How collaboration helped Canberra through COVID-19

The dust may not have fully settled on the disruption caused by COVID-19, with school closures and lockdowns still in play for some parts of Australia, but 12 months after the extent of the pandemic’s impact became clear, the ACT’s Education Directorate has reflected on its performance in transitioning to a learning at home model.

According to the department’s website, it took a lot of collaboration to switch from classroom to living room in just two weeks.

At the onset of the pandemic, the Directorate quickly mobilised a team of teachers and Education Support Office employees to smooth the transition. Senior Director Learning and Teaching Policy and Service Design Mandy Kalyvas credited breaking down the walls between branches with allowing staff to work through obstacles.

“A team of people went into a room and brainstormed what teachers could need to deliver lessons over the platform that was available to us.

“It was such a creative, challenging and innovative time. Everyone in the team was committed to action and many of us had to upskill very quickly,” she said.

According to the Directorate, the team was able to achieve incredible results almost overnight including:

• development of a home learning website to provide students and families with lessons, activities and resources, lessons and activities that racked up 93,000 internet visits over two months;
• delivery of professional learning sessions to about 5000 online educators on methods and techniques to provide education to students remotely;
• creation of Capital Collective, a portal that allowed educators across the ACT to share resources including lesson plans, timetables and techniques to make better use of technology.
   

As the world soon discovered, there was no blueprint or manual to guide schools through the level of change required in such a limited time. Kalyvas said the eight pupil-free days available in which to turn that around was akin to building the plane while flying it.

Once the library of information and resources was created and the professional learning sessions developed and delivered, the Education team started communicating with students to provide online assignments, instructional videos and other materials.

Preschool and primary grades utilised paper-based lessons that parents could print out at home and the team took advantage of Chromebooks that were already distributed to older students, utilising Google’s G suite for education.

Additional professional learning sessions were added once online teaching started, allowing educators to focus on specific class levels. Teachers helped create the bulk of the content for these sessions through the addition of lesson ideas, timetables, story boards and templates, even creating their own brand ‘By ACT teachers for ACT teachers’.

The team set up the Capital Collective, a website that housed resources so teachers could share lesson plans, templates and technology techniques.

As students returned to the classroom in late May and early June, teachers incorporated new techniques and technology to create more of a hybrid learning model. Those who were reluctant to use technology pre-pandemic now embrace it and are looking for new ways to use it.

The Directorate said the shift to and from online instruction also has changed other ways of working, with teachers now designing lesson plans to share via the Capital Collective, taking resources beyond their own classroom and school.

ACT schools have also gained the ability to quickly convert to online learning, should any future emergency situation require the closing of one or all schools within the territory.

“Certainly, COVID-19 changed the way we all work. While it has been such a difficult time, the innovation, creativity and resilience of our teachers and staff has shone through,” Kalyvas said.

Image credit: ©Rawpixel/Dollar Photo Club