Learning in lockdown

How Tassomai helped us to personalise our teaching during the pandemic 

By Andy Darracott, Deputy Head of Science, The Petersfield School

After tackling the first lockdown last year, I did feel slightly more prepared this time around, but I still worry about some students getting left behind.

It is now easier than ever before to lose touch with your students. There are always some who have poor attendance or just simply don’t do the work, but it is even more important to try and stop this from happening in a pandemic. Trying to provide students with the support and structure of normal school life is much harder when we’re all online, but it’s not impossible.

Our school was lucky enough to be in the process of switching to a one-to-one iPads scheme for all of our Year 7 students. I think they will be particularly helpful to students at the moment. Obviously, I don’t want them to all become slaves to their screens, but this time last year I didn’t know what else I could get the students to do on them other than write notes - only now am I really seeing the benefits.

Technology in the pandemic

Just over a year ago, The Petersfield School introduced Tassomai for year 11 science students but we had already been debating expanding our usage to other year groups when the pandemic hit last year. We took advantage of Tassomai’s discount last March, using it to integrate year 9 and 10 into the programme, and are so grateful that we did. We are now using it for all of KS4 and it seems to be going very well.

We try to use a range of technology resources in our online classes to keep things fresh for the students. We have a good mix of staff, some relatively early in their teaching careers and others who have been with us for 15 years, so everyone has a slightly different approach and integrates a different level of edtech into their lessons. We are all very good at sharing information on what is working for each of us and learning from each others’ experiences. We also have a great Head of Science who is really driving student engagement and learning forward, so that helps the team a lot.

Giving structure through Tassomai

We have a system at the school where the students start their lessons by answering five recall questions in their exercise books. They then complete a knowledge tracker to show how frequently they get questions on different topics right or wrong so they can track their own progress. This works quite well but as teachers we would have to check all of these individually and keeping track of everyone’s progress was a challenge, but Tassomai takes on all of that for us.

In our online classes, students arrive at lessons at slightly different times, just like regular school - some arrive late from lessons that have overrun and others can end up sitting around with little to do. As a result, we have started devoting the first ten minutes of each lesson to using Tassomai. The students all log on while we wait for everyone to arrive and it is treated as their starter activity. We are implementing a 5 minute gap between lessons now to stop the timings being such an issue but I think the Tassomai will definitely stay.

Incentivising students

When we first introduced Tassomai, we were very upfront with the students. We had a big assembly and told them, “look, we’ve spent a decent amount of money on this and we really want it to succeed”. We explained to them how much it would help us as teachers as well as how much it would help them to own their learning and revise more efficiently. I think doing such a big sell at the start really helped get everyone involved and onboard. The students recognise how much it helps us as teachers and they reacted to that with great maturity.

Remote learning

The Spring and Summer terms in 2020 were challenging for everyone, so in September we blocked off all the topics on Tassomai, other than the ones that the students should have been learning in the Summer term, and worked out which areas were most in need of a recap. It saved us so much time and effort - we didn’t need to test all of the students ourselves, because we could just look at the Tassomai data. It helped to inform where we needed to be teaching when we got back into the classroom. 

At the start of this lockdown, and with the uncertainty over GCSE assessments, I thought it would be inevitable that some of my students would lose their focus or no longer see as much urgency in their study, but to be honest, I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far! I’ve been overwhelmed by how hard my three year 11 classes have been working. Even my combined science class, which is a mixed attainment group, has had 21/24 still show up everyday well into the latest lockdown.

Now with students once again working from home, we can use Tassomai to personalise the resources we send them. If student A is struggling with osmosis, I can send them some extra information on that; then I see that student B is fine on osmosis but needs some help with stem cells - I don’t think that level of personalisation would be possible without this data. Tassomai is useful for teachers now more than ever. It’s a very powerful tool for us. The breakdowns we can get on the program show us exactly where students are struggling.

Exams and teacher assessed grades for GCSEs

At the time of writing, we still await to hear the outcomes of the government consultation upon how the GCSE assessment and grading system will work for the 2021 cohort. All we know is that students will be assessed in some form and that they will need to produce evidence to justify a grade. Of course, they will have a mock exam result from the Autumn term that gives a certain level to work from but historically we know that most students progress throughout the year at different speeds. 

Obviously we still don’t know the extent to which teachers might be involved in the grading process and nothing is set in stone, but having Tassomai in this process would be a massive help. We can look at how many hours a student has spent on Tassomai as well as their accuracy and progress over that time. It provides us with real learning statistics rather than forcing a teacher to estimate a student's progress.

Reassured and supported by data

I’m a particular fan of what I’ve always called ‘The Bubble Chart’ (The Understanding Grid), as it’s a great snapshot of where a class is doing well and what we need to go over again. Having all of this additional data lets me know that I won’t have to do as big a recap at a later date when we are back in schools again. Tassomai has certainly saved me a lot of time.

If I ever moved schools I would encourage them to get Tassomai as soon as possible. I’m hoping my role going forward will be going to the other schools in our academy trust to help them all implement Tassomai for their science departments.

This year has been really stressful, as we’ve not fully known how much the students are learning. I can sit in my chair and talk for 45 mins on camera but it’s still a worry that some of them might not always be getting it. However with Tassomai I know that they can’t fool me into saying they’ve understood a topic. I find it immensely reassuring.