Innovating City School

Rising to the challenge of remote City School

City School is an experience shared by all our Year 9s and it’s not like our normal English subjects. It’s collaborative and at its centre is our enquiry model. It’s also normally an opportunity for students to get into their city and explore. Students usually spend three days in the city surveying members of the public, interviewing experts, attending workshops and yes, eating their own weight in burgers and fries!

But pandemic restrictions have put a halt to that and the City School team have had to innovate to give students the experience of independence, while isolated in their homes. As adults who have been trying to collaborate with workmates know, it’s not an easy process – even with video conferencing; social media and phone. Our City Schoolers have had to find ways to work with their groups - they’ve set up google docs; organised group chats; become proficient in using email and other more sophisticated platforms; to be able to keep collaborating. 

For the research tasks, teachers have had to develop a new way of doing things. Survey Monkey has become our friend – with teachers and students learning together how to use this powerful platform. The opportunity to interview an expert is a deeply satisfying part of City School. Our students have been working hard on creating engaging introduction emails; cold calling scripts that will get them a “Yes!” and using technology to record their interviews. 

A central part of our normal experience are the workshops with the Big Issue and SYN FM. Here students get to see homelessness and marginalisation and the creative solutions that are being offered. At SYN they learn about radio and get the chance to record a radio segment. For young people who are nervous speaking in class it’s a challenging moment of personal growth as they approach the microphone for the first time. Fortunately both organisations have adapted and instead of trooping into brick and mortar offices – we met online! Students were able to hear the personal story of a homeless person and ask questions – even across the chat function the sense of justice and fairness of our students, that underpin our school values, was very clear. For SYN they have worked in online groups and been recorded, live, in front of their classmates. Students’ nervousness was obvious; but so was their ability to rise to the occasion and embrace the opportunity to learn a new skill.

In a normal year, students would gather for family members and teachers to see their presentations. With restrictions in place, we won’t be able to have those face to face gatherings. But working with video conferencing software means we are all now experts and ready to wow the online audience with virtual presentations. While it won’t be the TED-talk experience some students have been looking forward to – it will be an opportunity to present in a medium that many adults are uncomfortable with and just beginning to learn about. We think it’s an exciting chance for our students to show all they have learned.

City School is designed to teach collaboration; confidence in presenting and to build independence and resilience. Even while we’ve been scrambling to find ways to use technology to make this semester’s experience as rich as possible; we’ve been so proud to see students innovating for themselves; finding workarounds; teaching themselves new skills and rising to the challenge. We hope those of you lucky enough to see their final presentations will agree.

The City School teaching team