What are virtual visits?
One of the most powerful things about Edu-Twitter is that you get to hear about schools and trusts that are doing great things. But it’s one thing reading about it, and quite another to actually see it in practice.
Getting to see live teaching in a different school can be tricky to organise. Although teachers and leaders are often keen to share best practice and learn from one another, there is a limit to how many visits a school can accommodate in a term. Geography can be prohibitive too – seeing a great school can mean having to rely on unreliable public transport or the packed motorway network.
At the new National Institute of Teaching, we think we’ve found the answer. Virtual visits.
The idea was born out of the Exemplary Leadership Programme, a pilot funded by the DfE and led by a consortium of organisations. It was the early months of the pandemic, and we were trying to think of a way to bring live practice to our participants with all the restrictions in place. What we found however, was an approach that had huge power beyond what we’d envisaged, an approach that I wouldn’t change now, even though we could go back to being in-person.
How do virtual visits work?
It's simple really – a school leader joins an online meeting from an iPad and takes a big audience in to their school. Using the camera on the iPad, they can flip between narrating the visit and showing live action in a classroom, SLT meeting, CPD session or corridor. You see what they see.
We use these visits as a tool on both our specialist and leadership NPQs – we think we’re the only provider to use them in this way.
The visits are carefully planned to ensure they maximise the time and show deep insight into the focus of the module. In some cases, you might see a recorded excerpt from a coaching conversation between a teacher and their coach, before immediately visiting that teacher in their lesson to watch them enact the feedback they received. Or you could hear from the headteacher about the culture of expectations they’ve created, before seeing it unfold in front of you in corridors and classrooms across the school.
Participants can be in their schools from Torquay to Middlesborough, visiting a school in Birmingham without having to contend with unseasonable snow or traffic on the M6.
This isn’t a ‘school tour’, the purpose is not to see the nice facilities, but to really see what happens on a normal day in a great school. Like a fly on the wall, but with expert narration throughout to make the ‘invisible visible’ – to unpack and explain how practices were decided on, developed, implemented and sustained.
What’s so powerful is that the audience doesn’t impact on the life of the school. We’ve done these visits with audiences of over 100 leaders, you certainly couldn’t do that in-person without bringing the school to a standstill.
The headteacher stepping into a classroom to observe teaching, when this is common practice in a school, doesn’t affect the dynamics in the classroom – the visitors don’t disrupt the flow or interrupt the learning.
So does it work?
The feedback we’ve got so far suggests that teachers and leaders really value this approach.
When learning on a programme like the NPQs, it can be easy to feel that the practices defined in the programme frameworks are too hard to apply in real life. The virtual visits demonstrate those practices live, making them more attainable and easier to apply in one's own setting or context.
Visits go beyond a recorded exemplification, allowing participants to ask questions and dig in to the realities of practical application of successful strategies. Participants talk about the value of ‘seeing it in action’, allowing them to ‘envisage implementation’ and ‘cementing the purpose’ of the learning in a powerful way.
Many participants on the Exemplary Leadership Programme reported having low expectations of a virtual visit, feeling they’d much prefer an in-person visit, but they were genuinely blown away by the experience.
There are countless testimonials I could share, but here are a couple that get to the heart of it:
‘This remote training and the opportunity to see the schools, and actually to see things in practice, it's a privilege really. In some ways it's actually easier as an observer remotely than if you're actually walking around, because there's no pressure on you to do anything other than see what's going on. I think the running commentary alongside that really helped. But I think that opportunity to see things in action and see how they work is really powerful.’
‘I was really surprised with how much I gained from the virtual visit. Really got a great feel for the school, the processes they had in place and their consistency of practice. Some really useful ideas for implementing in my own school.’
To see a virtual visit in action, sign up for one of our eight new NPQ programmes.
Why study with the NIoT?
We are a new, pioneering institute, established by a diverse community of schools. Our blend of online and in-person learning will include contributions from schools in a range of different contexts, as well as from teachers and teacher-educators who are specialists in their fields.
It is an exciting time to be a teacher right now: there is an ever-increasing body of evidence of what works in education. We will be generating our own research, and putting those findings to immediate use in the classroom. We are part of a new school-led movement to change education – if you join us, you will be helping to shape the teaching profession.
We are rooted in schools – we know how rewarding teaching can be, but we also recognise the day-to-day obstacles to teacher development. Our time-efficient NPQs have been drawn up specifically to meet the needs of time-poor, commitment-heavy teachers. Teachers know best what teachers need – our course will give you only the information essential to providing the best education possible for your pupils.