Coronavirus in Hamburg: Can private schools do homeschooling better?

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Distance learning is anything but smooth at many schools in Hamburg.

There are always massive technical problems, some facilities don't even have WiFi.

School Senator Ties Rabe (SPD) prides himself on the fact that Hamburg's schools are “nationwide at the top” when it comes to equipping them with WLAN, laptops and desktop computers.

On the other hand, says the school policy spokeswoman for the CDU parliamentary group, Birgit Stöver, that it is “pure luck whether or not your child goes to a school that is digitally well positioned”.

Those who go to private schools seem to be more fortunate: it seems to work there.

The Jenisch Gymnasium of the Privatschulpädagogischen GmbH in Klein Flottbek set up iPad classes two years ago.

“In order to finance the acquisition costs, we applied for funds from the DigitalPact at an early stage and worked out a concept.

The parents also made a small contribution, ”says headmistress Corinna Lippert.

For those who couldn't afford it, the school stepped in.

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“The first lockdown caught us cold despite all the preparation.

We used the summer vacation to train all of our teachers. ”In the months that followed, the students were introduced to the programs in class.

"We were able to do a few test runs and so switch from one day to the next at the second lockdown and continue to offer lessons according to the timetable."

"Our IT team offers teachers regular training and webinars"

At the Protestant Bugenhagen schools, real distance teaching is also given alongside face-to-face teaching.

From the years up to the seventh grade of the inclusive elementary and district school there are a relatively large number of pupils on site, from the eighth grade onwards they learn at home.

Depending on the year, there are digital morning sessions, video conferences, virtual learning groups and chat sessions.

Eva-Maria Kopte, Head of the Bugenhagenschule Alsterdorf and Primary School Director of the Evangelical Foundation Alsterdorf, is downright enthusiastic: “We experience the situation as an absolute accelerator of digitization.

In the second wave, in which we were well prepared, most of our colleagues have developed a great ambition to provide the best possible digital support for the schoolchildren at home.

Many, who previously feared digital work, try out new media with enthusiasm and learn together how best to do it. "

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The head of the school and university department in the Archdiocese of Hamburg, Christopher Haep, also sees the effort in each individual: “In these times, mistakes can and should be tried out.

Not everything can and must work optimally right away. ”The past few months would have“ cost an incredible amount of energy.

We absolutely have to prevent a drifting apart between high-performing and low-performing students. "

At the beginning of the year, it was possible to switch to hybrid teaching, as Internet connections and networks had previously been optimized.

The digital school platform iServ is now used for communication.

“Our IT team offers teachers regular training courses and webinars so that they can get to know the new possibilities intensively - and then use them as a matter of course in everyday school life.

The regular exchange in video conferences with the school administrators and the communication of best practice examples among each other advance the Catholic school system as a whole, ”said Haep.

The Walddorf schools have also prepared

Perhaps it is precisely this cohesion and the bundling of know-how that proves to be a head start in the crisis.

In the Waldorf schools, too, the school administrators were not left to their own devices; instead, solutions were sought together and benefited from each other.

“Some schools had dealt with the DigitalPact School long before the pandemic began, others are starting now.

After the summer vacation last year, we sat down and prepared intensively for a possible next lockdown, ”says Dagmar von Falkenburg, member of the school management team at the Rudolf Steiner School in Altona and member of the board of the Waldorf Education Working Group in Hamburg.

A working group made up of teachers and parents developed the concept for video lessons and other digital learning opportunities.

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The schul.cloud learning platform is now being used in Altona.

Video lessons run through the open source web conferencing system Big Blue Button.

"It is hosted centrally on a German server, which was important to us so that everything also complies with European data protection guidelines."

Children who have no chance at home can work in school.

The younger ones up to and including grade six should not work on the screen in Waldorf education, and that remains that way even in lockdown.

Von Falkenburg: “This extreme situation showed once again how important it is to work well with parents and students.

I am aware that this is a privilege and that it is certainly difficult at some hotspot schools right now. "

In any case, the success of the schools does not depend on the financial resources, says Andreas Haase, commercial director of the Brecht-Schule Hamburg GmbH and state chairman of the Association of German Private Schools in Hamburg: “Independent schools like ours tend to be less financially equipped than state schools . ”Rather, he had already implemented the requirements of the Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs for the digitization of lessons years ago, bought his own fail-safe servers, equipped the classrooms with whiteboards and intelligent projectors and invested in further training for around 150 teachers.

"We financed this through an appropriate reallocation of funds," said Haase.

This text is from WELT AM SONNTAG.

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Source: WELT AM SONNTAG