Teaching methods: Teaching at an online school

Thanks for tuning in to this podcast from Teacher magazine, the resource for K-12 educators published by ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research. I'm Dominique Beech. 

In this episode of Teaching Methods, I sit down with Joanna Baker, Head of Campus at Haileybury Pangea – the fully online campus of Haileybury. Haileybury Pangea has around 180 students in years 5-12 from a diverse range of backgrounds across Victoria and the Northern Territory. Approximately 45 teachers deliver lessons for the campus, some of whom are also face-to-face teachers at Haileybury’s in-person campuses. A virtual classroom is such a different context to in-person, so in today’s episode Joanna shares the details of what the school’s timetable, lesson structures and even pastoral care look like. Let’s jump in.   

Dominique Beech: Well welcome, Joanna Baker, to the Teacher podcast. It's a delight to be able to chat with you today for an episode in our Teaching Methods podcast series. I thought to get us started, it would be great to hear a little bit about your role at Haileybury Pangea and also the school context, because it's very unique.

Joanna Baker: Absolutely. Well, it's a pleasure to be here, Dominique. 

I am the Head of Campus at Haileybury Pangea. So, we are a campus of Haileybury, which I believe is still Australia's largest independent school. And we are Haileybury 's first online campus. So, we launched in 2023 with about 80 students, and it's been my absolute pleasure to be Head of Campus from the beginning and to see our school campus grow over the years. So, we're now in a fourth year of operation. 

I think what makes us unique is probably the obvious thing is that we're not limited by geography as a campus. So we do have students indeed from metropolitan Melbourne, but across regional and remote Victoria as well, both coasts, I suppose, and right up to the corner in Mildura represented. And we also operate in the Northern Territory. Haileybury has the Haileybury Rendall School campus up there. And we provide an online option for students in the Northern Territory as well. So, we do have students from all across this very vast country, and we also have a lot of students who might be temporarily travelling or living and travelling overseas with their families, travelling for sport, etcetera. We've even got a student who's currently crossing the Pacific on a boat. So, it's a really fascinating group of students and group of families to work with and we're really proud to be able to offer that flexibility to families in Victoria and the Northern Territory over the last 4 years.

DB: That's really interesting. It hadn't even occurred to me that you'd be able to offer your services to students who might be temporarily travelling or going through a kind of a transient circumstance there so that they can remain engaged in education. That's fantastic. I'd love to hear a little bit more about then why this school was established back in 2023 and why are families enrolling their children at the campus.

JB: That's a really great question because, of course, Haileybury is a very known and very established school with a really, really strong academic reputation. So, I think it's so exciting that Haileybury decided to take that step and deliver Victoria's first independent online school to provide flexibility. Really, we keep coming back to that word at Haileybury because we know that the world has changed for families, the world has changed certainly for students, particularly post-pandemic, and we wanted to provide another choice for families and for students without compromising the quality of education that Haileybury is known for and delivers. 

And of course, for me particularly, I'm someone who – I live regionally myself and I'm really passionate about expanding access to that brilliant education that Haileybury provides. And so, we've been able to do that with our blended online model, which is really exciting. So, we do work with a really diverse range of families and students come to us for all kinds of reasons. We do have a number of young athletes or elite performers in their fields who really want to pursue their sport or their passion in the performing arts without compromising their schooling. So that's certainly a big group of our students and a growing group of our students as well. 

We do have a lot of students living in remote areas who may not have the school choice or the subject choices at their local school. Indeed, we have a number of students who study one or 2 VCE subjects with us that they can't get at their home school as well. And we have a lot of students who prefer learning online as well. I think that's something that we all saw as educators coming out of COVID is that there are some students who do benefit from a home environment or an environment where they don't have the distractions or the intensity, the social intensity of the campus environment and who can really thrive when they have a bit more control over that environment and control over the pace that they learn at as well. 

So yeah, so I guess that's a little bit of a snapshot of some of the families that come to us, but certainly, yeah, we are grounded in that principle of choice and providing families with different options.

DB: And so that’s something that I want to quickly mention as well is that you’re of course based in Cairns, aren’t you? So, you’ve got children enrolled in Victoria, students involved in the Northern Territory. You’re based in Cairns. Where are your teachers based? Are they kind of flexibly located across the country too?

JB: They are indeed, yeah. That’s been a great benefit and I think that's something that other educators and school leaders like to hear about that we're doing is we've been able to recruit teachers, again, without the, I suppose, the restrictions of geography, which has enabled us to not only recruit some really fantastic teachers, but also retain fantastic teachers that have worked with us in Haileybury in Melbourne, or indeed in Darwin at Haileybury Rendall School, or even in China in our Tianjin campus. And we've been able to retain them, even if they've moved away from Melbourne or Darwin (or whatever it may be) and they've been able to continue to work with us at Haileybury and bring that expertise that they've developed over time at the school to our online campus.

We also do have a number of teachers who teach both online and in our Melbourne campuses as well. And that's been a really interesting exercise in providing more flexibility to teachers as well. Again, we see some of the challenges that have come post-COVID in terms of teacher retention and what teachers are looking for in their work-life balance as well. So, to be able to provide more flexibility in the day, in the week, for teachers about when they can work from home, when they can work from campus has been a really exciting thing to be able to provide, absolutely. 

DB: And so, since the school launched in 2023, obviously a key part of your role has been building and refining a model that blends all of these different methods such as live instruction, you're very big on self-paced learning as a campus, which is definitely understandable. And you also use elements like video content, personalised sessions with subject teachers. I'd like to touch on all of those different elements in detail, but before we actually get there, I'd love to know – in terms of the big picture – what does a broader timetable look like at a campus like yours?

JB: That's a great question and it can be a common misconception, I think, when people think of online learning that it is something that's either completely self-paced – as in students are just let go to work through online content at their own pace – or the other misconception is that it's a replication of a typical school day on campus where students are in online lessons every period of the day. 

Our model, which is very much drawn from what we learned through the pandemic and those experiences, but also from experts in blended learning, including Heather Staker in the US – who's really led a lot of work in this field and we worked with her – is that it is very deliberately a blend. So, it is a blend of live instruction. So, students will have typically 2 to 3 live lessons in small classes of about 10 students, and that's per subject per week. And then they'll have about 2 to 3 hours complementing that of self-paced learning online per subject per week. And that's where the flexibility for them comes in so they can complete that work in and around all the other commitments that they may have, whether that's training, whether that's work, whether that's – we've got students who work on their family's farm, all those kinds of things. So, they have the flexibility around that self-paced component, but it is a requirement and they're submitting that work each week. 

And then there's lots of flexible support that students can opt into as well. So, our teachers have what they call ‘office hours’, so times when they're available online outside of those lessons. We have academic coaches who are graduates of Haileybury trained to support students with general study skills as well as subject specific help as well. And then we have a range of peer collaboration sessions as well that students can opt into during the week too. 

That's in addition to, of course, our co-curricular programs, assemblies, and all those community activities that we run online as well. So, the weeks certainly start to fill up for students, but I think what they like the most about it is that it does give them a little bit more autonomy over their day. And again, certainly for our older students who might have significant commitments outside of their academics, it's really, really beneficial for them to have that flexibility.

DB: And then when we take the example of one of those subject lessons that has about 10 students in it, what does a typical lesson look like? Can you talk to me about what the structure of that lesson might be?

JB: Absolutely. And I will caveat by saying that we at Haileybury, we put a lot of trust in our heads of department, our academic staff to develop the model within our model that is going to work best for their subject. It's very much driven by that notion of value adds. So, what is that class time going to add to the student's experience? What's best to happen in class time? What's best to happen in that self-paced model? So, it does vary from subject to subject, but it's very much focused on interaction. 

We want those lessons to be opportunities obviously for students to be interacting with their teacher but also interacting with each other. And of course we use – at Haileybury, we use an explicit instruction model which underpins a lot of the instruction that happens in class as well. So, the start of a lesson might be introduction of a concept, of course, activating prior knowledge, working through an example etcetera, doing some modelling there and then moving to collaborative work or collaborative modelling and then reflection towards the end of the lesson as well. 

Often there's a component of one-to-one check-in with the teacher as well, where students are getting that individualised feedback. And then that's something they take with them into their self-paced learning component that week as well. So yeah, it's been really interesting to see how that varies from subject to subject and how teachers, of course, are really responsive to the work that they're seeing from students week to week as well. That's another real strength of that blended model is that teachers are getting a lot of information each week about how students are understanding the work, how they're progressing and they can adapt their instruction accordingly.

DB: I'd love to hear a little bit more about that then, because that's something that really does come to mind that there may be some real opportunities in this learning model to support teachers to facilitate differentiated instruction for their students. Could you tell me a little bit more about this and perhaps what it might look like in action within a virtual environment like this?

JB:  Absolutely. Yeah, look, that differentiation is so important as we know it's important in general in education. And we found that blended model really has unique affordances around allowing teachers to, I suppose, work through that cycle of seeing student work, identifying, not only individual areas where there may be misconceptions or where students need additional feedback, but also general trends as well across the class in things that are common misconceptions. So, within the online lesson, then they've got that, I suppose autonomy to be able to create small groups, to create flexible groups where needed to address different concepts with students or indeed have that one-to-one time as well. 

And because all of our content is fully visible for students and for teachers as well, our online courses have been designed by our teachers at Haileybury in conjunction with our digital learning experts at the school, there's always work for students to be continuing with as well. So, teachers have the ability to stretch and extend students where they need but also reinforce and revisit particular topics as well with individual students or groups of students.

DB: And something that I do want to really get to next with you, Joanna, is about the student wellbeing aspect. But before I move on to that, I do want to kind of wrap up talking about the method of instruction with hearing finally just about going back to the different methods of live instruction that we've spoken about – self-paced learning, which I feel like I understand a lot better, the video content and the personalised sessions with the subject teachers that you've touched on, too. Obviously, they would play vastly different roles individually, those different methods, and I imagine they complement each other quite well. Can you talk to me a little bit about that, how they all kind of fit in together to create a big picture of a really robust model?

JB: Yeah, look, I think that's where the really strong culture of collaboration within academic departments at Haileybury has been a real strength that we've been able to leverage to build and deliver what we do at Haileybury Pangea. 

And it's been great to see … I guess, as an example, if we think about our maths department, they've started with our initial online courses, which were designed for us, but they quickly learned that there needed to be some adjustments in terms of the online content that was being provided. So they really invested their time as a department in creating instructional videos – which were short and sharp on key topics – and they were built into the online courses which allowed, then, students to have more independence to do that revising, which we know is so important in maths. Students need to go over key concepts. And indeed, when we've got new students coming into the campus as well, really important to be able to direct them to the resources that are at the level that they need as well. 

So, that library of incredible instructional videos that our team have built over the years has meant that they then, the teachers themselves have more freedom to be able to use their time working with students one-to-one in the classroom or in small groups in the online classroom as well. And it's been great to see that those resources are not just for use for our Haileybury Pangea campus but are used across all of our campuses at Haileybury. And that's been a really key part of Haileybury Pangea is that we want to advance educational practice, not just in our online campus, but across all of our campuses and share what we're learning with the wider educational community.

DB: Let's get to talking about student wellbeing and the building relationships with students now. Obviously, I'm really curious to hear about how that all works in an online environment. How do staff go about it? What considerations are there, especially with students in vastly different contexts?

JB: Yeah, absolutely. We've mentioned the diversity of our student cohort and the fact that our students do come to us for many reasons. For some of them, it has been that they've really struggled to attend school in person for many reasons, or it could be indeed that they've been homeschooled because the traditional school model has not worked for them or their parents have wanted something a little bit different for them as well. So that diversity really does require a 360 approach to support. 

So we do have an incredible team that supports our students. Each of our students has, as a first point of contact, what we call a tutor, so a homeroom teacher who sees the student every week. So, they meet in groups every week with students and they're there to do those individual check-ins to have a look at how students are progressing. The data around student progress is very visible for students and for staff as well, so they can very easily have those conversations with students around how they're keeping up with the work, how they're developing their independent learning skills as well. 

And then we have our specialist staff who also support our students. So we do have individual needs advisors. We have a campus psychologist as well. We have a careers team. We have our IT support, digital learning support. So, students have a lot of different experts that they can tap into at different times and that are working, you know, might also work of course with families in the case of our individual needs; psychologist staff as well. And again, the great thing about Haileybury is that those specialist staff are also members of our whole school teams. And so we have the support there from the wider Haileybury community as well. 

So, it is really about, I guess, identifying where students need support and providing that just in time support as well; so it's certainly not a one size fits all model. I think some students, once they adapt to our learning model, find that they really just fly and are quite accomplished at being self-managers, whereas other students may need some more support with study skills, organisation, all of those things, so we have the structures in place to be able to provide that.

DB: And alongside that, student behaviour and classroom expectations is something that came to my mind immediately as well. I imagine that the way that a teacher might approach setting up expectations for their classroom would be quite different in an online environment to an in-person environment. What does that look like for staff at your school?

JB: Yeah, look, that's been a really interesting one. And in fact, what we have been able to do at Haileybury over the past few years, we've developed what we call a culture of learning – and that is a set of routines, behaviours and rules that we expect students to abide by and that we cultivate through the culture of our campus. Whether that's in the physical classroom, in the online classroom, in the quad, at lunch times, wherever it may be. And it's been really interesting to have our Pangea leaders and key staff involved in developing those as a school. 

And it really does come down to respect and interaction. So all of our students in Haileybury Pangea in our online space are expected to attend and participate in those live lessons; so the expectation is very much on that interaction in the classroom with the view that, of course, we want students to get the most out of that experience online with their teachers. And of course, that they're engaging respectfully with their peers. In Pangea, there's a heightened, of course, expectation around managing their time, managing their work, and meeting deadlines as well. And again, that comes with a high level of support underneath that if students are struggling with those organisational skills. 

We also really place a high expectation on our students to be able to vocalise when they need support and what kind of support they need as well. And of course, we work with our students as they go through the school in developing that ability to self-advocate and self-manage. That's really important as well. 

In the broader context, of course, now for the digital world we live in, Haileybury has been very proactive in developing a toolkit for – particularly for parents – around managing safe online relationships and actions. So, we have an incredible program of education for parents and students around that as well. And that's been really, really beneficial, I think for all of our families. And it's certainly an evolving space, so we do try and ensure that information is really up to date as well.

DB: Fascinating stuff, Joanna. It was so interesting to hear everything about Haileybury Pangea and how it's all coming together there and supporting student learning. It's been really great to sit down with you today. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention before we wrap up?

JB: Look, it's been a pleasure to share what we're doing at Haileybury Pangea and indeed what we've learned from the experience. I think, again, that's one of the most exciting things about Haileybury Pangea, is we continue to evolve. And I think that what we're learning is that students can really thrive when they have that mix of high academic challenge and flexible support. So, we're really excited to share what we're learning with the educational community in Australia, so thank you for your time.

DB: Thank you for your time as well. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, Joanna.

That's all for this episode. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a quick moment to follow our show on your podcast app if you haven't already and leave us a review. Both of those things help more people like you to find our podcast and they're a really big help to our team. We'll be back with a new episode very soon. 

Teacher magazine is published by the Australian Council for Educational Research.