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The Learning Institute

The Learning Institute

Nicolle's Diary #2: 21st April 2020

Home schooling highlights and the start of a new module

Some highlights from this past week - well I finally acquired some paint (not sure if I’m excited or full of fear- my nemesis, Arts and Crafts is now unavoidably on the agenda), I did A LOT of online shopping (not sure if this was a productive act or an act of escapism?) and I have started work on my latest assignment. Home-schooling highlights this week included making Pizza from scratch, making puppets for a puppet show and my 7-year-old has mastered his three times-table! Our next challenge, making a video to send to school of their best work (maybe technology is my adversary more so than crafts?).

As mentioned in my previous blog in the past week some level of normality, in the form of lectures, has resumed! It was definitely different from what I had experienced previously in online sessions. A session that had been intended to be delivered face-to-face had been adapted for online. Furthermore, Team Poole would be working in collaboration with Team Southwark! Usually online sessions would be delivered to groups from the same setting or the same degree but these sessions are definitely working wonders for my confidence- either that or my thirst for adult conversation has driven me to need to verbally contribute a lot more than usual!

It was great to get stuck into our new module ‘The Enabling Environment’. It has got me thinking as a student, a parent, and a practitioner what steps are currently being taken to enable learners? These are unprecedented times and schools, parents and learning providers have had to really adapt and adjust to what is going on in the world! As detailed probably long-windedly in my last post, home-schooling is taking over my life, so I took the opportunity this week to email my children’s teachers some of the work they had done and what really struck me is their responses. Words of comfort and encouragement to the children and an acknowledgement that they too were balancing home-schooling their own children with working from home- they understood the struggle! It begs the question, when this is all over, will the ‘accountability culture’ that has been allowed to develop, in recent years, between parent and practitioner still exist? Or will Corona have inadvertently smashed down this barrier?