When the Screen Started Getting in the Way
Over this year, I have been reflecting on my use of screens as a medium for delivering my whole-class literacy sessions.
Like many of us, I got caught up in the PowerPoint wave a few years ago. It started with UFLI and slowly developed into creating my own slides, including words and sentences for children to read from the screen. Of course, I still used paper texts, books and all the other things that make up a literacy programme, but the PowerPoint gradually became the backbone of my sessions.
And initially, it seemed to work.
The children appeared receptive, I liked the structure it gave me, and it helped me feel organised and prepared.
As a device-free class, I didn't really question the use of the screen in this way. Our Year 1–3 rooms have been device-free for a long time, with the rest of our school using devices fairly minimally. The majority of our children's day is screen-free, filled with play, conversation, hands-on learning and interaction. So what was the harm?
The Screen Became the Teacher
I spent a lot of time crafting those PowerPoints.
A lot.
I thought carefully about the needs of my class, the words I wanted them to practise, the sentences I wanted them to decode and encode, and how I could structure the lesson so that everything was there, ready to go.
Quite often, this meant spending part of my weekend creating slides.
At the time, I thought I was making my teaching better.
And perhaps, in some ways, I was.
The presentations helped me keep on track. They gave the lesson a clear structure. They meant I didn't have to stop and think about what came next.
But somewhere along the way, I started to wonder whether the thing that was helping me was actually helping them.
When the Shine Wore Off
This year, I started using the presentations again, just as I had in the past.
Across our junior classes, we merge approaches together, taking the bits that work best for our children. One of these approaches uses prepared slideshows, so it seemed perfectly logical to continue.
I persisted through Term 1.
But as the term went on, something started to feel different.
The children weren't as engaged as they had been in the past.
In fact, the slideshow seemed to have the opposite effect.
It was almost as if they had become so accustomed to screens that the screen itself no longer held their attention.
I found myself spending more and more time trying to direct their attention towards what was happening on the screen.
"Look at this."
"Eyes up here."
"We're looking at the sentence."
"Look at the word."
And the more I tried to get them to look, the more frustrated I became.
And, if I'm honest, so did they.
I tried really hard to maintain that perky pace, to be direct, to keep it moving. Hey I'd been doing this for years now, I knew what I was doing...didn't I ?
I suddenly realised that I was spending precious instructional time managing the medium rather than teaching the content.
That was a bit of a lightbulb moment.
So I Bought a Giant Scrapbook
And this is where things got wonderfully low-tech.
I went out and bought a massive scrapbook.
No hyperlinks.
No animations.
No transitions.
No carefully selected fonts.
Just paper.
I wrote our focus words in it.
Our spelling rule.
Our morphology focus.
Sentences for decoding.
Sentences for encoding.
And I used the scrapbook to guide my teaching.
Almost immediately, something changed.
The children's focus improved.
They were looking at me.
They were looking at the words.
They were listening.
I had the most precious commodity of all, their attended focus.
And, perhaps most importantly, I wasn't spending half my lesson trying to get them to look at a screen.
Ever since then, management during my literacy sessions simply hasn't been an issue. We have found our rhythm again, a perky pace, multiple opportunities to respond, everybody doing everything, time to think, time to respond, time for me to tune in, to recognise, to respond, because I am not worried about managing the slides.
What Else Had I Forgotten?
It got me thinking about what other approaches I had slowly forgotten about simply because the slideshow had become the backbone of my teaching.
I brought the sound cards back.
Instead of clicking to the next slide, I held the cards in my hands.
And everyone focused in.
I brought back games like bingo for decoding practice. It can be used throughout the day, gives children lots of opportunities to practise and, unsurprisingly, they love it.
There was something quite refreshing about rediscovering these simple things.
Things that had never stopped being effective. I had simply stopped reaching for them.
The Magic of a Handwritten Sentence
One of the things that has surprised me most has been the impact of the very simple sentences I write in my scrapbook.
I write a couple of sentences containing our focus sound according to our scope and sequence.
We decode them together.
Then I dictate them for the children to write.
And this is where something rather lovely happens.
Once they have finished, they bring their book over and sit down with my scrapbook.
They compare their sentence with mine. They look carefully. They find anything they need to correct.
Then they bring it to me.
They actually like finding the mistakes.
In fact, they like to beat me by leaving me nothing to correct.
There is something about having my sentence sitting there in front of them—handwritten, on paper, created by their teacher—that seems to make this process more meaningful.
They are not comparing their work with something floating on a screen.
They are comparing it with mine.
It feels more personal and perhaps that matters more than I previously realised.
Perhaps the Problem Wasn't the Children
Initially, when I was shaping my practice, the slideshows really did help me.
They helped me organise my thinking.
They helped me sequence my lessons. They helped me stay on track.
But this year has given me the opportunity to question whether something that makes teaching easier for the teacher is necessarily the thing that makes learning better for the child.
I'm particularly interested in this for children who are instructionally sensitive. Those who are really relying on us to get it right, not those who progress despite of us, but those who's progress is dependent on us.
For some children, even though I tried to keep the slides as simple as possible, the addition of another layer—the screen, the movement, the visual information, the constant changing of slides—may actually be adding to the cognitive load rather than supporting learning.
And perhaps I had been so focused on making sure I had everything I needed that I had stopped noticing what the children actually needed from me.
The Tool Isn't the Teaching
I'm not suggesting we throw out the screens.
That would be rather ironic given that I'm writing this on one.
There are absolutely times when technology adds something valuable to learning.
There are things we can show, create and explore with technology that would be difficult to do otherwise.
But I do think we need to be careful about allowing the tool to become the teaching.
A PowerPoint can organise a lesson.
It can't notice that a child has misunderstood.
It can't look at a child's face and realise that they have completely lost the thread.
It can't decide that today, actually, the sound cards would work better.
That's our job.
Choosing the Right Tool for the Children in Front of Us
Like everything else in teaching, I think this comes back to balance. A word we seem to be so scared of using.
We need to make instructional choices based on the needs of the class in front of us and choose the best tool in our kete to meet those needs.
Sometimes that tool might be a screen.
Sometimes it might be a book.
Sometimes it might be a sound card.
Sometimes it might be a whiteboard.
And sometimes, apparently, it might be a giant scrapbook.
The ever-popular approach of delivering learning through a screen may make it easier for us to organise and guide our practice.
But easier for the teacher doesn't automatically mean better for the learner.
Perhaps the question we need to keep asking isn't:
"Does this make my teaching easier?"
but:
"Is this helping my children learn?"
Because ultimately, that is the bit that matters.
And sometimes the best teaching tool isn't the newest one.
Sometimes it's the one we already had in our hands all along.
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| Thank you AI for the image |
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