Teaching Spanish 2020/21

How it felt to teach Spanish to year 7 and 8 students in Covid times!

1. One thing was clear when we started school in early 2020 – Covid was coming and we should all get ready for it. At my school we began to plan for what changes we would have to make in order to keep ourselves safe. We quickly started by making sure all our windows were open, desks would be sanitised before (or after, there was some confusion) each lesson – the students did this after a bit of training from the teachers. We also strongly encouraged everyone to wash their hands for 20 seconds with soap, and sanitise regularly. Each student would sit in the same place each lesson as well. This was quite a handful of new rules for our middle school students! Our Languages Department and the Year 7/8 Deans decided it was a lot easier for us middle school teachers to teach in their own homeroom.
2. Travelling back and forth between Harvey Block (where I taught Spanish and ESOL classes) and the year 7/8 block, was quite a mission but I had got used to it when I lost my classroom and became a bit of a wandering teacher! I got lots of exercise though, and I enjoyed teaching these students in their own classroom. One downside was I couldn’t show them the resources that my Spanish colleague and I had put up in our classroom, so I began taking things with me such as posters, alebrije and masks students had made.
3. Our first lockdown happened quickly. Teachers were told to teach online from one day to the next, and this was a learning curve for all of us. I already had a Google Classroom and had shown my students how to get on to a Google Meet. Those who were confident helped others who weren’t. Usually by contacting each other on mobile phones or other social media. The expectations were that every lesson would be online for the first 20 minutes, then provide the students with enough work to continue for the rest of the lesson (75 minutes x 4 lessons a day). I prepared each lesson very carefully to ensure I didn’t overload students, and we weren’t on for too long. I also made sure I greeted each student as they came on, got some Spanish from them, even if it was just a greeting and a short sentence. I began keeping digital registers of attendance so I knew who was coming online and whether they engaged or not. Students were taught by their homeroom teachers to mute and turn the camera off if they wanted to. Students became very adept at being present, but not present!
4. Sometimes I pre-recorded a short instruction (less than 5 minutes on screencastify), and I got into the habit of recording my digital lessons for students who could not or did not attend at the right time. There was a lot of discussion at school about expectations. Some students were not able to come online (eg no wifi at home), had no support at home so didn’t know when to come online (organisation skills of students and parents!), or just plain refused to turn up or do any work. We took the softly, softly approach at first; later it became the senior management/HOD task to follow up on the students who neither came online or did any work.
5. My students did a LOT less work than normal despite my trying to engage them positively, give them tasks that were engaging, fun and short, and developing a new ‘best practice’ based on what was quickly becoming the norm across the world. I read a lot of background professional reading about how to teach online. Some links are:
6. Some benefits: Smaller, shorter classes sometimes meant some fun, off topic chats about life, covid, lockdown and what students get up to eg online games/social media, favourite things eg hobbies, sports, favourite toy, place, person.
7. In 2021 we had some times where teachers were at school, along with some students, however a few students stayed at home (parents were encouraged to send their students, but some chose to keep them at home). This was the most difficult for me. I had to teach ‘in person’, giving instructions in class and sometimes physical handouts, AND keep an online presence with those at home. I kept my laptop where the online students could see the whiteboard, added digital handouts, and tried to be all inclusive. I know other teachers had trouble with this too as I attended some mainstream senior classes with my LSC students (see other blog post about LSC 2021).