Pandemic lessons: Student-led strategies for assessing writing in English in the middle years of school

Throughout the past two years of the covid pandemic teachers have been dramatically reminded of the critical role of quality relationships and authentic student-centred learning for effective classroom teaching. When significant classroom learning conditions were suddenly taken away through school closures, a ‘pivot’ to remote learning, teaching through online meetings and observing students’ social isolation, the challenges for students and teachers to maintain a positive learning community, sustain student engagement and encourage student commitment to their learning were significant, and sometimes quite problematic. The ‘paradise’ of rich classroom-based learning and teaching was abruptly replaced by the ‘parking lot’ of rapidly-developed online teaching resources and the trials of connecting with distant and sometimes disengaged students. As Joni Mitchell lamented... ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’.The pandemic has provided an opportunity to learn, not only about the possibilities offered by remote learning that might continue into the future (For example, see Yates & Starkey, 2020),but about valued aspects of classroom-based learning that were lost during the past two years.