New teachers' professional development needs in response to emergency remote teaching in Scotland
EARLI Online Conference, August 25th, 2021
Dr Rachel Shanks, University of Aberdeen @rshanks
Dr Mark Carver, University of Strathclyde @themarkcarver
Study Location
Aberdeen
Edinburgh
Glasgow
Newcastle
Belfast
Dublin
Manchester
Birmingham
Liverpool
London
Cardiff
Covid-19 in Scotland’s schools
All teacher education is university-based, with >50% of new teachers studying at either Aberdeen or Strathclyde
Central decisions were made to end practicums for student teachers. School closure announced March 18th, effective two days later as teaching went online
Emergency Remote Teaching expected to run for one month, including a two-week holiday
Schools ran ‘blended’ learning for all, and in-person for children of key workers, until full re-opening August 11th 2020 until Christmas 2020 – emergency remote teaching resumed January 2021
Lockdown 1: local authorities advised “no new content”, some insisted on live teaching, others ruled it out
Lockdown 2: prioritising ‘catch up’ and assessments, more local decision-making
from that last day at school having to, like, prep for teaching online, and the big thing that we had was a lot of our kids don’t have internet access at home, so we had to make up big packs of resources for them and then leave them by the office and then it was actually figuring out how to contact the kids to let them know that the resource packs were actually in school. And I don’t know how many of them were actually picked up by kids [P]
I was quite lucky that I was already using Microsoft Teams for all my homework with all of my classes, so I knew that they all had access, or at least it was already set up, but I didn’t have that experience of having any preparation, I was literally thrown out that day [L]
Assumed needs during the pandemic
Emphasis on struggling with ‘content delivery’ – teaching online, adapting materials, facilitating student access (O’Meara and Gentles, 2020)
Mandated professional development on particular tools, esp. Teams
School emphasis on online (GLOW) and offline (resource pack) delivery, but also a sense that this was temporary
Methodology
Would CPD needs be reflected in efficacy ratings?
OECD 14 CPD need items, 13 efficacy items, though some questions as to how these are interpreted
Late addition in March 2020 – “To what extent can you respond to new initiatives or changes (e.g. emergency remote teaching)?”
Surprise result: highest rating of all the measures: 3.4 out of 4, with only a moderate correlation with ICT use
Focus groups before and during lockdown looked at how sense-making developed, trying to represent the views of new teachers as they ‘create shared meanings through their interactions, and those meanings become their reality’ (Liamputtong, 2011, p. 16) – though possible self-selection bias
Thematic analysis using Nvivo, coded independently, themes from first round discussed in second round as a form of member checking
Teacher efficacy ratings
A common measure in TALIS, but not much utilised in the literature
Problems with the measure: individualises efficacy, assumes effective self-evaluation, unclear how relates to standards or context, unclear how it can be used as a proxy for measuring quality of ITE/CPD
For example, ranking gives a top 5 of Korea, Portugal, Columbia, Saudi Arabia, UAE and bottom 5 of Japan, France, Norway, Belgium, USA
Our surprise result: the highest efficacy was for something that was not part of ITE or CPD, and which was assumed to be one of the biggest global challenges in education at that time. Where does the efficacy come from, and is ‘higher numbers are better’ appropriate?
How teachers talked about their efficacy
Taking on a leadership role, teaching colleagues, being the ‘go to’ person
Doing better than colleagues with much more experience
Finally being able to ‘get ahead’
Focused on pupil learning, not just their own experience (Fuller and Bown, 1975; Twiselton, 2000)
I wasn’t teaching anything new and trying to keep it kind of interesting and make it worth them signing on [L]
everybody felt they were in a similar boat, didn’t matter how many years you’d been teaching for, it was all about we hadn’t used Teams before, we hadn’t had the training, and it was everybody getting up to speed [J]
[CPD course] it was like three days of six hours, and then there was course work to do as well, which actually gave me something to do because I got quite ahead with my classes [LG]
How teachers talked about their response to Emergency Remote Teaching
How quickly teachers shifted from ‘coping’ to seeking out professional learning (Nikel and Lowe, 2010)
Finding time, thinking differently about time as a barrier to professional learning
Pastoral care of students and colleagues; expanding teacher role
I would quickly then just go and do a quick screen, screen sharing and record myself talking them through things that they had to do, and then I’ve shared that with other departments as well, you may get a question of a pupil asking this, this is a video that I’ve done for it. So, you know, it’s helping the whole school as well [A]
we put out a form, like a Microsoft form online and told parents for any issues that there were around IT and using Glow and getting on to Teams, just a kind of one-stop place to put all your issues, and I’ve been picking that up. So I was going through that on a daily basis and then get in touch with families [LG]
Implications
Methodological: high efficacy ratings may not work as a proxy for the quality of ITE or CPD, but the pattern of responses may be useful
Theory: the assumption that change is always a dilemma or struggle may not be true for newer teachers, who are already operating in a tumultuous setting
CPD recommendations: enable newer teachers to take on local leadership roles and give time and space for informal and online CPD
Pandemic response: mitigate the desire for local authority control and prohibitions
ITE recommendations: no need for a knee-jerk response, but could be value in looking at how teachers deal with sudden change to show how teacher skills and knowledge are more than the sum of their parts
References
Carver, M., & Shanks, R. (2021). New teachers’ responses to COVID-19 in Scotland: doing surprisingly well? Journal of Education for Teaching, 47(1), 118–120.
Fuller, F. F., & Bown, O. H. (1975). Becoming a teacher. In K. Ryan (Ed.), Teacher Education, Seventy-fourth Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education (pp. 25–52). University of Chicago Press.
Liamputtong, P. (2011). Focus group methodology. Sage.
Nikel, J., & Lowe, J. (2010). Talking of fabric: A multi‐dimensional model of quality in education. Compare, 40(5), 589–605.
O’Meara, J. and Gentles, C. (Eds). (2020). Teacher Education in the COVID-19 Pandemic: a global snapshot [Special Issue]. Journal of Education for Teaching, 46(4).
Twiselton, S. (2000). Seeing the Wood for the Trees: The National Literacy Strategy and Initial Teacher Education; pedagogical content knowledge and the structure of subjects. Cambridge Journal of Education, 30(3), 391–403.