Teaching remotely: Focus on the essentials as less is more
Dr Felicity Coughlan, academic director at ADvTECH, explains that now is the time to focus on essential skills and aim for consolidation, rather than overloading learners by cramming in as much content as possible.
THERE are many parents helping their children come to grips with online schooling during lockdown.
However, they can perhaps be too diligent and create chaos instead of calm.
Academic director at ADvTECH, SA’s private education provider, Dr Felicity Coughlan, reminds parents that online schooling at home is a far cry from the classroom.
“The temptation to do it all as if it is possible to maintain the pace and volume of contact education remotely, must be resisted,” she warned.
As educators adapt to teaching remotely and online, there may be an attempt to mimic what a school day would normally look like, by filling learners’ days according to pre-lockdown timetables, pace and content of learning.
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“However, this approach is counter-productive and can lead to further frustration, anxiety and tension under what is already challenging circumstances for all concerned,” she said.
Dr Coughlan said there is an important difference between focusing on essential skills during this time, as opposed to trying to keep the curriculum going in full.
“Much of the stress people are experiencing arises from this well-intentioned attempt to ‘keep up’. It is far more conducive to learning and well-being to make deliberate choices and to pare back and focus on those skills around which we can then build content knowledge again later,” she said.
In quite unexpected ways the lockdown and the unique and unprecedented circumstances in which we now find ourselves, provide a perfect opportunity to develop and entrench those global competencies which otherwise might not receive the requisite focus during normal school time, Dr Coughlan said.
“We have known for some time that the world is changing, that the skills required in the workplace are evolving and that the workplace of the future is going to look much different from what used to be the status quo only four weeks ago. Now, all of a sudden, we find ourselves thrown into a completely new paradigm and it is quite clear that the world will not be the same.
“So what better time to develop those global competencies and master 21st Century Skills than during the biggest global disaster in recent history?”
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Dr Coughlan said SA teachers have risen to the challenges of remote and digital teaching with remarkable resilience and zeal, with very little warning or lead-time.
They have been wonderfully innovative whether or not they have had access to extensive educational technology or been required to use WhatsApp or other day-to-day communication tools to keep in touch with the children they were teaching.
The mindset of making do and re-inventing is a precious one we should not lose.
“The world of the future just came crashing through our door,” said Dr Coughlan.
The Global Competencies of thinking skills (creative, critical and reflexive), RESEARCH skills (collecting, recording, organising, interpreting), communication skills (personal interaction with others), SOCIAL skills (personal behaviour) and self-management are the only ways that teachers and students will navigate this period and what follows it, successfully.
“So, for teachers developing lessons and content, and schools still grappling with how to approach learning at this time, consider that less really is more.
“If your school or class can continue learning then this time needs to be used to develop global citizens just as much as it must be used to entrench skills. Content can and will follow. Don’t mistake quantity for quality,” she added.
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