A Day in the Life: Inspiring creativity, capturing confidence and sharing skills…online
The pandemic has altered every aspect of our lives.
For a lot of us, it has changed the way we work, the way we live and the way we cope with everything from popping to the supermarket to planning our future. Something it significantly altered for us here at Finding Voices was the way we teach. As well as shifting an entire curriculum, tailored from years of experience, to become accessible online, we had to quickly adapt to the new norm of teaching via video call from our homes - very different from the image of me teaching above! Some of you might be thinking, yeah that’s pretty simple, you can chat to your students in exactly the same way as you would in person, right? If only it were that easy. For our teachers, moving around, using our bodies and engaging with our students in a safe, fun, physical space is vital to a lot of what we do.
Since moving online, we have had to come up with equally engaging and exciting ways to teach communication skills, similar to many teachers across the country this last year. In this blog post, we delve into a busy Finding Voices (formerly Speaking Works Young Voices) day in the life of one of our class teachers, Rebecca Charlton:
8 AM
Wakey - wakey! I’d be lying if I told you I set my alarm for 8 am every single day, but for a Finding Voices day - 8 am it is! After squeezing in a quick workout, I tend to pop straight on to the least exciting part of my day - email admin! Even though answering all of your questions about classes, LAMDA Exams and availability isn’t my favourite part of the job, if it means they lead to exciting group lessons with as many students as possible -I’d answer emails all day if I had to!
10 AM
Lesson planning time! I’m a very organised person. I honestly thrive off a good spreadsheet so lesson planning brings me lots of joy. In my lessons, I aim to find the perfect balance between supplying my students with essential communication tools, inspiring creativity in their improvisation skills and arguably the most important element, FUN!
12 PM
Time for my first 1:1 lesson of the day. For the purposes of this day in the life, I’ll be changing all of my students’ names and details but hopefully, you’ll be able to get the gist! My first lesson is an hour-long lesson on zoom with James. James is 12 years old and sometimes lacks confidence in school, specifically when he is chosen at random by his teachers and peers and challenged to speak on the spot. With James, I find that he thrives using character and acting skills. It is when embracing bold characters that I can see James gain confidence. So for our session, we looked at various characters in some of James’ favourite books and films: including Batman, Scooby-Doo and Harry Potter. We embodied each character, standing far away from our camera and walking around our rooms as each of them. We also improvised conversations with each - thus allowing James to practice spontaneous conversations in his everyday life at the same time.
Online lessons
2 PM
My second 1:1 zoom lesson of the day is with Elizabeth. Elizabeth is 8 and struggles to pronounce the beginnings of certain words. Though we wouldn’t describe ourselves as speech therapists here at Speaking Works, a lot of what we do allows our students with certain speech difficulties to gain a new level of confidence and learn skills that they can apply to their speech. With Elizabeth, we don’t focus on what she can or cannot do. Instead, we like to have fun when we are trying out new speaking exercises. First, we tried out some pretty hilarious tongue twisters focusing on strong use of the articulators. Red Lorry, Yellow Lorry, Betty Botter Bought Some Butter, She sells seashells on the seashore. Then, we focussed on expressing what want to express using other means than just our words, such as our facial expressions and our gestures. Turning off our mics and sitting a little back from our camera can make for a brilliant charades session!
4 PM
It’s time for group classes! On Mondays, I run 4 classes: 5-7 years, 8-10 years, 11-13 years and 14-18 years via zoom. In it, we focus on the same communication skills as I would teach everybody, whether in a 1:1 session or not, but alongside other students, meaning I can further challenge them by introducing conversational exercises. With my 8-10 class for example, I decided to split the group into 2 scenes. In the first, the students became police officers in New York City, who had just spotted a bad guy! The other scene involved 5 firefighters, in a mansion, who had just come across a ghost. After a few minutes in breakout spaces to devise their plan, the group came together and performed their hilarious scenes to each other, as though in a performance setting (a virtual one, of course). It was not only a chance for my students to have a great time using their imagination and creativity skills, they also had the chance to share skills amongst themselves, learning continuously.
BEDTIME
It is the end of the day, and I am absolutely exhausted but also exhilarated at the same time. Yes, exuding huge amounts of energy to a screen all day is not ideal but you know what, my students are from places all over the UK - sometimes the world! In my virtual classrooms, my students can interact, play, create and pretend with other students they may never have met before, in a safe and comfortable setting, from their own bedrooms! Technology really is amazing when you think about it, isn’t it? Plus, once I’m finished with my last class, I only have to roll from my desk to my bed - the best commute EVER!