Welcome back, students
By Louise Wallace-Richards, Assistant Principal Teaching and Learning
What a delight it is having our students back in our classrooms.
With the return of Years 7 and 8 students this week, we now have all our students back on site for classes with really just one more week of Term 4, with Years 11 and 12 students beginning exams next week.
This year I have taught a Year 11 Literature class and it has been an absolute pleasure to teach – in both the real and virtual worlds. For me, they have shown online and in our on-campus lessons the traits that we are seeking to develop in our students.
My experience with my students has been the common one for our Secondary School teachers. In the online world, we saw our students certainly be open-minded about new ways of learning. They were open to being placed in ‘break out’ rooms on Teams and having their teacher ‘pop’ into the room without any warning to see how they could assist the group.
Their communication skills certainly developed in the online world where they found themselves being called upon to share their ideas online as well as regulate themselves to listen to and learn from the views of others, expressed across the NBN. With the return to on-campus lessons, our students and teachers are now having to work hard to project their voices through their masks!
Being principled and self-regulated have figured prominently over the past months in our students’ online learning experiences. Our synchronous, or in real-time, lesson delivery certainly helped our students stay focused on the lessons their teachers had taken many hours to develop, as did our shortening of the lesson times to assist the students to manage their on-screen time and have a break from online learning. As convenient as it may have been to sleep in and pull on a pair of track pants with a school PE shirt minutes before the first period of the day, the sleep-in was also needed because learning, and teaching, online is very tiring. I think all of us have found this to be true. Who would have known that sitting and viewing would need so much concentration and be so exhausting!
Feedback from our students throughout the lockdown learning period showed that we had become more proficient and effective delivering the lessons online, were able to think laterally about how to mirror approaches in person online, such as providing one-on-one conferencing time during lessons for students to discuss their drafts for tasks with their teachers, break out rooms so that students would feel comfortable asking questions of their teacher about something they didn’t understand instead of ‘in front’ of the whole class, and time for students to stay online for that one more opportunity with their peers to have another example of the concept shown through OneNote.
By staying with a synchronous learning approach that included following the timetable, maintaining the assessment task program, albeit with many adjustments to accommodate the online learning world, maintaining pastoral care tutor meetings, broadcasting assemblies and so on, Radford Secondary School students were kept in a routine of learning that has put them in good stead for returning to on-campus learning. At assembly last Wednesday I encouraged students to take the opportunity to ask questions in class now they are back on campus about any work they completed during lockdown that they have not quite consolidated. With Homework Hub resuming this week in the Morison Commons, all Radford Secondary students have every chance to catch up on any concept learning in the lead-up to final assessments and exams.
Many thanks go to our teachers for maintaining the quality learning experience for our students over the lockdown period. To the Heads of Department; Mrs Braithwaite, Assistant Principal Curriculum; and Mr Moss, Dean of Senior Studies and IB DP Coordinator, thanks for enabling our students to show their learning in meaningful ways online. Thanks also go to our Assistant Principal – Students, Mrs Melloy, Heads of Year, and pastoral Tutors, for the way they were able to continue to provide ways for students to connect with each other and share their online learning experiences.
On Friday, 29 October, Radford students celebrated World Teachers’ Day. Led by the Captains and Prefects and aided by Ms Carter of our academic admin team and myself, teachers and College Services staff across the College were thanked with a small gift and a casual dress day for the work they do to make Radford College a learning organisation of excellence. All Years 9– 12 students and staff who wore casual dress on the day contributed a gold coin to the College’s fundraising for UNICEF, the United Nations body that seeks to improve access to education for children and teacher education programs in developing countries across the globe. All Years 7–12 students were also encouraged to write messages of thanks to their teachers on a shared padlet, and Mrs Notley’s Year 8 English class wrote poems of thanks to their teachers. One wrote five stanzas of tribute to their maths teacher, Dr Edie Sevick!
