Leon Furze

This article has been adapted and updated from an earlier piece published in VATE’s Idiom magazine.

I know we don’t talk about remote learning any more, but…

The first Stage 3 lockdowns came into effect in Victoria over almost four years ago to the day, at midnight March 31st, 2020. Schools had been forewarned, and many had spent the previous days preparing for the transition. This looked different for every school: some leveraged existing Learning Management Systems like Canvas or Schoolbox, or platforms such as Google Classroom and Microsoft Office 365. Others had to frantically adopt new technologies, digitising and transferring documents and reinventing lessons for a remote space. Many schools held on, initially, to the hope that the lockdowns would be brief, and resisted making major changes. Wherever you were in the state when lockdowns hit, you’ll probably remember it as a time of uncertainty and frantic action. As an English teacher, the first thing I remember was the feeling of relief that our faculty had adopted Google Classroom a year prior. This was quickly tempered by the realisation that most of the other faculties in the school hadn’t.

Those initial months will go down in the history of our lifetimes as one of the quickest pivots ever required in education. The amount of training, redevelopment of resources, and shifts in pedagogy required to go from face-to-face to remote was huge. In the English faculty we spent a great deal of time in 2020 recording videos, making engaging (we hoped) lessons based around short clips of teachers discussing the various merits of Mary Bennett and Kazuo Ishiguro’s clones. We recorded Google Meets where the four Year 12 teachers held #qanda style panels, and encouraged the teachers in junior year levels to experiment with podcasts, vlogs, and other digital texts. We also went a little app crazy, installing every browser extension and bitmoji add-on we could find, using voice to text recorders for feedback, activity trackers to check for engagement, and making slides, websites, and quizzes galore.

By the final lockdowns in Term 4 of 2021 – those confusing, half-in half-out, regional versus metro, preps and Y12s only lockdowns – we were as tired and miserable as anyone else. But on reflection, many educators also took the things they learned during the two years of disruption and continued them into 2022 and beyond.

Practical AI Strategies is available now from Amba Press

What we learned

Not all of the technologies and activities of remote learning stuck. We all got a serious dose of survey-fatigue, and thankfully bitmoji Leon has returned to whatever digital cave he crawled out of. But many things stayed as part of my former English curriculum for a year or two post-COVID:

• We kept the recorded lessons and YouTube channels alive and repurposed them into activities that could be rolled out during conferencing lessons. While the teacher works 1:1 with students on assessment and feedback, the rest of the class is engaged with relevant content from a trusted (you’d hope) source.
• We increased our use of digital collaboration tools, including whiteboards for planning and note taking, shared documents for writing, drafting and peer editing, and slides and videos for presentations and group projects.
• We continued to improve our assessment and moderation practices. Prior to remote learning we had already gotten rid of ‘exam style’ coursework tasks, replacing them with longer tasks where students could draft and edit. Post remote learning, we have added in additional steps to check for originality and plagiarism and have also increased the amount of collaboration with the aforementioned tools. And I’ll talk about the impact of GenAI later…
• We communicated more effectively as a team. The faculty reduced the amount of face-to-face meetings, but smaller group meetings became far more common.
• Student feedback has shifted towards quick, actionable comments embedded into digital documents and verbal feedback in person. No more taking away piles of essays to “mark”, leaving hastily scrawled comments in pen which no one will ever read. Students responded in kind, @ tagging teachers for help, DMing us in chats (during office hours only), and responding quickly to suggestions.

What we lost… and what we stand to lose

The idea of “loss” normally has negative connotations, but frankly I think we’ve all seen enough negativity around teaching in the years since COVID. I’m ignoring the learning loss conversation entirely and focusing on the parts we’ve carved away: loss isn’t always a bad thing. There’s an almost certainly apocryphal quote attributed to Michelangelo about carving his masterpiece David: “All a sculptor has to do is to take a big block of marble and just chip off all that isn’t necessary for the figure.” I think that many of us can see how, during remote learning, we have chipped away some of the facets of the education system that have been obscuring the masterpiece.

In 2020 and 2021, during the tail end of COVID lockdowns, students across Australia were awarded university placements and employment based on factors that went beyond just their ATARs (a tertiary ranking system). When ATARs were used, they were calculated to include the hardships of working under remote conditions. Many of my former students – with the double disadvantage of being in a regional area – found that their final results were much higher than they’d expected. Remote learning demonstrated some of the major flaws in our systems of assessment. We carved away content, focusing instead on just the essentials. We carved away lecturing at students, moving instead towards short bursts of video followed by synchronous and asynchronous discussions. And we carved away unnecessary assessments and the subsequent pressure to perform in exams.

Going forward, I hope we retain much of what we learned. Equally, I hope that a great deal of what was lost stays lost. An increase in non-ATAR based pathways into university, a move towards better writing processes in the new study design, and an adoption of technologies that help both students and teachers all have me optimistic about the future of teaching English.

The new new normal

And after all that digital upheaval, the rise of artificial intelligence presents a number of new challenges for education. Once we returned to the “new normal” post-COVID, no one imagined that within 12 months we’d be facing another huge technological disruption. One concern I keep coming across is the idea that learners are going to lose the ability to do certain things as AI becomes more prevalent. There is research to support this concern, such as the loss of mental arithmetic skills due to calculators and the loss of geospatial skills due to GPS. But we can’t, as educators, just throw our hands up in the air in despair.

If we, as a society and as an education system, truly value those fundamental skills – mental arithmetic, literacy, reading, writing – then we need to find ways to enshrine them in the curriculum, irrespective of the technology. We need to work doubly hard to convince young people that these are actually skills worth learning, because people young and old will always tend towards taking the easy route – that’s the principle of least effort. And, maybe we even need to reconsider some of what we take for granted as fundamental skills.

Post-COVID, we saw an almost allergic reaction to digital tech in some schools. Teachers rejected technologies and threw out the good parts along with the bad like they’d been inoculated against digital technologies. After spending, in some cases, almost two years trapped inside Zoom calls, maybe that’s fair enough. Unfortunately, whether we like it or not, this technology is set to steamroll over the top of all of us.

Yes, there will be some regulatory protections – the EU AI Act, for example, forbids the use of facial recognition technologies in education settings. But the use of tools like ChatGPT, Grammarly or Microsoft Copilot to write drafts and edit work is down to us to make decisions about – no regulator in the world is going to stop students from using chatbots. So instead of the allergic reaction to technology that we saw post-COVID, we need a considered, proactive approach.

We also can’t afford to be too precious with ideas that we hold dear but which aren’t necessarily written in stone. For example, I’ve written elsewhere that the privileging of writing in assessment disadvantages our students more than it helps, and that whilst it may seem that academic success has always been contingent on the ability to write, this has really only been the case for a few hundred years – a drop in the ocean of the entire human lifespan. Other ways of knowing and sharing knowledge have existed for millennia. Maybe general artificial intelligence could force us to confront some of these broken educational paradigms.

As we move forward, “navigating the rapidly evolving landscape of education in an AI-driven world” (that’s me, writing like ChatGPT), it’s crucial that we strike a balance. We must hold on to the valuable lessons and practices with digital technologies that we have learned during and since the pandemic, while also being willing to let go of outdated paradigms that no longer serve our students.

Interested in discussing professional learning, consultancy, or just have questions about Generative AI? Get in touch below: