Teaching on Outschool: Learning Lockdown Lessons

In March 2020, when the first lockdown began, my work life had to change completely.

The work I was doing – running cross-school writing projects and delivering CPD across England – was almost uniquely unfit for the times of COVID. Pretty much everything stopped. The kids I had been right in the middle of working with, I haven’t seen again. All of my work was cancelled within two days.

Between March 2020 and now, I have ended up pivoting into five new and peculiar kinds of educational work in order to stay afloat.

• Teaching children worldwide on Outschool
• Poetry Residencies
• Writing a book about teaching
• Teaching Videos on YouTube
• Producing assemblies and marketing for schools

As I start to plan out what my working life might look like in future, I wanted to reflect on what I’ve learnt from each of the five different things I’ve worked on since lockdown.

I have learnt a lot from each one, and it is remarkable how much of it feels transferable into my work in school classrooms. This little mini-series of blogs will explore that learning.

Teaching on Outschool

Outschool is an online marketplace for small-group learning. Teachers on the platform run classes for students around the world. Teachers decide what they want to teach. Some classes are academic but many – perhaps most – are not. Kids with obsessions about rocks can have social groups with other kids who are obsessed with rocks. Kids obsessed with Pokemon can learn how it links to mythology. Kids can learn about the science of farts…

It allows kids to go deep into their interests.

I started teaching on there in mid-February and it has been wonderful. My profile is here for anyone who is interested. I teach about things which I want to teach about, and remarkably enough, the classes have been a magnet for kids whose interests are in mythology, creative writing and subversive humour.

The Secret Society of Odd Behaviours is one of the weirdest things I’ve done as part of my teaching and it is joyous.

I have built things up quickly on there and have taught over 300 kids from across the world. More significantly than that, though, I have a group of about 30 kids who have done 4 or more of my classes. Some of these classes are weekly.

I joined Outschool after getting a targeted advert plonked in front of me on Instagram. I was curious enough to sign up and give it a go, but what I did not expect was how fulfilling it would be, and how meaningful the teaching and the relationships could be.

So… what have a learnt from it?

1. The world can feel very big and very small at once. Across a typical day where I might teach three lessons, I will almost certainly teach kids from 4 continents. I teach plenty of kids in the UK, alongside many in South Korea and New Zealand. I do most of my classes in the evening, meaning most of the kids I teach are in the US. I know how old-fashioned it makes me sound, but the novelty of having kids around the world all learning in my class, side by side, feels like sci-fi.

2. Kids are kids wherever you find them. They all experience the same initial Zoomy unease, they laugh at the same jokes (or ‘don’t’ laugh at the same jokes). They have a really significant set of shared experiences despite being raised in wildly different settings and cultures. Reflecting on this, I go back to Michael Rosen’s writing, and his exploration of what it means to be a child – to be a child is to be in a less powerful position than the adults they live with. This imbalance is the root of a lot of humour. It rings true.

3. Teacher-face can translate to strangers online. Behaviour management can be a challenge when I am teaching classes that are, by definition, quite raucous. If my lesson plan is like a Monty Python sketch, the boundaries of what is and is not appropriate are understandably blurred. The same truths for classroom practice work online: being crystal clear and explicit about where the boundaries are makes it easier for everyone to have a productive time.

4. Parents matter, enormously. What I have found echoes everything I found in school – the more you seek to reach out to parents, the better everything goes. They are the expert in their child and I am the expert in teaching children. I pride myself on the good comms with parents – I ask them before teaching the kid for the first time whether there is anything they could share which would help me to make the class fun and informative for them. This info is golden. When the parents realise I am putting into practice what they are saying, it makes the learning more meaningful for everyone, and trust can build. It has meant that when I have had to have difficult conversations – twice this has happened – I have had the confidence to speak to parents candidly too.

5. Kids need connection, and grow from it. My most successful class has been the Iliad Project. One week, on the second evening of five, I had some time to kill and invited the kids to stay on the Zoom for a while longer so they could chat and get to know each other. They were very good in class before – they were attentive, interactive and thoughtful – but the whole dynamic changed after they had gained that time to be social with each other. They wanted to see each other’s talents and oddities – one kid brought his pet ducks along, another a haunted doll; one kid taught martial arts to everyone, another shared his short story collection – and this shifted the dynamic for the whole week. They were not 10 atomised children seeking the attention of a teacher. They were a group of 10 kids learning together with a teacher – they gave space for each other, and seemed more interested in each other’s ideas. I am more conscious of how I build the social interaction into our classes now – it can work online.

6. Children’s social culture is incredibly globalised. It is mind-boggling to me that kids in Jakarta, the Maldives, Tallinn, Dublin, California and New Delhi can have sampled from so much of the same social and cultural platter. They watch many of the same YouTube channels and share the same memes. They are obsessed with Percy Jackson (in my classes, anyway). They share similar slang. They wear similar brands of clothing. They read similar books and listen to the same music. I am not saying this is good thing, but it certainly eye-opening, and is something to take account of as a teacher.

7. Online small-group teaching is real teaching. I genuinely did explore Outschool out of curiosity, rather than seeing it as a viable form of income. The thing that surprised me was the depth of the learning and the relationships. There are some kids who I have been teaching in different classes for about 4 hours a week. There are some kids locked down in very isolated parts of the world for whom their Outschool lessons have been their main connection with the outside world. I have taught some of these kids long enough, in the small group setting, that I dare say I know them better than I know some of the kids I work with in school face-to-face. Next year, there are some kids dotted around the world for whom I am their main educator, with their place in my class being supported by their school district. Isn’t that mad?

8. It can be financially viable to do this. I’ll avoid the vulgarity of detailed money-talk, but I am “doing well” on Outschool. I invested a stupendous amount of time in it in the first few months, and am now seeing the rewards of that. Outschool is currently my main source of income and it is keeping my kitchen cupboards stocked up.

If you were interested in teaching on there too, I’d be happy to let you know how to set up and get started. It would be nice to have some more local teachers on there. Here is my referral link.

I have learned absolutely loads about what it means to be a teacher through Outschool. I see how it does not absolutely require a physical classroom. In my opinion, it is about knowledge, curiosity, questions, story, humour and relationships.