The COVID-19 pandemic introduced unprecedented disruptions to teaching and posed urgent questions regarding its impact on learners in all levels of education. This project, funded by British Academy (BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant #SRG20\201530), seeks to explore how teachers work collaboratively with others and use technology to support students during the crisis, so as to identify essential skills, resources, and support that can enable teachers to act as agents of change in difficult times. Both trainee and in-service teachers will be invited to participate in activities involving reflective logs, interviews, and workshops. The lessons learnt will provide insights valuable to enhance institutional strategy and policy, as well as inform the design of a virtual internship for trainee teachers who continue to face great uncertainty regarding the availability of school placements which offer important experiential learning.

With some delay due to COVID-19, the project finally kicked off in December.

In 2021, we carried out a series of research activities that successfully engaged six in-service and ten pre-service teachers from Australia and Scotland through two activities:

• TRAC online reflection log

• Interviews/ focus groups

The online reflection log (TRAC) contains questions that prompt teachers to describe ‘what’ changes or adjustments they made, ‘who’ they approached to drive the desired change, ‘why’ their action led to (un)desired consequences, and which technologies they used to support their actions. Based on their inputs, TRAC generates automatic feedback visualizing and describing a teacher’s interactions with individuals, so as to prompt teachers to reflect on their experience working with others. The teachers in our sample were asked to use TRAC to reflect on situations in which they sought support from others to enable teaching practice and student support during the COVID-19 disruptions.

The interviews focused on exploring the challenges participants faced while teaching during the COVID-19 lockdowns, the changes they made as a response to these challenges, the support they received and the additional support they would have wanted, and the enablers they think could help them make positive changes going forward.

The interviews and focus groups were transcribed verbatim, and analyzed together with the responses recorded in the TRAC log using the same coding scheme (https://bit.ly/3tmvsxa). This analsys revealed the aspects of agency involved in teachers’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, namely their sense of professional purpose in the face of the challenges presented by the pandemic, the collaborative relationships they harnessed during this time, and their reflexivity on the impact and appropriateness of their responses to the switch to online learning. It also helped us identify the enablers that allowed them to exercise their agency.

Our project was showcased in the COVID-19 Perspectives blog (a platform to showcase research on COVID-19 from across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Edinburgh). Read the article here.

Workshop

In January 2022, we carried out a workshop at the University of Edinburgh with 18 physical education student teachers. We presented the results of our research to them toget their feedback on our research results and help us identify effective ways to support experiential learning virtually.

The student teachers were divided into small groups to facilitate discussion. Through sharing real-life examples collected from the results of our research and activities designed to promote group discussion and reflection about agency taken from the Agents of Change Toolkit, we gave student teachers the opportunity to reflect upon the challenges experienced by others in similar situations, the steps they would take to face those challenges, the resources they could mobilise, the networks they could tap into, and the skills they would wish to have in order to handle these delicate situations.

By engaging with the student teachers and encouraging to engage in dialogue with each other and with our result findings, we gained valuable insight on the needs and wants of student teachers in terms of skills, knowledge, and support they would like to receive from a virtual internship. They indicated that they'd like to be trained on more advanced uses of the platforms they use for teaching, as well as being trained on how to effectively use these technologies to teach and how to apply them to their specific subject. Another recurrent theme was the need to learn how to engage students in virtual settings and how to form relationships with them.

The slides used for this workshop can be found below: