Dear CBHS community, in the event of the school’s sustained closure (greater than five consecutive days) at any point due to the COVID-19 outbreak, we intend to shift to remote learning.
Dear CBHS community
In the event of school’s sustained closure (greater than five consecutive days), we will shift back to on-line learning. We recognise there will be stress on our whole community including students, parents and staff. Using feedback from our March 2020 experiences, we have continued to take into account the holistic well-being of our whole community; individual health, employment and financial stressors; and the ongoing psychological impacts. Staff at Christchurch Boys’ are committed to offer the best on-line learning support that we can under difficult circumstances. This will be in line with the following broad principles. They are deliberately broad as we will be receiving daily updates and guidance from various agencies.
Principles Around Expectations of Staff
- We understand that teachers and schools have an important role to play in terms of continuity, providing students with a sense of purpose and productivity, and assisting families and parents to achieve some sense of normalcy.
- We will act with professionalism and collegiality, so we do not create a sense of inequity where students receive nothing from one teacher and too much from another.
- We also understand that staff and students (and their families), will be impacted by COVID-19 which may compromise their ability to deliver on-line learning and for students to complete learning activities.
Principles Around Communications with Students
- Where possible we will use the software that the school already has in place such as Reading Plus, Read Theory, and Education Perfect, especially for junior students.
- All teaching staff must have at least one ‘live’ Teams Meeting with each class per week. This may take the form of a live tutorial post-task, a live instructional lesson pre-task, a live question and answer session, etc.
- For Year 9 and 10 classes, a start of week summary sheet will be managed by their Kaitiaki to which all subject teachers will add their outline for the week. This will be emailed to parents and students by 10am on Monday mornings.
- Teachers will record any video communication and use OneNote/Teams chat/emails for learning conversations. These will also provide threads and a written record of these conversations for students to refer to.
- Other than the weekly “live” Teams Meeting, we accept that student access and work will still largely be asynchronous to help parents and students manage access to shared devices, manage their internet connectivity, and family life.
- Staff will observe these principles for “live” Teams Meetings...
1. staff should time these to match with our existing timetables to avoid potential clashes
2. staff should record these video conferences for students unable to attend the ‘live’ meeting
3. The Teacher Code of Ethics applies to all communications no matter the medium
4. Facebook will not be used as a Learning tool.
- Teachers will generally aim to plan work in blocks (for example, a 3-4 hour block that can be distributed for a student to work on over several days). This will allow students and families to manage device access, wi-fi management and workload.
- We accept that not every student may be able to access work and complete work.
- Staff will predominantly use Office 365 email, One Note, Teams and PC School Messaging as the main tools of communication. These tools create a record of learning and communications within our secure school systems and can be referred to later.
- Staff will encourage work that is not solely on-line based to reduce the time students spend sitting at a screen. Opportunities for a variety of work and activities (for example, Williams Matrix Model projects) are to be encouraged along with community-based activities being recognised as learning opportunities, and health and well-being activities being promoted (for example, the CBHS Strava Running club competition with CGHS, reading to siblings alternated with Read Theory, baking for science experiments, etc).
Principles Around Assessment (Especially for NCEA)
- Without knowing if, when or for how long school may be closed, and subject to any future directives from NZQA or the Ministry of Education, we will take the following into account around any assessment activities on-line...
1. Whether off-site assessment fits within existing assessment conditions and policies (for example, where students are already allowed to work on an assessment task at home).
2. The nature of any assessment tasks and whether sufficient learning/scaffolding is in place for it to be a valid assessment.
3. The conditions for any individual assessment, especially NCEA assessments, and whether those conditions can be meet in an on-line environment.
4. The ability to satisfy authenticity issues.
5. Whether the stressors on students and the wider community outweigh the need to continue with high stakes assessment.
6. Whether we are able to estimate the likely length of closure and whether we can delay, defer or remove assessment from overall course designs.
Pastoral Care and Learning Engagement
- The Weekly Note in its usual form will NOT be sent during remote learning.
- Teachers will provide information to their students’ year level Dean every fortnight. Where a student has not shown evidence of engagement in Teams Meetings or has not completed on-line work, parents will be contacted by e-mail or phone by their Dean (or Kaitiaki) to check if the school can offer any help with learning support or technical issues.
- Students will be sent a ‘Health and Wellbeing’ survey every fourth week. Year level Deans will also use this, along with the fortnightly teacher feedback, to contact parents of students of concern to offer support.
- In place of the Weekly Note, and due to the changing patterns of student work completed during the March 2020 lockdown, an alternative form of reporting will be issued monthly using the following criteria:
Attendance at on-line class meetings
Completion of on-line work and tasks
Standard of work completion
- If you are concerned about your child’s engagement at any point, please email the appropriate year level Dean.
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