Teachers not doing live lessons

[Imsosorryalan75]

As an ex teacher, I know how hard it must be to be working online. I'm now a TA but my stress levels over lockdown are sky high. Before I approach my head, I wanted some perspective from those in the thick of it as it were.
We currently are on a rota system in school but Ta's days in school have just been increased. We are now working 5 days week compared to teachers, who are working 1 day a week in class. Teachers are at home planning lessons, marking and answering parental/child emails but not live teaching at all.
Is this justifiable? How is it working in your school? I guess I'm wondering why it's ok for us to be in every day at increased risk to us but not teachers?

What an appalling and ignorant thread. Teachers workloads under lockdown are higher and more stressful than ever before and I have taught for many years. The OP idea that they are not shouldering the load is contemptible.

I do teach live lessons and I also go into school once a week for Critical worker children but the vast majority of my time is taken with planning, marking and communicating with parents. My work life balance has disappeared as I often work late into the evenings trying to a job that I was not trained for and find stressful and unsatisfying compared to the job I normally do which I love. I am also homeschooling my own child because I don't want to increase the burden on his school.

I like live lessons but they are are not the only way to effectively teach in a lockdown and I am concerned by the way people are implying that teachers should do them to show that they are working. Teachers have never worked harder than they are at the moment and are doing under a barrage of abuse from the media with no protection from the government or from Ofsted.

I think you should go to your Head because it sounds like you need to have a conversation with someone who can point out how deeply unreasonable you are being and hopefully help you to understand the situation so that you can show a little bit of compassion and solidarity to your colleagues.

@LadyCatStark

Have any of the people who don’t want live lessons actually had any? Because the difference in interest, engagement, discussion and therefore learning is huge. There’s going to be a huge gulf between those children who’ve had full days of live teaching and those who’ve had a few links to Oak Academy/ BBC Bitesize and a couple of worksheets.

I lead an evening group over Zoom. Some children find them useful. Others find them hell.

But none of that changes the simple fact that NOT ALL CHILDREN CAN ACCESS THEM.

"Every child should have a device of their own now" they should but thousands haven't and the ones the DfE sent out have been found to contain malware so useless! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55749959

"All private schools provide live lessons and pupils are making progress. Many who could moved from the state to private system after the first lock down because of this."
*
I take it you haven't seen the OFSTED report ... It states: “Some think that a live lesson is the ‘gold standard’ of remote education. This isn’t necessarily the case. ... live lessons are not always more effective than asynchronous approaches."*

LadyCatStark
Have any of the people who don’t want live lessons actually had any? Because the difference in interest, engagement, discussion and therefore learning is huge.

this depends so much on the class, the area, the school.

Engagement does not equal learning. I agree that live lessons are great for some students enjoyment. And enjoyment is important. But a well planned independent task with proper feedback is much better for learning in many cases. I currently cannot give proper feedback because I’m too busy planning and delivering live lessons and I’m certain some students are not learning at all.

@LadyCatStark

Have any of the people who don’t want live lessons actually had any? Because the difference in interest, engagement, discussion and therefore learning is huge. There’s going to be a huge gulf between those children who’ve had full days of live teaching and those who’ve had a few links to Oak Academy/ BBC Bitesize and a couple of worksheets.

Yes, and it didn't work at all for my 6 year old. He doesn't have the attention span to concentrate on the screen for long periods while there are lots of delays, mic muting/unmuting, kids telling long stories about their weekend or showing the teacher their hamster, background noise from other family homes. I have other children so can't sit with him helping for 3 hours a day.

As an adult I find 2 hours of Zoom training or governor's meetings hard going, a full day of online teaching for weeks is too big an ask for small children.

We are able to do 15-20 minute video lessons and worksheets, that we can slot in to our day.

Creating one PowerPoint for a lesson - 30 minutes to 1 hour

Creating worksheets for same lesson - 30 minutes to 1 hour (depending on year group)

Filming the lesson (which we have to do in addition to live lesson, so pupils who don’t attend live lesson can still access) - 15 to 30 minutes

Repeat for up to 5 lessons a day.

Schedule all lessons and videos - 30 minutes

Complete live lesson report forms - 30 minutes

Mark EVERY piece of work that comes in (“so pupils know working from home isn’t a waste of time” - 2 hours

Online meetings - 30 minutes a day

Other jobs like data input, open evening videos, answering pupil and parent emails etc - 1 - 2 hours

I open my lap top at 7am and I’m LUCKY to be off it by 7pm. I do not stop for coffee; food; breaks. The only time I leave the screen is to nip to the loo.

Want me to come into school? No problem, which day will you take my lessons off me? Perhaps I’ll have an earlier finish that day!

@Imsosorryalan75

Thanks for the messages. I'm not an advocate of live lessons. My point was more the unequal shift system where ta's are putting themselves more at risk, being in class daily.

You chose to work as a TA instead of a Teacher. It's not surprising at all that schools are choosing to have TAs support/babysit the KW children at school while Teachers plan the work, provide the work, record/livestream the lessons, answer questions about the work, mark the work, and contact families weekly individually during term time.

Be lucky you're on a rota to do so. We're so short staffed, all TAs have to be in every day to support the children who are in school.

We aren't doing live lessons at the moment as we've lots of children doing their work on phones. We also have families with one laptop but multiple children. They wouldn't be able to access live lessons at the same time.

Having video lessons and being on google classroom to answer questions is easier for all parents to manage and we've not had complaints when the head had explained the reasoning.

We have TAs in school manning the key worker children and going through the google classroom work with them.

SLT are in daily and some teachers come on to the rota to cover classes too

@DBML

No offence but I think you sound like you are working a little inefficiently

PPs shouldn't take an hour to make. Have you heard of cognitive overload? Keep them Stripped back and simple.

Equally do you need to be pre recording the lesson? Record it as you deliver it, and upload that.

@Norestformrz

I don’t think OFSTED are right about everything. I form my own judgment and, in my opinion, no live lessons at all Is failing pupils, especially the most vulnerable.

How live lessons are blended with other resources will depend on a variety of factors.

[quote TheReluctantPhoenix]@Norestformrz

I don’t think OFSTED are right about everything. I form my own judgment and, in my opinion, no live lessons at all Is failing pupils, especially the most vulnerable.

How live lessons are blended with other resources will depend on a variety of factors.[/quote]
But you assume all the pupils can access the lesson at the same time. It’s a big assumption that isn’t really valid.

Disadvantaged children learning on a shared phone may well struggle to access the live lesson and then they definite miss out.

Live has good and bad i have yr4 and r
Both have 2x20min live a day
Generally
inflexible
Due to timing only 1hr lunch so no walks etc..

But if forces a timetable and those bits get done so for people like us with lots of distractions at least some is done

The y4 it works well
But very short
Tired after so wants a break
We then have 40min maths to fit in topic and 2x oak/wr maths

Yrr
The speed of writing is so different some.must be waiting ages and others dont finish
Again we have oak videos to watch
Dc doesnt want to do any more writing but we didnt do much in the 20min live

Ideally parent would have had a choice about timings as it's taken over the day basically but not enough learning. So would be fine if it were all in am or pm etc or longer lesson for the yr 4 so everything covered but its only 20% maybe but disrupting the day.
Also the kids dont do any chat to each other i guess like a normal.lesson but that means zero interaction with their class.

I don't think OFSTED are always right but sometimes evidence outweighs opinion.

I don’t want live lessons but would like pre-recorded. Our school seems to think that a White Rose maths video covers all bases of online learning for them. Feedback on work submitted is often nothing more than ‘well done’ or ‘good work’. I’m really disappointed. 2 classes per year. TA is in teaching the KWs and 2 class teachers are at home.

@Norestformrz,

Was that the same quality of OFSTED used when they wanted to see evidence of whether someone was a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learner in every lesson?

@LittleBearPad,

Can you cite me some evidence that disadvantaged learners benefit from prerecorded lessons? What do they do if they are stuck? An e mail exchange is not easily accessed by someone struggling and many just don’t engage at all.

[quote Perfect28]@DBML

No offence but I think you sound like you are working a little inefficiently

PPs shouldn't take an hour to make. Have you heard of cognitive overload? Keep them Stripped back and simple.

Equally do you need to be pre recording the lesson? Record it as you deliver it, and upload that.[/quote]
I don’t tend to put lots of information on my PP. they aren’t all reading.

I tend to spend time looking for the right YouTube clips to use...for instance if I want to teach about enzymes, I might look for a child-friendly YouTube clip that is less than about 2-3 minutes long. Finding the right resources takes going through and watching them yourself.

Then I might want an interactive page, or a Google forms element (like a quick quiz) and again, this takes time to set up...although I do teach secondary, so this might be different to primary.

It’s the other way around in my school. All teachers and SLT in and TAs mainly at home with some rota-ing in school.

No live lessons at our school either.

I’m a TA and have no problems being in most of the time so my teacher can plan and record lessons at home. I’ve actually insisted in being in more as I know how much extra work she has to do.

It’s a hard time for all of us and we’re doing the best we can.

Our school also has teachers at home doing all the planning, researching, recording, delivering, answering of queries, marking and feedback (am sure I've missed some things) and putting in 12-13 hour days plus extra at weekends.
TAs are on a rota to supervise KW kids, and are currently in one or two days a week, depending on their usual working hours, and are at home the rest of the time with no further duties or expectations, on full pay.
I'd swap.

Assume you're talking about one ill-informed maverick inspector Thereluctantphoenix rather than the organisation publishing evidence.

Was that the same quality of OFSTED used when they wanted to see evidence of whether someone was a visual, auditory or kinaesthetic learner in every lesson?

When was this? Not while I've been teaching.

@DBML
For the sake of your own sanity, steal as much as you can. Quizzes for example, there's hundreds of those. You must be able to reuse the same resources all week for the same year groups? Maybe with a bit of tweaking. Don't burn yourself out!

Every school is different and has different issues in this time of COVID. Each school needs to think through their particular circumstances and devise their own way forward For the school where I am Chair of Governors this is a blended mix of live lessons which goes to both pupils at home and in the classroom, pre-taped lessons and work sheets plus some fun!
We are getting rave reviews from pupils and parents about how much they are enjoying this blended way of learning. Every member of staff is engaged full time on the activities they are responsible for and for anybody to be saying that they are not working their butts off is an insult to every member of staff. My concern is whether as Chair of Governors I will have a staff who are exhausted and stressed out at half term.
Having said that it does not need much reading of the posts in this topic to say that the reality in my school is not the reality in every school.
Only time and we are talking many months and maybe years will tell whether all schools and all school staff have done their best in the circumstances. But assuming negativity at present is just not justified.