STUDENT EDUCATION FEATURE
Selly Oak Trust School is a specialist school for young people aged 11 to 19 years , in Birmingham . The school has worked collaboratively with occupational therapy students in creative ways to support the service demands at that specific time .
The occupational therapy offer spans across three tiers of provision – universal , targeted and specialist – in accordance with the World Federation of Occupational Therapists ’ position statement on school-based provision ( WFOT 2016 ), meaning that students receive experience of both direct work with young people and families and indirect work , such as training , curriculum development and resource creation .
In September 2020 , national COVID-19 restrictions encouraged people to work from home where possible and social distancing guidelines in schools led to high demand on limited physical space . This required the school to re-evaluate its practice placement offer .
It was able to accommodate three students on site under the restrictions , but made the decision to trial a blended placement model with six students – Salma Abdulle , Pavandeep Dhillon , Pantelitsa Eracleous , Amaan Halim , Cleo King and Safa Nawal Mohamed – each spending half of their time working on site and half working from home .
It is fair to say that both the students and the educator , Dan Waldron , approached the new placement format with excitement and concerns .
For example , Amaan says that he ‘ experienced feelings of anxiety and excitement around not knowing what to expect before starting placement ’, while Salma says that being on a blended placement at first made her ‘ have doubts over whether it would be as much of an experience ’, as she did not understand how she would be able to work from home and complete certain tasks .
The reflections of the six students and educator are summarised here to capture their experiences of a participating in blended placement .
Barriers to learning There were a number of barriers to learning on the blended placement , including screen fatigue , building rapport and structuring and self-motivating time at home .
Screen Fatigue : the placement relied heavily on Microsoft Teams to communicate with colleagues and families , and also on the school system to access documents and details .
Pavandeep feels that spending long periods of time in front of a computer screen was ‘ draining , and sometimes led to a lack of concentration ’, while Pantelitsa adds that ‘ online learning can be difficult and tiring ’, reflecting that she especially felt this being an ‘ active learner ’.
Rapport-building with staff and young people : the occupational therapy process of assessment , intervention and evaluation tends to span over several weeks or months in the setting . Students primarily spent their time on site working through this process with young people and their families , alongside colleagues in the multi-professional team .
Cleo comments that spending less time on site meant that building a rapport with staff ‘ takes longer ’. She adds that it also led to time constraints on how much she was able to interact with young people . This is a point echoed by Pavandeep .
Occupational therapist Dan Waldron says he had worries before the placement about ‘ whether working in different physical spaces might negatively impact on the working relationships between students and therefore the effectiveness of the peer support that is so powerful in multi-student placements ’.
Structuring and self-motivating time at home : Working from home presented challenges , including finding the physical space to work , structuring the day , and motivating oneself to work amongst the distractions of the home environment .
Amaan says : ‘[ I ] sometimes found it extremely difficult to concentrate at home and so I had to develop some strategies to keep myself focused and complete all my tasks required . Salma agrees , saying that it was ‘ hard working online for the first couple of weeks … however , doing some adjustments , such as taking breaks in between and getting up for a walk , allowed me to become more productive ’.
Dan adds : ‘[ I ] was concerned before the placement began whether students would require more support from their practice educator when working from home , due to not having the day-to-day support from colleagues and peers .’
Overcoming the barriers A number of strategies were used to overcome these barriers to learning .
Digital strategies to access typical experiences remotely : Selly Oak Trust School has an IT system that allowed the students to access the information and files they needed to work from home . This proved essential to enable the students to perform tasks such as contacting families and recording when working remotely .
Dan says : ‘ We had to think carefully about how we could offer students the “ usual ” placement experience when working from home . We found that students could join face-to-face meetings happening in school remotely , using Teams , and were able to contribute to these meetings despite not being in the room .’
Safa adds : ‘ I had a vast variety of opportunities , which aided my learning [ including ] participating in multidisciplinary team meetings [ and ] communicating with parents via telephone .’
Daily briefings and reflections : In response to students sharing their struggles with structuring their days , morning briefings and daily reflections were organised to replicate the ad-hoc opportunities that students would typically receive on a traditional placement .
The students and educator would meet twice daily , for 15 to 30 minutes , to agree plans for the day , share learning and reflect on experiences .
Amaan says : ‘[ The ] end of day reflections were key for me [ because they ] gave me an opportunity to recap my learning for the day .’ Safa believes that these opportunities ‘ allowed us to share positive experiences , as well as to provide support to one another on how to overcome the barriers that we may have been facing ’.
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