What surprising lessons I learnt from teaching remotely

While remote learning brought its hardships, I found it also had some surprising benefits.

Being a drama teacher, I was apprehensive about how ‘Zoom teaching’ would work. Most of what we do is ‘on the floor’ practical work. There is an element of theory, but in junior years that is less important than getting up and doing the practice. Being in the room, working face-to-face, will always be crucial.

The key thing to impart when teaching drama to juniors is focus. Without appreciating the importance of focus, students are simply unable to do anything. When we focus, we concentrate on what we are doing instead of what is going on around us, including worrying about what people think of us.

This may be especially obvious in drama, but could of course be applied to learning any subject. It is incredibly liberating for young people to be able to let go of all of those things that plague a teenager’s self-esteem. How they look, how they sound, what everyone says about them. Once they have the hang of it, being able to solely focus on, let’s say, delivering someone an important message on stage, is extraordinarily freeing.