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If anyone had told me that remote teaching would be this hard – I would never have believed them. What’s there to worry about? No time wasted travelling to and from school, far less marking, one or two Zoom calls a day as well as a daily a message to my class… A breeze! Or so I thought.

Well here I am, in my third month of lockdown and time has a different tale to tell. The ‘new normal’ has been exhausting! Having to get used to a totally new way of doing everything has been way more tiring than I thought it could be. Yes, there was a potential to have a bit more sleep – no daily 6 a.m. alarm to worry about. However, I didn’t expect to be affected by the Covid-19 news the way I have been. Sleepless nights and a fuelled anxiety have meant that I haven’t rested well at all. I constantly worry about everything and everyone around me- with elderly parents who can’t get out, to vulnerable friends and neighbours and of course, my own children.

Zoom meetings have become part of my ‘new normal’. I have learnt all the techniques and tricks to successful online meetings: I am sure this will be the way forward for so many as we come out of lockdown. It’s all been great as long as the technology hasn’t failed, or that I haven’t forgotten to set an alarm for my meetings. I have absolutely loved seeing my pupils on Zoom calls – I didn’t think I would miss them as much as I did. Just hearing about what new skills they’ve picked up or the fact that they had mastered life skills such as cooking and D.I.Y, was fabulous – this is something that I would never had known about otherwise.

Never did I think planning and putting together remote learning packs would take as long as it has. I have been meticulous in sourcing/making the right tasks with the right amount of challenge for my pupils. Not being able to teach them new concepts has made me feel as if I have let my pupils down, but it couldn’t be done. Not knowing how much support my pupils were getting at home meant that I was ‘in the dark’ about how much work they were actually doing or even if they were being supported by their parents, who had their own work to do.

Having the joys of no SATs this year (I am a year 6 teacher), should have offered a welcome reprieve but it didn’t. I didn’t realise that some pupils would actually get so upset over having no tests! Tests aren’t for everyone, we know that, but they are a form of summative assessment that many teachers rely on for data. We are now left thinking “Do we actually need that data?” especially now that teachers all over the country have had to fall back on their own assessments of pupils’ progress.

Being a RE subject lead, I have made sure that we as a school sent home sound RE activities. This has been a particularly good time to use the NATRE Spirited Arts competition to send home, giving our pupils a highly relevant and creative task to enjoy completing. Through contact with my pupils via Zoom calls, I know that many of them have thoroughly enjoyed having the time at home to sit and reflect on life, in order to write about their compositions and more importantly, they have enjoyed involving their parents in this process, which I feel is an ideal opportunity to give their parents a clearer understanding about what RE is like in schools today. I have found the home learning tasks provided by NATRE as well as RE:ONLINE to be lifesavers!

The breakdown of lesson content on the RE:ONLINE website has been extremely useful: I have loved the useful headings of activity, knowledge, lesson planning, starter and assessment to help guide me in my planning. I managed to continue teaching about Buddhism (as I had started this unit with my year 6 pupils before the lockdown began) thanks to RE:ONLINE. I was able to easily source a website giving my pupils information about Buddhist beliefs and use the suggested activities from the RE:ONLINE website to give my pupils. Being able to do this has been instrumental in easing my workload. I know that the lesson content I have given my pupils is of sound quality and I know that they will really enjoy the tasks which have been set for them.

I have really enjoyed finding links showing how religious worship has changed all over the world and using these to form the basis of new lessons. An example has been sharing current images of Mecca with my year 5 pupils, teaching about how worship has been forced to change, especially relevant during the month of Ramadan. This is turn raised questions with pupils about the importance of having a place to worship and what difference not being able to visit a mosque, church, synagogue or any other building would make to a person of faith. I have learnt that pupils have enjoyed discussing these ‘Big questions’ with their parents at home and that the classroom is not the only place where a debate can happen!

Moving forwards, I do believe that the way we teach and plan units of work from now on, will change for the better as we have learnt to think from a different perspective. I certainly know that the staff in my school have all been signposted to where to find certain resources and will now have a bank of where to access super quality lesson ideas and resources.

The lockdown has taught me one thing: that I am a dedicated teacher who loves teaching. This is what I was always meant to do! Teachers are highly resilient and they find a way of making things work. Whenever the wifi played up or my school’s remote server broke down, I sought to use the time I had doing something productive. The amount of amazing cpd opportunities available for free has been countless – for this, I will always be so grateful! The RE:ONLINE website has offered a plethora of resources and learning opportunities that I have shared with teachers in my school. NATRE and RE Today have offered excellent webinars at cheaper rates – an opportunity I couldn’t resist: such a great way to provide cpd for all staff. This has been one of the many advantages of the lock-down – a time that I will never forget!

When we do go back to school in some shape or form, I do know that I will never take anything for granted and I will cherish every moment with my pupils and my colleagues.

It can be a daunting space: this symbol is associated with what religion, this mantra belongs to whom and ‘celebrating’ in school without being disingenuous. Welcome to Primary Religious Education.

The love for diversity and communication between people is what has driven me for a long time. From personal experiences to the places we hold in society, I find it hard to shelve the subject of RE as a standalone concept. From children to adults, the notion of identity and religion is a fluid concept. It not only swims from one side of the spectrum to another, but also deviates from the stereotypes society may have. I suppose that is why it may overawe primary practitioners in their delivery of the subject.

Let us take our best assets: our pupils, our want to teach and share knowledge, and most importantly, the want for relationships. Religions seek for relationships: be it between creators and their servers, festivals and even places of worship are there to bring people together. The classroom has brought us together, and literacy leads to self-reliance and curiosity. So why can’t that be the footing of your RE lessons?

Religious literacy should aid in the delivery of your lessons, no matter the topic or question at hand. It stems from the importance of oracy. For a child to be able to vocalise their thought process, whether with visual prompts, or key words, in order to better communicate. Religious literacy strives for better communication between peers in a classroom, and also between teachers.

One of the principles of religious teaching is that religions are internally diverse. That’s a biggie: navigate slightly away from singing praises of us all being the same with different names. Yes, it can be a topic of discussion (my religion says this, that’s similar to that), however, while these ‘major religion’ labels have their uses, it is important to understand that identification as a Hindu or Muslim (or any other religion) conceals an incredible diversity of beliefs and behaviours. This is where the literacy takes place.

More so, your classroom is its own culture of (little) human behaviour, with a set of rules, beliefs and disagreements. From early theological thought in year 3, to deeper questioning by year 6. Religious literacy encompasses all aspects of human culture and behaviour in one. What it will also bring to the forefront, and it’s peeked its head into many a lesson of mine, are that religions are dynamic and changing. Concrete they are not. Why? Human practice and behaviour.
For example, by emphasising principles, you can start to engage in the rudimentary recall of facts of a religion or world view, in the hope to lead a more innovative way of communicating with people for whom religion is an integral aspect of their lives, and others where it is not. Knowing that someone has religious beliefs or practices can then be the start of an open-ended conversation, rather than an invitation to make assumptions – either positive or negative. Allowing the asking of questions, and creating an environment where judgment is suspended is key. Challenging unfounded claims others make about a ‘cultural other’ that sound unfair is also a good way to redirect the conversation and help others evaluate their own worldview to prevent the problem from perpetuating.

It sounds fiddly, with curious minds who pose another question in response to the question, but perspective broadening starts with the teachers, the assistants and the children in a whole school setting.

Religious literacy doesn’t and shouldn’t stop at the school gates.

We are lucky to have good provision at key stage 4 for those students that don’t opt for GCSE. We see them once a fortnight for 1 hour and we mainly have RE specialists teaching it. It’s called REality.

Up until recently our course has been mainly moral and ethical issues per half term, some which link to the GCSE and some don’t. To avoid repetition of work of the GCSE students we have tried to take slightly different angles on the topics in our core RE. For example, when looking at abortion we look at many more ‘real life’ case studies and look at examples of ‘forced abortion’ and the issue of who should decide about if a woman should be allowed to either have or not have a baby.

However, in the past year we have been reviewing our provision to try and plan for more challenge, progression and balance across the disciplines. Our key stage 3 (year 7&8) is purely theology and religious studies so we wanted to balance out the disciplines at key stage 4. So, we completed the Church of England audit resource (https://dioceseofyork.org.uk/uploads/attachment/4000/self-evaluation-audit-secondary-sept-18.pdf) and saw that we were doing less philosophy with students as we could be.  The moral and ethical issues were using a lot of social science and some of the philosophical ‘big questions’ in life but not much from the influential philosophers and their arguments. So, we now have a ‘Philosophy 1’ & ‘Philosophy 2’ unit in year 9 & 10 that build on each other, which is helping us to develop our subject knowledge as we’re teaching things we’ve not taught before.

We also looked up to the A level specifications to look for content that could be included in our topics to challenge students. We found that theories such as Utilitarianism could be taught simply and importantly repeated across topics, so students have the repetition of content to help them remember and understand it across topics.

Finally, to give each unit a clear focus, we are developing a clear, curricular enquiry question for students to answer at the end of the topic. Whilst these won’t be ‘in-depth’ due to the time restraints, they will allow students to pull together the beliefs and theories to answer them. For example, “Is it our right to decide what happens to our body?” for our medical ethics topic. We don’t have to complete formal assessments for REality but this does give students a sense of purpose over the topic as we can reference back to it over the 2-4 lessons and they can see how each lesson contributes to their response to the enquiry question. To keep things focussed for students we don’t use books, but we use A3, double sided sheets which have a pre-designed framework for their keywords, notes, questions and finally the enquiry question. This means that we spend less time on presentation and copying key information and more on discussion, case studies and application of the beliefs, teachings and theories. This also significantly reduces our mark load as we mainly are checking they’ve completed the correct boxes for the lesson.

Overall, we feel that these developments are encouraging the students to continue to take REality seriously as we are challenging their thinking and giving it a clear structure and focus.

Reflecting on teaching and leading RE during the lockdown period has made me realise there have been some challenges, but also some surprising advantages.

We have been teaching all of our classes the normal curriculum predominantly through a combination of audio power points (delivered via google classroom) and live zoom lessons. These have caused some challenges. For example, I had to quickly learn how to use these apps and to find time to write numerous power points and source suitable clips. I have also made many, many mistakes. Such as forgetting to turn the microphone on when I was recording! However, there have been advantages. In particular, creating the audio power points have enabled me to deepen and consolidate my understanding of a unit and how this links to other curriculum areas. As well as introduce some new ideas sparked from my attendance at Strictly RE earlier in the year. In addition, as the students have found these audio power points to be so useful, I plan to write more of these and utilise them to better support flipped learning and to aid those revising for an examination or to catch up due to absence.

Deciding how to teach the year 11 and year 13 has also been a challenge. We made the decision to provide lessons which enable students to make the transition to the A level or a university degree respectively. However, although this was time consuming, as there were no previous materials to draw on, it too has been advantageous and even enjoyable. Firstly, it has enabled me to further my engagement with various academics in order to identify beneficial topics for pupils to explore and to discuss the suitability of materials they already provide (I am lucky in this respect as, due to my role on NATRE, I already work with various scholars). This has led to fruitful, ongoing dialogues, concerning how these materials could be adapted and developed to better support school pupils; something that will be continue to be useful for all in the future I hope. Secondly, this also drew my attention to various free webinars being provided for teachers. Thus, I have been attending, virtually, webinars (which include those given by ResearchED and James Holt/TRS at Chester University) that have enabled me to deepen and reflect on my subject knowledge, pedagogy and teaching practice. Such engagement has already been beneficial as it has led to adaptions being made to the curriculum and in the resources used to support pupil learning; something I hope will also continue over the summer term.

Therefore, although there have been many challenges (not all mentioned here), there have also been benefits both in terms of my own practice and in the experience I have provided for the pupils, as I try to do the best I can to deliver my lessons in this ‘new normal’.

‘How I..’ feels misleading for the title of this blog post. When it comes to developing schemes of work in my department it is very much ‘how we…’. Taking a collaborative approach to developing our KS3 curriculum is important to ensure that all of us are invested in it and share the same vision.

The first thing we discuss when wishing to introduce a new scheme of work is ‘what knowledge do we want students to know by the end of their time in school?’ The National Curriculum states that we should ‘introduce pupils to the best that has been thought and said’. In RE, this could encompass a huge amount: allowing students to encounter the ideas of the Greek philosophers, engage with religious texts, debate ultimate questions about meaning and purpose, discover contributions that have shaped our response to ethical issues in society today. The list goes on. This appears wildly ambitious. The first question you might ask is ‘How can I fit it all in?’ Unfortunately, we can’t. Being selective is difficult but consider what concepts it is that you wish your students to learn that will enable them to succeed later on at GCSE and A Level. A couple of years ago I shockingly discovered, on introducing A Level at my school, that although students had achieved 9’s at GCSE, they did not know how to look up a Bible verse because I had always provided the texts for them. I knew this was something I had to rectify immediately and embed earlier on in the curriculum.

The second question may be ‘Well surely I can’t possibly teach Descartes’ philosophy to Year 7 or explore how the Great Schism changed the face of Christianity forever in Year 8?’ Actually, this is exactly what I am suggesting – all students deserve access to such groundbreaking and influential ideas, however complex they may be. We shouldn’t assume that our students would not be able to ‘do it’ and therefore, we won’t teach it. I actually find that students enjoy learning the most when they are challenged. The feeling of finally understanding something is much more rewarding when they have had to struggle to get there.

In our Year 7 Introduction to Philosophy unit we explore Descartes’ infamous cogito ergo sum (usually translated into English as “I think, therefore I am”). We begin by asking students ‘what they know for certain to be true? How do they know?’ which leads onto a class discussion about empiricism. We then use a clip from the film ‘Inception’ to reinforce the idea; the main character Cobb cannot know whether he was dreaming throughout (spoiler alert!) because dreams feel so real when we are in them. This gives students enough background knowledge to look at Part 1, Article 7 of Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy. We use the original text and students are asked to infer whatever they can from it. Support comes with the live questioning and unpacking of the text together that follows. In our Year 8 History of Christianity unit students summarise each event studied on their own timeline throughout the lessons so they can put them in context and analyze their impact. The ‘Knowing Religion – Christianity’ textbook and the Truetube ‘Church History in Ten Minutes’ video have been useful resources. Most students can relate to the arguments that led to the Great Schism when they think about the disagreements that they have with family or within school, despite shared values.

Finally, context is equally as important as content. Mary Myatt stresses the importance of ensuring that students understand the bigger picture. This is crucial for when students apply knowledge to new topics throughout the curriculum. Our Year 8 curriculum is centred around the theme of morality and rights. Students begin by studying ideas of right and wrong including different responses to ethical dilemmas e.g. the trolley problem (a thought experiment where a decision has to made to save the lives of 5 people by killing 1 or do nothing and allow the 5 to die). We then move on to looking at how religion has both been a force for equality and discrimination throughout history before enquiring how Jews can still believe in an all loving, all powerful God after the Holocaust? Finally, we examine why Muslims face prejudice today and how we need to learn from the mistakes of the past in how they are treated. Each of our lessons starts with a retrieval quiz where we ask students recall questions from ‘last lesson…’, ‘last term…’ and ‘last year…’. This allows us to make explicit links with knowledge from previous topics that we will be building on in that lesson.

Due to the new Ofsted framework the words ‘intent, implementation and impact’ may now strike fear into teachers, however, considering these has very much allowed our department to review what we want out of our curriculum and to engage afresh with the subject we love.

In September 2017, I started what I could only describe as my dream job. A supportive, local secondary modern school appointed me as Subject Leader of RS. I was to teach from KS3 to A Level. I couldn’t be more excited to get started.

One thing, however, troubled me. In a larger than average school, I taught only twenty students in Year 11. The Year 10 cohort numbered twenty-seven. Whilst this made for an easy marking load, it didn’t bode well for the survival of the subject as a GCSE option and put our A Level numbers in jeopardy. Something had to be done at Key Stage 3 in order to boost the numbers.

The most obvious place to start was with the Year 9 course – my priority was to ‘sell’ the subject as a challenging, respected GCSE option, and one that would prepare students for life in modern Britain. In line with the SACRE Agreed Syllabus, I kept the first half of the year focusing on Sikhism but introduced a Philosophy module for the latter half. Broadly inspired by the ‘Existence of God’ theme from the OCR GCSE, this module introduces topics such as evil and suffering, arguments for the existence of God and religious experience. I was also keen to bring in a lot of discussion and evaluation – so P4C techniques and Socratic Circle discussions feature heavily.

However, I knew it wouldn’t be enough just to re-write Year 9. In order to promote sustainable growth and genuinely attract students to the subject (as opposed to them choosing it to fill a spot on their timetables), Year 7 and 8 needed well-resourced, challenging and interesting lessons. A further challenge was posed by the large number of non-subject specialists teaching RS across the two years – I needed to ensure that they felt confident and supported in delivering lessons which stretched and enthused the students.

I had inherited a handful of schemes of work and a few resources which didn’t have the depth that I felt was needed. I decided to re-start from the Agreed Syllabus. We decided to keep Years 7 and 8 to comparative religion, exploring Christianity and Buddhism in Year 7, allowing students to build on their work from KS2, and Islam and Judaism in Year 8. This meant that students could draw comparisons between Islam and Judaism and see the overlaps – important in promoting the British Values of individual liberty and respect of those with different faiths. We introduced a further module at the end of Year 7 called ‘Big Questions’, which boosted listening and debate skills through exploring the nature of humanity and morals from Buddhist, Humanist and Christian perspectives. I was keen to promote student-led working and independence, as well as keeping lessons fairly fast paced, so we have lots of ‘chunked’ activities and mini-plenaries throughout to assess understanding. Lastly, I wanted to emphasise the academic value of RS in terms of developing written skills, so we have embedded evaluation questions in order to develop empathy and appreciation of different views.

To say that I have been pleased with the results of the re-development would be an understatement. From a cohort of twenty, now over sixty students have chosen RS as one of their GCSE options to start next year, tripling our numbers in three years. From three in our current Year 13 class, we are set to have 15 A Level students start in September. I haven’t declared the RS lessons ‘finished’ yet – I’m exploring a re-design of KS3 to introduce a more thematic based approach, however it is clear that students value the challenge and depth of study that our subject can offer.

‘Are you sure about that?’

Five of the most powerful words in any teacher’s vocabulary. In my modest career teaching RE across a variety of settings and ages, nothing in my teaching toolbox has been more effective than casting doubt on a student’s knowledge. By ‘doubt’ what I really mean is finding creative and subtle ways to make students question their knowledge, but it starts by making them doubt themselves first.

One of my favourite ways to do this is in something like a card sort activity. I remember one I had set up providing the students with a range of quotes that were said by either Martin Luther King Jr. or Malcolm X. Their task was to match the quotes to the person using their knowledge of both. What I discovered was a very low level of learning and students not really engaging with their knowledge. I could hear lines such as ‘Malcolm X couldn’t possibly have said this, so it must be the other one’. On the face of it this is good stuff, that student knows enough about Malcolm X to know that he wouldn’t have said that. But that’s not what learning in RE is about. We want the students to go just that little bit deeper with their thinking. That’s what I wanted to achieve.

Next day, same activity, different class but this time (having reflected on my practice of course) I changed things up a bit. To make the students begin to really question their knowledge, I put a quote in there from a small green character from a well-known science fiction film. Except I didn’t tell the students. This changes the game completely, because now when students looked at that card they said ‘Well it can’t be Malcolm X but hang on, I can’t imagine Martin Luther King Jr. said that either. What is going on? Did we get this card by mistake? Could it possibly be one of them?’ Now we have it, the proverbial cogs are turning and the deep learning is happening. Plus, it’s always a delight to reveal at the end which one was the ‘outsider’.

Call this what you want, ‘the red herring’, ‘the odd one out’, ‘the elephant in the room’ but the principle is still the same. Include in their learning something outside the paradigm of what you’re asking them to learn in order to question their knowledge and get them really thinking about what you’re teaching them. The applications for it are endless – adding a quote from the Qur’an in with Bible quotes for example, or even replacing one of the 8 Fold Path with one of the Decalogue. If you’re really creative you can cast doubt on the student’s current knowledge by building in elements of their previous knowledge.

Don’t do this too frequently though. Recently a student of mine took one look at something and within 30 seconds said ‘That’s not right. Sir has put that in just to try and mess with us.’ He was right, I did. I was so proud of him.

We are in unprecedented times that offer new challenges for the teaching profession and our students. It has been difficult setting work that is worthwhile, easy to monitor, works with family commitments at home and is not going to create an excessive workload.

Keep it simple

Keeping it simple means bullet point instructions via an email sent each morning and resources in clearly labelled folders on our VLE. I am trying to balance working from home with family life and so I set up my emails the night before using delay send. We also have whole year groups doing the same tasks rather than individual teachers setting their own work. This reduces workload and keeps it simple in the event of staff absence. We need to remember that parents are often trying to help multiple children with one laptop in already difficult circumstances – now is not the time for experimenting with lots of new ideas.

Key Stage 3

I am going to say something now that is a tad controversial but I don’t think it should be – we like textbooks and I think that they can provide some of the solutions to the challenges of remote learning. Our Key Stage 3 students are doing textbook work in their exercise books which is then tested every 3^rd lesson using Sam Learning. I want to keep it simple and I don’t want teachers having to check that students have marked work accurately and so I have created or set pre-existing tasks that mark themselves – shockingly some students write “dunno” for everything and then award themselves full marks.

There are online platforms via which students can access electronic textbooks or part of a book can be scanned and placed onto your VLE. Information about copyright can be found here. (https://www.cla.co.uk/cla-schools-licence)

I have staggered the SAM Learning tasks so that teachers are not getting bombarded by reports constantly, this means that a full time RE teacher with 20 plus classes is only getting one or two reports emailed to them each day. When the report arrives we use SIMS to send a bulk email  for any student who has not completed the work. So far it has been very few. To minimise workload it is a copied and pasted email that politely says that we have noticed that your son/daughter has not completed their work and can we do anything to help. The student with the top score in the class gets a postcard home via sims and we give out achievement points for the top 5 in each class.

We are using this process to train students into good habits, when we have achieved this, we will consider using the excellent resources that have been provided by NATRE. http://www.natre.org.uk/about-natre/free-resources-for-you-and-your-pupils/

Key Stage 4 and 5

Most of our time and effort is going into Key Stage 4 and 5, we have small option groups and therefore the approach suggested may not work for schools that enter full cohorts for the GCSE.

We are using our existing PowerPoints and turning those into videos which we narrate ourselves using either the record slide show option in PowerPoint or screencast. https://screencast-o-matic.com/. These videos are then being uploaded onto YouTube and a link is sent to the student. We are not doing any live video lessons because this could trigger safeguarding issues. Prerecording videos is also quicker than streaming a live lesson because I am not waiting for students to complete tasks, they pause my video whilst they work. This flexibility also works for me as a parent with a young child at home because I don’t have to guarantee to be online at a certain time. Most videos are about 15-20 minutes long. The resources are all familiar to me and so it is rare that it takes me more than one take to record a video. If I don’t have time to make a video, I am just emailing students the existing PowerPoint with simple bullet pointed instructions.

In each lesson I ask the students to send something to me so I can check that they are keeping up. This is often just a screenshot of a quiz that requires a quick glance but about once a week an exam question. I have email folders set up for my GCSE and A Level classes so I can put their exam questions straight into a folder and then come back to it when I have time to look at them properly.

I am trialling whole class feedback using a recorded PowerPoint in which I will include samples of work and talk through strengths and weaknesses as they annotate their work – just as we do in class.

I am keen that any resources that we make can be used in future years as revision resources, we are working hard and this must have an impact on future cohorts.

Rewards

We are a department that recognises the power of the carrot and we don’t want to lose this when the students are working from home. We send home and tweet a merit league table each fortnight (just the top ten) and we will continue to do this because teachers are still giving out merits and sending home postcards from SIMS.

We also have a department twitter account from which we share examples of student work and we will continue to do this.

Enrichment

We all have those students who love RE and want to go that extra mile, those students are our GCSE and A Level students of the future and so we need to keep them engaged with enrichment activities.

We will be inviting students to take part in the Spirited Arts competition at home.

http://www.natre.org.uk/about-natre/projects/spirited-arts/introduction/

We have also published on our twitter feed a guide to RE related programmes they can watch on TV or stream. I am also planning to share on our twitter feed links to virtual trips to key sacred sites around the globe.

Being born in the Midlands I was aware of and very comfortable with diversity from a young age. I was interested in particular by the different foods and colourful cultures which just seemed so vibrant and celebratory. This early interest has stayed with me throughout my life. So, when I moved down to the Bournemouth area aged 13, I was surprised to find a much more monocultural situation. However, being 13 I had plenty of other things to concern me, so I just got on with being awkward and trying to work out who I was and what I wanted to be.

Fast forward 10 years and I began teaching at a secondary school in Poole in a department of 1 and trying to introduce seriously apathetic students to the faith of Islam. I realised that what I really needed was a ‘wow’ factor or a connected human factor.

Could I visit a mosque? No, the nearest one was over 30 miles away and with no budget or likelihood of gaining permission for a trip this clearly wasn’t going to happen. Add to that the absence of any nearby Muslims I felt rather stuck…

So, when three years ago the opportunity arose to be involved with RE:ONLINE I was thrilled. Not only because of the teaching resources but because of ‘Email a Believer’.

Here you will find 10 believers from the following religions and worldviews

• Baha’i
• Buddhism
• Christianity
• Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter-Day Saints
• Hinduism
• Humanism
• Islam
• Judaism
• Paganism
• Sikhism

Each believer is available for you to ask questions about their faith or worldview.

These answers are all quality controlled and the service is completely free.

This would have helped me when I was teaching so much. Let me give you an example:

When I was teaching GCSE Islam, I was totally comfortable with the knowledge aspect of the hajj pilgrimage but I would never be able to say how it would feel as a Muslim to walk around the Kab’ah or stand on the Mount of Mercy.

As a non-Muslim I would not even be allowed anywhere near Makkah however our Muslim believer has performed the hajj and can give that personal connection. So, if you live in an area without many opportunities to connect with different faith communities personally ‘Email a Believer ‘ can help provide some missing answers and personal insights.

Our believers have already answered many questions on a variety of topics, these can be found on the webpage. Some are now also being turned into resources which can be accessed in the RE:ONLINE teaching resources, just select the theme ‘lived experience’ to see them all.

Sometimes teachers use ‘Email a Believer’ to set a homework task.

The homework could be ‘ think of 5 questions each that you would ask a believer about an aspect of their faith’. Then bring all the questions back and have a class discussion before submitting some to the believer. We aim to get the questions answered within a few days. I would always suggest asking a question that would involve the impact on daily life or lived experience. If you also mention the age of your class, we will try to answer in age appropriate language.

I hope this will encourage you to engage with ‘Email a Believer’. Personally, I know that reading the answers has helped me develop my personal understanding of the faiths and worldviews. I hope it will help many others too.

Throughout the first part of my training I believed that a good teacher was someone with a good PowerPoint. I remember planning every single aspect of my lessons on a PowerPoint, believing that I must absolutely rigidly stick to the sequence of slides, otherwise the lessons would go off plan. Two years into my career and thankfully I have seen the light, the PowerPoint doesn’t make the teacher, in fact it is often liberating to teach without one!

For a long time, Microsoft was the only technology I exposed myself and students too. All my lessons were planned on and delivered through PowerPoint, it wasn’t until this year I started to look into the many existing and also new and emerging technologies that can be used to digitally enhance learning in the RE classroom. I believe that RE can often be a subject not linked with using technology much. It all started with the trusty visualiser, I love using this piece of kit, it allows me to live mark, plan and answer exam questions right in-front of my students, giving them an opportunity not only to open up the exam specification but also to see the thought process behind answering a GCSE style question. This new addition to my teaching and learning got me thinking of the many different ways we can integrate technology into our classrooms not only with the aim of supporting pupil progress and collecting assessment data but also with the hope of engaging pupils with the subject.

My next step was to set up a departmental website on Weebly, with revision guides for KS4 and homework support for KS3 classes. As a department we were able to create QR codes which were stuck in planners, meaning pupils could scan and access all of the information they needed on their phones or tablet devices for additional support which has so far proved successful. This was also linked to other blogs created by members of the department so that students have a wealth of resources available to them.

Recently, I completed the Apple Teacher qualification which opened my eyes to the potential apple technology can have in the classroom. It’s ability to allow me to teach with apps, such as Quizlet and Nearpod, which not only allow me to assess learning in real time and collect and store formative assessment data, but they also afford me the opportunity to open up the real world from within my classroom. An example of which would be, Nearpod which allows you the opportunity to walk your pupils through the Sistine Chapel, so that they can see the Creation of Adam painting in all of its wonder and glory, the way it was intended. Technology gives us the opportunity to instil a sense of awe and wonder in our pupils, that perhaps other teaching styles cannot.

However, probably the most revolutionary aspect of technology I use regularly to enhance my teaching is twitter! Twitter is full of dedicated and knowledge rich-

practitioners with tons of ideas that they want to share with others in the profession. I use twitter every day, and often signpost other teachers that use tech in the classroom, and whilst I’m fairly new and still finding my feet in the world of digitally enhanced teaching I am sharing my research and evidence via Twitter. You can follow this journey via @tjones_m.

My final thought is this, technology without pedagogy is useless. In order to properly integrate technology into the classroom successfully first ask yourself the question “what is the purpose?”. If the answer is because it will genuinely enhance your teaching, then great go for it, however, sometimes sticking to a PowerPoint and a whiteboard is ok too.