As lockdown part 3 dawns, teachers across the country are once again grappling with the challenges of school and organisational closures. Although many of the initial practicalities will have been addressed around digital or remote teaching and learning, at least in part, via the first lockdown and planning thereafter, there are naturally niggles that remain and fires that will need to be fought in the coming weeks.
It could be argued that translating subjects such as music and drama that involve an element of performance to remote teaching requires an even greater degree of ingenuity and resilience – something we saw in previous lockdowns and I am sure we will again.
We understand that many teachers will want to continue to support students to achieve music and drama exams digitally, especially with the removal of formal assessment at GCSE and A Level. With that in mind, we have tailored support on offer to help teachers get to grips with our new digital exams offering including a range of recorded webinars and the opportunity to book your own session with our support team to discuss specific questions.
With input from experienced examiners, we have also created a new guide to preparing for exams at times when you can’t be with your students which can be downloaded here. And over the summer we ran a series of lunchtime chats with teachers and practitioners across music and drama, exploring innovative ways to continue teaching digitally. You can watch these all on catch up, for music and drama.
The digital exam model perfectly supports submitting a performance for assessment as part of the student’s home learning schedule. All the student needs is a little help from a parent or another household member to record their pieces and exercises/supporting tasks, compress the files if necessary and make the submission on the online portal (or they may even be able to do this themselves). There is a handy checklist of the recording and submission requirements for each syllabus on the Trinity website.
There needn’t be concerns that the current restrictions on travel and meeting indoors will impact on the recording session. Trinity have recently published a ‘COVID-19 Special Arrangements’ policy which means that, for music a range of alternative arrangements is in place for candidates who cannot access live accompaniment or particular equipment at the time of making their recording and special arrangements for drama can be requested when the restrictions render the filming and uploading process difficult to complete within the published timelines.
We wish all of our teachers and candidates the very best of luck as they continue with music and drama lessons this term and look forward to supporting them to celebrate their successes through our digital assessments.
Find out more about Trinity’s Digital Grades and Diplomas.
Comments & Replies