Will Snow Days Ever be the Same?
We all know that feeling, when winter has arrived and the weather has taken a turn for the worse. ‘Will it snow?’, we all ask ourselves. ‘Will we be snowed in?’ Students get excited that they have an impromptu day off, and staff are thinking they have time to do planning, relax a little, take a breath.
But 2020 has been a strange year and we have all had to adapt our working practises to accommodate the restrictions that have been put in place. We are now a much more adaptable society and even schools, who are notoriously rigidly structured through timetables and curriculums, have managed to adjust their working practises. Online content and live teaching along with home working, Teams meetings and technology-enabled distance working have all changed the way that we operate.
So I ask, does this spell the end of ‘Snow Days’?
If we wake up one morning and we are all snowed in for a week, we now have the proven capability to continue our work, offering remote learning and working from home. Of course if it is really bad and lines are down and the internet is affected that is different! Before the current pandemic we had no systems in place to facilitate access out of school, now we have not only the systems but also the experience. That will work really well for administration duties, we can access our systems and carry on as before but what will it look like for teaching and learning?
Regardless of whether your school has been hosting live lessons or providing online content, timing will be key. It will require teachers to have another element to their planning which would enable the learning to transfer to online content. For each year group or department that could look very different and each phase would need a dynamic approach. This would need to be measured against the value of the outcome. We know through our recent experiences that not all students could or indeed chose to take part. Would we decide that this approach would be to time costly to administer for the small number of days and value-added that it would incur?
Teachers and support staff are now aware of the possibility of remote working, it is added to their radar and is now included in any planning both of the curriculum and the way that we work operationally. Lesson planning is done with a view to how it could be delivered remotely. The admin teams are still having remote meetings and certainly for our school, new processes are cloud-based to enable remote access.
Short term we are likely to do this due to the uncertainty of the current situation. Perhaps that is not the long term answer but I have to ask, could we meet it halfway? Could this current spell of remote learning and support for our students be the beginning of a whole new way of working?
When I wrote my dissertation for my degree, back in the dark ages, I based it upon the use of ICT in offering another way of differentiating teaching and offering individual support. I never dreamt that it could benefit the current situation, I never dreamt of the current situation full-stop.
But maybe we are there; which brings me back to the point in question, is this the end of snow days? They have had their value in the past, the opportunity to slow down and take stock. Life is full of unexpected interruptions and long may they continue. Mind you, the way that 2020 has gone, we may be snowed in for weeks so who knows!