Teachers are best placed to choose teaching and learning activities that are appropriate for their students, taking into consideration students' home circumstances and the resources available to them.
Students could:
- with the cooperation of parents or carers and using household resources, plan and undertake a learning area activity that also includes an explicit collaboration skill learning intention; for example, planning and leading a group physical education activity and reflecting on the outcome
- work together in a small group to determine how a task might be completed collaboratively under remote learning conditions (for example, if completing a group creative text or a Mathematics-, Science- or Humanities-based problem-solving challenge) and justify and refine their approach to collaboration based on feedback
- consider ways that active listening in remote learning contexts might differ from active listening in face-to-face situations, practise agreed strategies for a remote context, and reflect on the outcome
- practise the collaboration skill of clear communication by creating a series of online instructions for a peer to follow (for example, instructions for drawing an image or recreating a treasure map), and then comparing and discussing the final results, as well as which aspects of the communication worked well and how other aspects could be improved
- work together on a budgeting or spending scenario (such as imagining they are part of a household that has to share a resource such as a car), discuss what is important to fully agree on and why and gain strong consensus on what, if anything, might be less important to fully agree on and why, and then reflect on how this improves collaboration
- engage with curated videos that demonstrate conflict scenarios (for example, conflict scenarios in the workplace) and, as part of a creative writing text, create conflict resolution text and dialogue that demonstrates what a recently learned strategy might look like, feel like and sound like
- conduct short interviews or watch a recording of an interview with someone who regularly works from home (for example, a freelance journalist, arts practitioner or micro-retailer) to gain insights into strategies for working effectively from home
- build on the results of a personal strengths profile to reflect on how these personal strengths might be used to help meet the challenges of working remotely
- create texts or recordings demonstrating instances of adaptability or persistence
- engage with texts involving adaptability, confidence-building and persistence, to assist in building a learning culture that recognises and values the struggle involved with learning something new; for example, engage with a text exploring the concept of 'heroic failure' in instances such as Eddie the Eagle (see Time magazine's 'The True History of Eddie the Eagle and Britain's Love of Losers') and the Jamaican bobsledding team, or stories of other underdogs not necessarily 'winning' but nevertheless demonstrating attributes encompassing a healthy attitude to challenge
- use a journal to record progress in working with particular strategies to improve their own capacity to work independently and to meet other challenges associated with remote learning and, when back in the classroom, reflect on how these might be deployed in an ongoing way when completing homework.
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