Covid has hampered teachers’ helpful ‘nudge’ efforts

Small moments between teacher and pupil can have a big impact on a young person’s future, but these are sadly lacking in an era of remote learning
5th February 2021, 12:00am
Covid Has Hampered Teachers' Helpful 'nudge' Efforts

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Covid has hampered teachers’ helpful ‘nudge’ efforts

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archived/covid-has-hampered-teachers-helpful-nudge-efforts

Mr Bailey, Miss Langford and Mr Watts. It was a series of nudges that led to my becoming editor of Tes, and it was predominantly these three teachers doing the nudging, back before I really knew what an editor did.

Because while I was busy dreaming of being John Cage in the TV show Ally McBeal or the next Simon Armitage, what I was really into was words and the stories they brought to life. Those teachers understood that passion, fuelled my confidence and, nudge by nudge, they nurtured in me an ambition to be a journalist.

We underestimate those nudges. Teenagers have a dangerous but emancipatory tendency to listen to others’ suggestions. While that can lead to disaster, it can also lead to positive life choices stemming from the smallest of moments. And so many of those moments come from teachers, who have that intoxicating combination of knowing children well, yet being separate enough from them - and respected enough - to be truly listened to.

Listening to our new My Best Teacher podcast and reading the interviews in Tes have brought that point home. So far, Tes has chatted with comedian Tim Vine, poet Lemn Sissay and - this week - actor Meera Syal about their school days. What shines through each interview is the importance of small moments with a teacher that nudged the interviewee on to a certain life path.

Syal talks about her Spanish teacher, Mr Cartwright, seeing “a bit of me that no one else had” and how a brief comment about it being OK to “be who you are” set the course of her life and opened up the potential of a career in acting. Vine discusses how Mr Moss nurtured his dramatic tendencies by acknowledging that they were worthwhile: “When you are a child and you have your dreams and silly ideas, and they’re then validated by an adult, it’s a great moment,” he says. And Sissay explains how Mr Unsworth read his early poems, saying that “being seen in that way was inspiring to me. It meant that what I did mattered.”

Teachers may create thousands of these moments over a career and not realise their impact. The power of their words and actions is hard to grasp and impossible to measure. “It’s such a wonderful thing when you are able to tell a teacher, many decades on, about the impact they had,” says Syal. But how many of us get to tell our teachers that the nudge they gave us all those years ago mattered more than they could possibly have imagined? How might it change the judgement of teachers if that “data” was part of the assessment of teaching - a long-term impact metric calculated years after the event?

It is worth reflecting on how many of these moments may have been lost to the pandemic. We are rightly concerned about potential lost learning but the physical distance of remote teaching will surely also have reduced the number of “nudge moments”, which rely on strong relationships, on frequent exposure, on the ability to notice and feel comfortable pointing out what is noticed.

Just as the positive impacts of nudge moments take time to manifest, the negative impact of their loss will not be felt immediately either. We need to pre-empt that discovery, assume that damage has been done and try to fix it. That will mean taking as much care to ensure appropriate time for reflection and relationship building as ensuring time to spot and attempt to repair any academic issues.

How easy will that be? In truth, fiendishly difficult. Already, we see the “catch-up” narrative putting schools in a corner where anything other than intense academic intervention will be impossible. We need politicians to remember that academic progress is built on firm relationships. And we need them to understand that when Syal says “a good teacher can change the course of your life”, she is not only talking about the results they help you achieve but the person they help you become.

@jon_severs

This article originally appeared in the 5 February 2021 issue under the headline “Don’t underestimate the power of the teacher ‘nudge moment’”

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