Caring for Those who Teach Online – Reflections from a Virtual Staffroom

Caring for Those who Teach Online – Reflections from a Virtual Staffroom

When schools and higher education institutions closed their doors in March 2020, some of the implicit and informal supports for teacher educators disappeared. As teacher educators migrated to new modes of teaching and learning, institutional supports such as IT upskilling, educational technologies, professional development, and assistance from HR were provided. However, many staff commented that the burden of the expectations placed on them often exceeded what they felt capable of responding to in a personal capacity. With this as the backdrop, I want to reflect on how staff in one institution developed more informal ways of supporting each other and building community in a time of isolation and fragmentation.

The imperative to create what Noddings calls ‘a climate in which caring relations can flourish’, and through which a sense of belonging can be maintained, led to us setting up a virtual staff room. The staff room doors opened for a coffee break from 11.00 to 12.00 every morning. To date, this has happened on over 120 occasions with more than 90 colleagues engaging in the staff room at different times. This casual drop-in space was hosted on Zoom with a reminder sent to all staff ten minutes before the room was opened. The live interaction was supported by emails, phone calls, and some shared photography and cooking projects.

As with any staff room, the tone was set by the people in the room at any given time.  Ultimately what emerged was a supportive conversational space which broke down barriers as people swapped the small details and intimacies of everyday living and allowed colleagues glimpses into one another’s lives. This online space was characterised by a framework of CARE: a space for free-flowing conversation on a range of topics from the sublime to the ridiculous, attention to each other, deepening relationships with colleagues, and an increasing empathy as we observed something of each other’s homes and family lives. What we learned from the virtual staff room is that each element of this framework of CARE has to be supported by a number of integrated principles for practice: presence, production, performance, persona, personal, pastoral, and peer-to-peer. 

Presence: Developing and maintaining a supportive space for conversation demands the fully engaged presence of the host in the virtual space. The host cannot dominate the conversation but will have to facilitate it. The continuity of having the same host, meeting at the same time, and sending a regular reminder, offered people a sense of assurance that some things stayed the same. As one colleague noted: ‘Just knowing that there are opportunities like this to connect goes a long way to help you feel more connected right away’.

Production: We learned that there should be no agenda or expectation of having to engage in quizzes or activities so that participants have the chance to ‘switch-off’ from having to do something. Participants wanted to ‘be’ with each other rather than to ‘do’.

Performance: Some personality types were comfortable adopting a virtual persona and spoke comfortably to the camera in the early stages of the virtual staff room, whereas it took others time to be comfortable in the space. Trying to ensure that all participants can be seen on one screen is vital for bringing quieter participants into the chat.

Persona: During the early weeks of meeting each other, there was a sense that participants were conscious of performing for the camera and projecting a positive persona. This mitigated against revealing what was really happening for them. Empathic conversations ensued when someone risked saying that things were not going so well for them.

Personal: The host has to ensure that people are introduced to each other as many colleagues may not have met in real-life. Deepening relationships in a CARE framework means that the virtual staffroom welcomed children, partners, and pets and provided glimpses of each other’s homes and gardens as part of caring for each other. In the words of one participant: ‘I like meeting people’s children and pets and seeing their homes and gardens – makes me feel more connected.’

Pastoral: Taking a CARE approach to hosting the virtual staff room will occasionally draw the host into providing pastoral support for some participants. CARE will sometimes call for actions that we might not have anticipated.

Peer-to-peer: CARE is ultimately a peer-to-peer activity based on the realisation, again in the words of a participant, ‘that we are in this together, I look forward to seeing the familiar faces.’ The virtual staff room extended people’s social network by creating new links and new modes of engagement between colleagues.

 

What began as an informal approach to caring for staff and keeping us connected with each other, the virtual staff room has become an example of how taking a CARE approach to an online space can provide a positive space for conversation, characterised by empathic attention to each other in our evolving relationships.

The door remains open, and the kettle is on.

Dr Sandra Cullen

Dr Sandra Cullen

Assistant Professor of Religious Education, Dublin City University

Dr. Sandra Cullen is Assistant Professor of Religious Education at Dublin City University where she specialises in second-level religious education. As Director of the ICRE (Irish Centre for Religious Education) she supports research and teaching in religious education in a variety of contexts. She is the APF (Area of Professional Focus) leader for Religious Education on the Doctor of Education Programme at DCU, and serves on the Executive of EFTRE (the European Forum for Teachers of Religious Education) and on the International Advisory Board of the Journal of Religious Education.

The Effects of COVID-19 Lockdowns on Children’s Education

The Effects of COVID-19 Lockdowns on Children’s Education

The theme of the ECER 2020 conference was Educational Research: (Re)connecting Communities. This focus was initially prompted by the concerns about the potential effects of Brexit and other fractures in communities in Europe. The conference aimed to interrogate the capacity of educational research to address the complexity of the challenges that are encountered in connecting and reconnecting communities in contemporary Europe.

The effects of Covid-19 and the consequent lockdowns that swept across Europe and the world led to further, more extensive, fractures and disconnects across Europe. Schools, universities and workplaces were closed. There were severe restrictions on travel and movement around Europe.

As the Covid-19 pandemic and the lockdowns continued, a number of serious issues arose for children and the continuation of their education in Scotland. For many children and young people, school became an online engagement with teachers. The use of platforms and materials and the frequency of contact varied across Scotland’s 32 local authorities with learning resources provided by schools, media companies and commercial companies.

 

The Effects of Home Schooling

Recent research indicates that the move to learning at home for the majority of pupils led to mixed results for pupils, parents and teachers. Some parents and carers became anxious about adopting a greatly enhanced role in supporting the formal education of their children in the home. The formal education of children is normally assumed, almost exclusively, by highly qualified professional teachers in a school setting. There were not always sufficient resources at home to support formal home learning.

The effects of digital poverty, or digital exclusion, became apparent as awareness grew that some families did not have adequate equipment or even access to the internet to support their children in online learning. Not all members of the teaching profession had the skill set for the sudden move to online teaching and learning and, like many other professionals, had to upskill. Further, all teachers had to spend a substantial amount of time preparing and implementing online learning. There was serious disruption to the exam diet for senior pupils and a highly publicised reconfiguration of assessment practices leading to a controversial recalculation of grades for the major public examinations.

All of this unfolded in the context of serious concerns about rising levels of child poverty pre-COVID-19 and further increases as a result of job losses during lockdown. This situation contributed to a rise in food insecurity for many families and more families now seek free school meals for their children and access food from foodbanks. The effects of the rising levels of child poverty will have consequences for the physical and mental health and well-being of the children and young people.

 

The New Normal

There are other ways to view the outcomes of the lockdowns. As we came out of lockdown and schools resumed, ‘The New Normal’ was a phrase that came into current use. An important aspect of ‘new normal’ is the new knowledge, which will inform any altered concept of normality. New knowledge can emerge through any number of activities, but typically, it is the result of sustained engagement with others, materials and contexts during which we come to assimilate the nuanced experiences and perspectives of others in a new way.

 

Positive Effects of the Lockdown for Learners

Children and young people will have had a range of experiences of lockdown. As a result, they will have developed new knowledge about themselves as learners. There are likely to be pupils who will have experienced ‘schoolwork’ differently in a positive way; who have engaged with their learning at their own pace and on their own terms. Some will have enjoyed working alone, whilst others might have benefited from engagement with siblings and parents.

Anecdotally, we have probably all heard of examples of children and young people learning new things and developing skills and interests not directly connected to schoolwork. They have already blended their own ways of organising and engaging with their learning, their own interests and other people with whom they have interacted during this period.

The likelihood is that all young people will have learned new things and have a stronger sense of themselves as people and learners. It is important that this new knowledge is sought out, recognised and built on as our children, young people and schools return. We are in a unique situation and should take the opportunity to engage children’s and young people’s new skills, newly-realised abilities and personal interests. We should blend these insights into practice and pedagogy in schools as we simultaneously explore new ways to allow them to demonstrate their learning.

 

Positive Effects of the Lockdown for Teachers

Teachers will have learned new things about themselves, their colleagues and the children and young people with whom they work and the relationships among them. Teachers know that young people’s emotional experience of learning is as important as their cognitive experience. The current situation presents a unique stimulus for teachers to make sense of the relationships they have with each of their pupils.

Teachers already see their pupils as learners and not simply people who have to be taught. They will already be aware of pupils’ skills abilities and interests, and the new experiences which young people bring to school could be used to enhance and enrich the learning of all young people. Teachers’ interactions with pupils during lockdown will have enriched their own sense of themselves as teachers and their place in the lives of their charges. This new knowledge will help reinforce any new sense that pupils have of themselves as learners and teachers have of themselves as teachers.

EERA also has a role to play, and the recent online events had a significant role in reconnecting our research communities. The events provided new spaces in which education was explored, theorised and researched from the perspectives of all member associations and networks. EERA also has a role in generating the new knowledge that will increasingly and relentlessly nudge forward our understanding of education.

 

Professor Stephen J. McKinney

Professor Stephen J. McKinney

Professor, School of Education, University of Glasgow

Stephen J. McKinney is a Professor in the School of Education, University of Glasgow. He leads the research and teaching group, Pedagogy, Praxis and Faith. He is the past President of the Scottish Educational Research Association. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Beliefs and Values, Improving Schools, the Scottish Educational Review. He is a visiting professor in Catholic Education at Newman University, an Associate of the Irish Institute for Catholic Studies and on the steering group for the Network for Researchers in Catholic Education. He is a member of the European Educational Research Association Council. He is the Chair of the Board of Directors of the London School of Management Education. His research interests include Catholic schools and faith schools, the impact of poverty on education and education and social justice and he has published widely on all of these topics.

Dr George Head

Dr George Head

Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Education, University of Glasgow

George Head is Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the School of Education, University of Glasgow, Scotland. George is a past-president of the Scottish Educational Research Association (SERA) and has represented the association on the European Educational Research Association (EERA) Council and served as Senior Mentor to the EERA Emerging Researchers Group. He is a visiting professor at Newman University, Birmingham. His areas of academic interest include Inclusive Education and the learning and teaching of young people whose behaviour schools find difficult. George was a member of the Local Organising Committee for ECER 2020 which was scheduled to take place in Glasgow

5 Tips to Help You Plan an Online Conference

5 Tips to Help You Plan an Online Conference

In September 2020, the Educational Studies Association of Ireland (ESAI) held its 44th annual conference. Unique on this occasion is the fact that this was the association’s first time to host this event online, necessitated of course by the current COVID-19 situation at both national and international levels. The conference ran across three days and consisted of over 120 live papers structured into nine rounds of 43 parallel sessions, with over 235 registered delegates. We asked Dr Enda Donlon of the organising committee to share his reflections on some of the decisions taken around the planning and organisation of this event. 

System

The technical considerations around what systems and platforms to use are key in the hosting of any online event. In our case, we opted to use the Zoom web-conferencing service for our virtual conference. We took this decision on the assumption that it would likely be a system with higher levels of familiarity among our delegates, either through professional use within their educational institutions or through personal use for conversing with family and friends during lockdown times.

Zoom offers two main options for online events such as ours: Zoom Meetings and Zoom Webinars. While the Webinar format has proven popular for a number of online conference events, we opted for the Zoom Meeting option for several reasons. Most prominently, our desire to make our conference as social and interactive as possible for all attendees.

The user hierarchy for Zoom Meetings (host, co-host, participant) is ‘flatter’ than that used for Zoom Webinar (host, co-host, panellist, attendee). Zoom Meetings allows all delegates to turn on/off their camera and microphone as they wish and to engage in a group chat with all present. In addition, Zoom Meetings is the ‘personal’ version of Zoom, so we assumed this would be the version that most attendees would know best.

Support

One of our highest priorities during the run-up to this event was that all delegates felt supported and prepared to participate in this first-of-its-kind event for our association and for members. We designed a number of user guides (one for delegates, one for presenters, and one for session chairs) and included links to several ‘how to’ videos and tutorials. These guides were shared with delegates in the weeks running up to the event to give them plenty of time to review them.

We also offered a short ‘Zoom consultation’ to presenters. They could book a timeslot within an allocated timeframe to join a short Zoom meeting (hosted by a member of our conference committee) to test their connection, check their camera and microphone, and share their screen to display slides. This gave them the confidence that they were ready to participate in our online event.

The final decision was around how we would offer technical support to delegates during the conference itself. Our logic was that if delegates were experiencing problems with our main system (Zoom), then the last thing they would want is to have to engage with another system for technical support. We opted for a simple email address that delegates used to contact us with any problems they were experiencing. A small team from the conference committee continuously monitored this email address and responded to all enquiries immediately. The simplicity of this approach worked well during the conference days and we were able to resolve all technical difficulties very quickly.

Security

Moving any face-to-face gathering to an online format brings with it a whole new level of consideration around issues of security. Our chosen platform for this event had its fair share of negative publicity around this since the beginning of the pandemic, with issues of ‘Zoombombing‘ having occurred for other online conference events. Conscious of the need to balance these critical security concerns with ease of movement into and within our conference online locations for all registered delegates, we put in place a number of simple but effective precautions.

First, a special version of the conference timetable (called the Delegate Timetable) was emailed directly to all delegates the day before the conference began and was not made available publicly. This Delegate Timetable contained all of the relevant links to the conference sessions. In contrast, the public version of the timetable that was available on the conference website for several weeks before the event did not.

Second, we applied a single conference password to all Zoom meetings in use for the event, and included this in the email sent to delegates the day before the conference began (again, not publicly available). Finally, we asked for delegates cooperation in not sharing the Zoom links or password any further to maintain the security and integrity of our online event. It is encouraging to note that we did not have any uninvited guests or intrusive incidents during our online conference event.

Structure

Across the three conference days, our event made use of almost 50 individual Zoom meetings. It was crucial that delegates were able to navigate the virtual venue with ease and could locate the various ‘Zoom rooms’ quickly. We solved this issue with the use of a structured timetable which showed the key details at a glance: session title and chair, the constituent papers and their authors, and the relevant Zoom link (see sample above). This timetable allowed delegates to easily move between sessions if they wished to do so and to quickly find the ‘room’ they wanted to go to next.

Simple

My final observation is one that philosophically underpinned the whole organisation of the event: keep it as simple as possible.

The majority of delegates really want to participate in these new online formats for conference events, so make it as easy as possible for them to do so in terms of registration, navigation, participation, and support. At the time of writing it is evident that the global COVID-19 pandemic will necessitate the online hosting of many conference events in the immediate future, with several high-profile and large conferences for 2021 already having committed to this format. I hope that these brief reflections from our event might prove helpful in informing discussions and decisions for those who may be organising their own virtual conference for the first time.

Dr Enda Donlon

Dr Enda Donlon

School of STEM Education, Innovation and Global Studies at the Institute of Education, Dublin City University

Dr Enda Donlon is a lecturer in the school of STEM Education, Innovation and Global Studies at the Institute of Education, Dublin City University. He is a former president (2018-2020) and vice-president (2016-2018) of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland (ESAI), and has served on the national executive of the Computers in Education Society of Ireland (CESI) from 2008-2019. Enda is the APF (Area of Professional Focus) leader for Digital Learning on the Doctor of Education Programme at DCU. He tweets at @donenda.