In spring 2020, the sudden closure of schools in almost every country in the world presented teachers, pupils, parents and education professionals with unusual challenges. Classroom lessons had to be moved to the living rooms and children’s rooms in families’ homes overnight. It quickly became clear that this was not a brief interruption of school operations like the occasional one- or two-week school closures during flu epidemics. On the contrary, the Covid pandemic, proclaimed globally, was here to stay. No one knew for how long the pandemic would largely bring public life to a standstill. For schools as an institution relying on fixed dates, timetables, curricula and exam dates and, above all, on face-to-face social interaction, the basic foundations were shaken. As the pandemic broke out, no contingency plan, or Plan B, was in place either at ministries of education or at schools themselves.
The pandemic as a catalyst for agile solutions
In retrospect, the first weeks of the pandemic in many schools were marked by a parallelism of persistent paralysis and creative agility. Suddenly a variety of solutions were found and uncharted ways tried out of how it could still work out: teaching and learning together in virtual space.
This has been the starting point for a long-term educational project by the Goethe Institutes in Southeast Europe in cooperation with pilot schools and educational partners in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Kosovo, Croatia, North Macedonia, Romania and Turkey: the Remote Schools project.
Remote Schools takes up remote schooling experiences and practical examples from Southeast Europe and enables school principals and German teachers to network and to exchange views and ideas about moments of frustration as well as experiences of success during the pandemic. By participating in the project, both target groups also receive comprehensive advice, information and training opportunities on all aspects of digital teaching and learning as well as school transformation processes.
Ultimately, the techniques and methods tested at the 34 pilot schools will be discussed at a concluding symposium together with the educational partners involved. The project also aims to identify potential for further school development and embed it in a country-specific way in local educational structures in the long term.
Remote schooling: a paradigm shift
The professional exchanges during the project's kick-off events in March of this year already showed that many teachers had done amazingly and developed their own creative ideas in the first weeks and months of the pandemic.
Panagiotis Giatras, a German teacher at a high school in Athens, describes these months as follows: ‘That reminds me of the quote: ‘Be careful what you wish for, lest it come true’. I always wished I had time to enrich my learning material with media, and the need to switch to remote teaching because of the COVID crisis gave me that chance. I had to work a lot more than usual, and I think that goes for all teachers – we spent endless hours in front of our screens.[1]
What also often emerged in the discussions, however, was the participants' stated desire to fully replicate face-to-face teaching in the virtual space. It was only in the course of the discussions during the kick-off events that a new awareness began to surface more and more clearly: the awareness that it was not only the technical framework conditions of teaching that had changed – rather, online teaching had brought about a fundamental paradigm shift in teaching didactics and methodology.
The questions posed by the 42 German teachers and 34 school principals included: How can traditional classroom communication be transferred to the living room at home? As a teacher, how do I manage to involve and approach all students? How much "online" can and should I ask of pupils, especially younger ones? How is learning content to be conveyed and how can learning objectives be achieved despite the changed formats? And above all: How do I, as a teacher, motivate my students to self-train (in German)?
The participating teachers in the 2021 project year elaborate these and other questions into four modules consisting of synchronous online live workshops and an asynchronous practical phase:
Digital competences: In this module the participating German teachers analyse their existing digital competences on the basis of DigCompEdu (the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators). This frame of reference also serves as a basis for mutual understanding and an instrument for target agreements with school management and higher-level educational authorities. The module focuses on the DigCompEdu competence areas. Participants jointly develop strategies to further develop their digital competence in an area of their choice.
Methodology and didactics: Methodological and didactic knowledge of foreign language teaching is a key prerequisite for teachers to successfully plan their lessons, and this also holds true in online teaching. Yet, delivering lessons in the virtual space also requires a different planning perspective and generates, qua medium, new formats for encounters and exchanges between teachers and learners. This module is therefore about weighting and interlinking synchronous and asynchronous learning, student activation in online live sessions, strategies for collaborative learning, promoting learner autonomy and working with digital textbooks. Participants consider methodological and didactic issues of teaching and learning in virtual space, get to know digital teaching ideas and tools and independently develop a teaching unit activating pupils.
Relationship work: Remote schooling, as the term suggests, generates first of all a spatial, technical and often social barrier between those involved. The typical classroom atmosphere, or the occasional 5-minute conversation between a teacher and a pupil after the lesson, are not such a matter of course in the case of virtual lessons. Teachers complain that students do not turn on their cameras, so a natural feedback space is missing. Yet there are ways of building closeness and establishing relationships over the virtual distance. That is why in this module participants deal with the question of how teachers can break down inhibitions in students and motivate them to actively participate in online lessons. The module also deals with forms of feedback and suitable communication channels and formats.
Organisation and administration: Not unlike face-to-face teaching, online lessons and remote schooling place particular organisational and administrative demands on school staff: How is performance to be measured and how can exams take place online? How can parents’ evenings and parent communication be organised online? What technical equipment does a school or a family need for successful remote schooling, and what about data protection? In this module, participants exchange best practice examples and together find ways to gradually integrate remote schooling into everyday school life, to establish reliable structures and to jointly develop them further through a steering group at the school.
Digital transformation process: it all depends on the school management
In addition to the German teachers at the 34 pilot schools, there is another important target group at the forefront of Remote Schools: school principals and representatives of education authorities in the participating project countries. They are the ones who take up the digitalisation impetus from the Covid crisis at their schools, manage it administratively and develop it sustainably. The growing agile potential that has emerged at many schools as a result of the Covid pandemic makes these schools a reflection of society: they move with it while also developing on their own. In line with this development, the roles expected from school principals are also changing: in addition to a stabilising management and leadership function, they are increasingly supporting their schools in making processes more flexible to enable new digital approaches.
Thus, through four workshops, expert surveys and comprehensive coaching opportunities, school leaders deal with the topics of agile management, transformation development and change management as well as digital school development.
Even though the two target groups, German teachers and school principals, initially exchange views and ideas and receive further training separately in the course of the project, it nevertheless pursues the participatory cooperation of all those involved: school management, teachers, parents and caregivers, pupils and representatives of the education authorities. Because successful learning and teaching requires a functioning interplay between organisations, people and technology. The fact that not all three components can be optimally balanced in pupils’ digital learning process is particularly evident in the case of socially and socio-economically disadvantaged children who are deprived of the technical facilities or family support required for online schooling.
Online symposium on remote schooling on 4 December 2021
These and other aspects of remote schooling will be the topic of a large online symposium on 4 December 2021. At the bilingual online conference (DE/EN), project participants, education experts, education partners and other interested parties will exchange their experiences, the methodological and didactic implications of online teaching and the transformation processes at their educational institutions and discuss opportunities and potentials arising from the establishment of remote schooling through the Covid crisis, also for the time after the pandemic.
Because even if the Covid pandemic is a temporary situation of an exceptional nature, concepts and materials for remote schooling, virtual exchange formats in everyday school life and digital forms of communication with parents will retain their greatly important role for all those involved even after the (partial) opening of schools. ‘All those involved should say goodbye to the idea that teaching will be the same as it was before the pandemic,’ education journalist Armin Himmelrath asserts and calls on schools to no longer avoid proper remote schooling concepts.[2]
Future scenarios for the integration of online teaching into everyday school life
It can be assumed that as infection rates continue to surge in waves in many countries, schools will continue to oscillate between different face-to-face, partial opening and remote schooling scenarios. There should be binding control, action and communication concepts for all these scenarios and their transitional periods, so that the coming school year can still run largely without disruption despite the ongoing pandemic and schools can fulfil their function as a space for learning and experience at all times.
The exchange in the Remote Schools project also puts emphasis on the time after the Covid pandemic. It is a time which all participants rightfully long for, but which also harbours the danger that education professionals will quickly revert to familiar routines of purely face-to-face teaching. Yet remote schooling has released a lot of potential in the schools of Southeast Europe in recent months, which is worth pursuing and developing further even after the pandemic. In Bulgaria, for example, there has been a shift system at schools for years because the number of school buildings in big cities is insufficient. In the future, this could be alleviated by stepping up remote schooling. While face-to-face teaching is especially important for younger children, the proportion of online teaching could gradually increase as pupils get older.
Hybrid teaching scenarios such as digital project work, flipped classroom and other online self-training concepts or playful learning opportunities should not be placed in students' free time only, as has often been the case to date, but should become an integral part of planning for synchronous face-to-face and asynchronous virtual lessons.
Daniela Nabu Sbiera, a German teacher from Romania, also backs this with arguments from a long-term future perspective: ‘I don't think we can go back that step. It remains an advantage for students who are temporarily unable to attend classes due to illness or the like, as it enables them not to lose touch with the school. The various learning platforms that our school employs will be retained in the long term for communication with our students, and can also be used for different work assignments in the future.‘[3]
Latest information on the Remote Schools project of the Goethe Institutes in Southeast Europe and on the online symposium scheduled for 4 December 2021 can be found at: www.goethe.de/soe/remote-schools
[1] The full interview is available at: www.goethe.de/soe/remote-schools.
[2] Armin Himmelrath, Julia Egbers (2020): Das Schuljahr nach Corona – was sich jetzt ändern muss. (The school year after Covid - what needs to change now.) Bern: hep-Verlag.
[3] The full interview is available at: www.goethe.de/soe/remote-schools.
