The big challenge during the pandemic has been daily school life, especially when it comes to the question of how online lessons can be designed in order to successfully achieve the goals of what is referred to as traditional schooling. The most important learning advance in the past year has been the multifaceted development of skills. This involves new focal points of lesson design such as motivation, the employment of appropriate methods and media, competence development in the areas of digitisation, differentiation and individualisation, securing results and reflection in the learning process. The main protagonist in online teaching has been the learning climate, something that is in the hands of students, parents and teachers alike. The switch to distance learning has brought a lot of change in all these areas, and my perspective on schooling has broadened, I would say... like a multifunctional tool!
How do you rate your media skills? Where do you see further training needs?
Using media is something common in my everyday teaching. In any case, distance learning has accelerated the uptake of media, the use of which has become indispensable for every single lesson, and as a consequence I now have ‘a fully equipped computer room’. This is not the case in face-to-face teaching. What I think is missing is collegial advice and peer-to-peer exchange. That would lead to a connection between practice and in-depth media education in the individualised field of instruction.
How do you rate your students’ media skills? What support do the youngsters need from you?
Students are well versed in using media, but only as far as online games and the latest social media and messaging apps are concerned. They are not aware of how media contribute to better learning outcomes in the daily learning process. They need support to transform their way of thinking and start seeing media as tools for improvement.
How do you imagine your lessons in 10 years from now? What will have changed? Would you like to continue teaching remotely in the future too? In what form?
The school system in general is facing major challenges, including digital, social, financial, multicultural and bioethical ones. Global change requires new skills and an inclusion perspective to make the world sustainable as a system. New skills bring new learning cultures in schools, and I think that implies a hybrid model of ‘blended learning’, combining face-to-face and remote teaching, which I would like to keep doing in the future. The collective concern about the learning success of students suggests the individualisation and differentiation of learning progress, and not only when it comes to children and young people from difficult social backgrounds. The development of tailor-made support and teaching propositions will be required; in addition, digitisation will become the core of life, say, in the form of the Internet of Things, or schools as labs or innovation hotspots.
