The Research

We had some discussion at a recent SPT meeting about a Rapid Evidence Review produced by the Education Endowment Foundation in response to the COVID-19 crisis and, in particular, the consequent and sudden shift to online learning.

The motivation to publish such information is clear. - To avoid a huge technological false start, in which the sector rushes to procure myriad potentially-ineffective software packages and attempts to embed ineffective or burdensome working practices without any reference to research.

Whilst it has the same issues as any educational research, - in its ability to raise as many questions as it answers; its applicability (or not) to each unique student and educational setting; and it's tendency to confirm what we already 'know' anecdotally, - I think we would do well to take it as a starting point for the long road that might lie ahead.

One section in particular stood out to me as something fairly 'obvious' but also eminently achievable via a number of easy routes: "Peer interactions can provide motivation and improve learning outcomes"

Early Issues and Constructive Criticisms

Having collected the staff's concerns about the work-rate of certain students following our partial closure and had a number of conversations with parents about the difficulties in motivating their teenagers to take study seriously in the current circumstances, I think it's fair to say that the eternal focus on Engagement remains.

We're fortunate that our Trust team have rightly said that live-streamed lectures and marking of individual work is unsustainable within the context in which many of us are working at home, and with our commitments to the current pastoral and on-site provision.

Yet we all know - without research - that student's can't and won't submit work into an apparent black hole. They need to know whether they're successful or not. They need their work to be appraised or marked in some way.

Our response thus far is to evolve the tasks set to cater to this by ensuring the success criteria are well modelled; some generalised, 'whole-class' feedback is given; or that they're given immediate 'right/wrong'-type feedback electronically. Whist this is a step forwards both in terms of motivation and in giving students the required information to self-regulate their own learning, I suspect that it doesn't fulfil the real need. Students just want to know that someone cares about the work they've done.

It goes without saying that we care - but we're in a struggle to demonstrate this to the students under our current working constraints. In the classroom, some of us can muster multiple smiles per hour and a few exclamations of "great work!", "great answer!", etc, ensure the motivation of the students. As the tutors and House Progress Leaders amongst us know all to well, the praise-per-minute coverage afforded by phone calls home and ClassCharts does not compare.

Given this incontrovertible truth, I say we do what any experienced teacher does. We get the students working for us! Let's have them show that they care. Lets have many eyes on the work produced. Below are three easy online tools we can use to bolster the student-student interaction (in line with the research findings of the EEF), provide some constructive feedback and streamline our own understanding of which students are producing the 'best' work and might be worthy of those precious phone calls home, etc.

They are in order of 'extremely easy' to 'slightly more complex' - but all three are easily achievable and I'm happy to help where I can.

The attraction to this is so strong that many of us - myself included - have been ignoring the opportunities to foster greater student interaction. As well as 'assignments', which are generally analogous to 'work' that might be done in a book, Classroom lets you ask questions and stimulate 'group discussion'. I suspect the strength of the analogy is weaker, in the same ways that communication online is in of itself weaker than face-to-face discussion but I've personally always held these parts of any lesson at least in equal importance to the 'production' of work. Let's use Classroom not just as a worksheet-delivery-service but as a tool to imitate some of these 'softer' bits of the lesson in which students can express and appraise each other's views and ideas.

I'll let the video do the talking on how this is done but I will point out that students can be allowed or disallowed from responding to each other's work and that questions can be open-ended or multiple choice. I would suggest that multiple choice doesn't add much value beyond what we have already been doing, unless used as a kind of subjective poll in which students can see the distribution of answers:

• "Which of the characters in the play showed the most courage?"

• "In your view, was historical character X right to take course of action Y?"

The open-ended questions and replies have fairly obvious merits in terms of student interaction. How about throwing in negligible workload as an added bonus? Our existing reading lists/watch list should facilitate reusable questions such as these:

• "State one thing you learned from the video that hasn't already been mentioned by another student"

• "Having read the text, what question might you want to ask? If you think you have an answer to someone else's question, hit 'Reply'!"

The process is roughly the same for Boomwriter and ComPAIR (which I will describe below):

1. Teacher sets the question or stimulus material.

2. Students write their answer/response.

3. Teacher switches it to the 'voting' stage.

4. Students, as a second activity (perhaps on a different day), view pairs of anonymous answers and select the 'best' one each time.

5. The internal algorithm works our a rank order which is presented to the teacher to celebrate, share and/or build upon as they see fit.

I've not been using Boomwriter for very long but my (not-terribly-well-informed) understanding is that it was first envisaged as an English Language tool, in which a teacher might offer up the first paragraph or chapter of a story, and students take it from there. Each time, they will vote upon and insert the 'best' paragraph/chapter into the story. They then try to sell you real, printed versions of the book at the end but it doesn't get in the way of the user experience at all.

Boomwriter also offers 'multi-section assignments' which lend themselves better to scientific writing, for example. An excellent feature of this is that you can input some tier 1 and tier 2 vocabulary, which they also get Boomer Bucks for including, whether they eventually 'do well' or not.

The process is very similar to that of Boomwriter: students write something, and in the next stage use comparative judgement to decide on the 'best' work. The immediate difference you will notice with ComPAIR is that is is a more 'serious'-looking application. It's obvious that it was designed with university students in mind rather than school children and you can't buy a jazzy moustache for your avatar in Boomer Bucks. That said, the user experience is simple enough, especially on the student side. Some students already have some experience of using ComPAIR in science and English lessons. If memory serves, I think our current Year 9 used it often as part of science lessons when they were in Year 7.

A more advanced, flexible system

It will allow you to set multiple criteria for comparison, rather than just asking students 'which is better?'. We all know that peer assessment without clear success criteria and a clear process is just 'filler'. Make it 'thriller' by breaking down what students should be looking for in the piece - but don't be tempted to go overboard or the comparison stage will become burdensome for the students and you'll lose the engagement afforded by those all-important interactions.

A few other key features:

• You can attach multimedia stimulus material and students can, in turn, attach a photo of their own artwork or a recording of a musical composition

• You can have teachers and teaching assistants take part in the comparison stage.

• You can ask students to self-evaluate their work as well as the work of others

• Students can make a group submission but all students then vote individually

• Staff can submit exemplar pieces to the process so that all students see what a 'good one' looks like

Logging in and finding your way around...

As with Boomwriter, staff and students can log in with their Google Accounts. The difference being that I have already set up some courses. For the sake of simplicity to get us started, I've just set up a course for each of the 4 year groups and given all the teaching staff access to them. This means that we can all get started straight away, and that we can all see one-another's assignments in addition to any work submitted. Whilst this will allow us to learn from and support one another in the first instance, it might be better to have a course for each year group and for each subject. Let me know if you're ready for that, and I'll happily set it up.