Every teacher will have moments, as they deliver a lesson, when the stars align, they are on a roll and the pupils are eating out of their hand, says Matthew Pearce, rector of The Glasgow Academy.
What he and the head of the senior school, Matt Gibson, wanted to do was “capture those moments and bottle them”, he says.
The result is thinkfour, a website containing short videos of teachers delivering core concepts - or unpacking big ideas, as the thinkfour strapline puts it - in 13 Higher subjects.
Pearce and Gibson worked with academics, cognitive psychologists, tech specialists, students, parents and teachers to understand what was needed to “digitally capture the human connection great teachers achieve in their classrooms”.
The other impetus for the project - beyond trying to “bottle” great lessons - was, of course, the pandemic and the lockdowns, which meant schools were forced to close and learning moved online.
During the national lockdowns, there was a lot of focus on “synchronous learning”, says Pearce, and the extent to which schools were providing live lessons. But he found pupil feedback wasn’t entirely supportive of that emphasis.
He says: “While live interaction with a teacher was valuable at times, it was almost overrated because the feedback we were getting from our young people was that, pastorally, it was very helpful but asynchronous resources - that they could return to on demand - were really powerful for them. With that thought, we started developing this idea about what we could create in that space.”
Work commenced on thinkfour in April 2020, in the early stages of the first lockdown, and the site opened in April 2021.
Pearce and Gibson started by looking at what was already available for Scottish pupils to tap into and they found a lot of content, but it was of varying quality. Many of the films involved teachers simply talking into the camera and the content was often too long, says Pearce.
“There were little snippets - gold nuggets - but the quality was not sustained,” he says.
The name of the site - thinkfour - comes from the fact that all the videos are just four minutes long. Around a dozen Glasgow Academy teachers feature on the videos and all of them were screen tested before they could take part.
Pearce continues: “The quality is so important because if the quality is not there - if it’s not packaged properly and the presenter isn’t engaging enough - then young people will switch off and choose to do something else. The videos are deliberately short because we need to hold their attention.”
All the videos have a rhythm to them, says Pearce.
He says they are:
- Tightly scripted with every word made to count and no more than four minutes long.
- The visuals match the verbals - with key words appearing on screen at just the right moment and simple diagrams used to help understanding where appropriate.
- Analogy is used to help get across difficult ideas because memorable metaphors should make it easier for pupils to recall the information contained in the films.
Now thinkfour is accessible through the Scottish schools intranet, Glow, and is officially part of Scotland’s national e-learning offer, which also includes the e-Sgoil and the West OS pre-recorded lessons.
Last month, The Glasgow Academy won an award at the Tes School Awards for “best use of technology”.
Hilary Goldsmith, one of the judges - who is also a school business leader and the founder and chief executive of SBLConnect - described the project as “head and shoulders above the rest in terms of impact”.
But with Covid and lockdowns fading into the past - and a school year successfully completed without mass school closures - does Pearce expect thinkfour to continue to be relevant.
“Absolutely,” he says, “because young people have to do a huge amount of independent study in preparation for SQA exams. But we should also be encouraging young people to spend time just enjoying and engaging with learning.”
He adds: “We have got to question if the future of education is going to be moving from lesson to lesson, six periods a day, five days a week.”
Currently, thinkfour has videos on key concepts in art, biology, business management, chemistry, English, French, geography, history, Latin, maths, modern studies, PE and physics.
All the content is freely available.
