay positive, stay connected and make your own personal triumph a glorious one.
Jayn Sadler is an English teacher from north Essex
