VIEW FROM THE VIRTUAL CLASSROOM
View from the virtual classroom T
his month, we hear from Daniel Melbourne at Radnor House in
Sevenoaks, who tells us how the school has risen to the challenge of keeping its pupils engaged and learning during lockdown.
Tell us a little about your school Radnor House Sevenoaks is an independent co- educational day school in Sevenoaks, Kent, for pupils from nursery through to sixth form. We have more than 450 pupils and aim to instil each of them with our core school values of excellence, perseverance, courage and respect.
How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you? Like every other school in the UK, we needed to ensure that all of our pupils and their families had the support and abilities they needed in order to continue their education from home as schools were officially locked down from March 24th. As with many others, this wasn’t a complete surprise and we had spent the week beforehand preparing and rehearsing for how to approach lessons when the anticipated shutdown came into effect. We want to stay ahead of the curve in delivering the best education for our pupils, and as part of this commitment we have invested in using digital technology to improve our pupils’ learning experience. This meant that, while it was still a substantial challenge, we were able to
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facilitate remote learning and collaboration for all our pupils.
How does this remote learning work? We use different approaches for different year groups. For our senior school pupils, their lessons are being delivered as normal via Microsoft Teams: teachers host their lessons as live video meetings, and the pupils can watch, interact and submit their work. The pupils can also interact and collaborate with one another over Teams, meaning they get the nearest we can give to a full school experience. For years four to six, we deliver lessons mostly
live and partly by pre-recorded video. In all these cases, the pupils have joined various departmental channels and switch between these channels to visit each virtual “lesson”. Last, our early years pupils can watch videos
that are uploaded to teams – for instance, featuring their teachers reading them stories, practicing phonics or introducing a subject. We also use Teams for the parents, letting them interact with the teacher directly both to get support, and to raise any issues with their children. We also use Teams to give students and their parents one-on-one time with their teachers. We also facilitate a weekly assembly for the
whole school – again remotely – which helps us to come together as a community and ensure we are keeping all of our pupils engaged. And one-
May 2020
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