Doha: With over three billion people around the world currently in lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, schools are faced with the tough challenge of delivering and keeping to the highest standards of teaching and learning.
In these challenging times health and well-being are more important than ever. The welfare of its pupils has been one of Sherborne Qatar’s main considerations as it developed its new e-learning environment; teachers are having to embrace a variety of ways in order to engage and stimulate pupils and to encourage them to keep communicating with their peers.
With this in mind the school has designed and developed extra curricula fun activities to keep children entertained. The response has been fantastic as pupils and their parents engaged with the school projects with real enthusiasm and imagination.
The Stay Connected initiative for instance covered a range of areas such as getting active, culture, drama and music, humanities, ICT and mathematics. Pupils shared fantastic videos of exercise and sport routines, animated video presentations on the ‘COVID-19’ theme, dancing and music videos played with a range of instruments as well as designing informative posters and flyers. A new weekly Ramadan competition has just been launched by the Arabic and Islamic Studies Department involving pupils listening to a short video of recitation of verses from the Quran, then recording and submitting their own recitations to qualify for the prize draw.
One of the highlights of the school closure has been the creation of a music video collating clips of children and academic staff singing from home the classic uplifting anthem ‘Heal the World’. The video, an initiative of the Prep School’s Head of Music, Razwan Sarwar, was produced by Sherborne Qatar’s parent company Sharaka Holdings and KidZania Qatar and has been viewed more than five thousand times on social media. The video offers a promise of hope for a united mankind and for a post pandemic world more aware of its excesses and fragile ecosystems.
It is in fact through a plethora of video and communication technologies, by holding regular live online lessons and by generating supporting materials in digital format, that the school has insured that the pupils’ education continues as fully as possible. Whilst it is impossible to completely recreate the buzz and dynamics of a real classroom, Sherborne Qatar’s teachers have been working harder than ever to foster a stimulating online learning environment and to cover the whole curriculum.
The coronavirus pandemic is giving us an opportunity to think deeply about the values of empathy and solidarity while the shared experience of the lockdown is creating a stronger sense of community.
The Sherborne Qatar community may be working remotely in many different locations around Qatar but, in a very tangible sense, it is as united as ever, working in unison to support the school’s efforts during the lockdown and anticipating the time when all children in the country will be allowed back at school.
However, when that day comes it will be with renewed optimism for the future and with the knowledge that the school’s belief in the human spirit, its values and particularly those of teamwork, perseverance and kindness have seen it overcome the challenge of these difficult times.
