teachers work Archives

The shock of dealing with Covid-19 has made teachers even stronger and better at their craft

Cast your mind back to the end of the first school term for 2020: Australian states and territories were rapidly moving into lockdown because of COVID-19. Political leaders were signaling – often using mixed signals – the likelihood and need to close schools and transition to distance learning. Here in New South Wales schools switched to distance learning for about six weeks, forcing teachers to adapt their programs very rapidly to support students and their parents with learning from home.

Currently around Australia we now have the whole range from fully face-to -face schooling, to partially remote learning, to fully (with some essential worker exceptions) remote learning. Random schools are thrown into immediate lockdown whenever a teacher or student tests positive to the viral infection. Teachers pivot their programs very rapidly between the different ways of delivery depending on the advice from health officials to their education authorities.

My doctoral research explores the way policy is enacted in teacher practice, and I seem to have landed in the middle of a system where policy has flown into flux.

My fieldwork actually started in the midst of one crisis – the Black Summer bushfires – and ended during another – COVID-19. I was fortunately able to modify the shape of my research to allow for interviews with teachers to find out how they experienced the rapidly changing work environment during the virus response.

I’m sure some of the findings are familiar to many teachers and researchers out there, and they aren’t specific to schools. For many people, the switch to working from home was sudden and required quick thinking and adaptation.

The teachers who participated in my research reported a number of interesting, and not all negative, experiences.

Workload increased dramatically

Teachers already faced significant workload demands going into the crisis, an issue plainly described in a partnership study between the NSW Teachers Federation and the University of Sydney. The teachers I interviewed explained how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this big time.

Teachers spend a huge amount of time planning and programming a school term, and much of that planning is premised on the physical environment in which they work. Educators take for granted the material contexts of their work – it helps them to improvise when necessary, to draw on a repertoire of skills and capabilities built up through experience.

In the Sydney school where I did my research the staff made a very rapid shift to online learning. This led to late nights preparing lessons, in some cases over-planning work for students in order to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction.

Some students felt more comfortable online

A number of teachers reported some students coming out of their shells in the online space. Otherwise shy students felt more empowered to contribute to lessons. Students with strong digital literacy skills were able to support teachers and fellow students in creating dynamic and interesting contributions to online learning.

While there has rightly been some attention paid to students who missed out because of inequitable access, there are also lessons that can be learned about engaging students who are less confident about speaking up in front of a classroom of peers. The digital world is here to stay: being confident learners in digital communities is an important life skill, virus or not.

Professional communities were more important than ever

The staff at the school scheduled an impromptu staff development day focused entirely on delivering learning remotely. Colleagues ran sessions on platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Faculty members headed to different classrooms to practice running Zoom lessons with each other. The New South Wales Department of Education also facilitated a ‘virtual staff room’ on Teams, and many teachers reported the value in sharing ideas with their colleagues both within the school and further afield.

When I spoke with the Deputy Principal of this school, he suggested that their quick response to COVID-19 was possible because of the school’s proactive approach to professional learning. The school saw the Professional Development Planning (PDP) process not as a ‘tick-the-box’ exercise, but rather a way to learn about the strengths and opportunities facing the school. He explained:

“What professional learning is about is foreseeing what obstacles might lie ahead, so that you can be properly prepared for when they do happen and you couldn’t get a better case in point than COVID.”

A year-round professional learning calendar helps staff at this school see the connection between their own Professional Development Planning and the whole school plan. Qualitative analysis of Professional Development Planning goals and professional learning needs helps inform the school planning process. And the teachers I interviewed were consistently engaged in improving their classroom practice.

Teachers felt their practice had improved because of the crisis

Each teacher I spoke with said that they had learned something during the crisis and that their practice going forward would improve as a result, sentiment echoed in a survey conducted by researchers Rachel Wilson and William Mude. This included their ability to incorporate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into their lessons, the different ways they can engage with their students, and their professional knowledge in the domain of online teaching and learning. As one teacher explained:

“I think there will be good development in our skills that will make us better teachers going forward. It’s been a baptism of fire, but I think we’ll all be better practitioners and have a wider repertoire of skills.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned a lot of things on their heads: it is a black swan event, something gigantic and unexpected that shifts the way we understand the world. Nassim Taleb, who wrote the book, The Black Swan, followed that with another book, Antifragile. He explains that the opposite of fragility is not resilience, but antifragility: where something responds to a shock by getting stronger.

The teachers I worked with pre and post COVID-19 (as far as we can say that we are ‘post’ this virus) are a perfect example of antifragility. So far, 2020 has delivered some of the biggest shocks imaginable. And out of it the teachers in my study have become even better at their craft thanks to the strength of their professional communities and their school’s meaningful approach to professional learning.

Pat Norman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney, looking at the way politics and political events shape the rationalities of policy and practice. He is particularly interested in the way neoliberalism and globalisation impact professional work. His current research in schools looks at the way teachers experience and enact policy, and how an understanding of good practice is produced in real-world contexts. He tweets as @pat_norman.

Teachers also are affected by the ‘school choice’ policies dividing Australia

What is it like to be a teacher? Often when we hear talk about teachers, whether in popular culture, policy or research, it’s as though the experience of ‘being a teacher’ is always pretty much the same. And often the attitude is you’re either a good one, like Professor McGonagall from the Harry Potter series or a bad one like Roald Dahl’s Miss Trunchbull.

In policy, teachers are lumped together in ill-defined discourses around, for example, ‘classroom readiness’and ‘teacher quality’. In research, a good example might be our understanding of the early career teacher, who is notoriously subject to stress and burnout.

But is being a teacher, or an early career teacher for that matter, really such a homogenized kind of experience?

My PhD research suggests that no, it isn’t. In particular, I argue that teaching is affected by the market-oriented approach to schooling taken in NSW, in which students and parents – operating with different kinds of social, cultural and economic resources – can choose to attend different kinds of schools. This system has long been known to have detrimental effects on equity outcomes in relation to student achievement, as students with greater levels of advantage move into more ‘desirable’ schools, which can lead to concentrations of varied and particular need within local, often comprehensive school contexts (a process known as residualisation).

But these school choice effects also have particular consequences for teachers.

I designed my PhD research to include as wide a range of schools as would be possible in an in-depth qualitative project. This meant I ended up exploring cases of early career teachers’ work in nine different schools, including high-fee independent schools, lower-fee Catholic schools, and public schools that enrolled student bodies with varying levels of average advantage (as measured by the Index of Socio-Educational Advantage, or ICSEA, available on the federal government’s My Schoolwebsite).

I found some interesting things.

Importantly a commonality was that all nine teachers in my study indicated having had relatively successful, and often fairly advantaged experiences as students themselves. However, given the wide range of school contexts these teachers were now working across, some teachers seemed to mesh well with their schools, while others found them particularly difficult and different to what they had known. It made me wonder whether this is the case for the teacher workforce at large; that perhaps on the whole we are people who have experienced advantage and success in the system as we know it. Indeed to some extent we must have, to have made it into teacher education courses.

Teacher experiences in school with lower ICSEA

Teachers in my study who were working in schools with lower ICSEA values, which enrolled students experiencing significant educational disadvantage, described particular socio-cultural, creative and relational requirements in their work. These teachers described the experiences of students who were marginalized within wider society due to social and cultural differences, facing multiple and sustained challenges both within and beyond the school.

Teachers in these schools described their students as being on the “receiving end” of discrimination and seeming to see school as “not our thing”. These teachers identified a need for greater creativity in lesson planning, as well as more resilience regarding their abilities in planning for and working with their students.

As one teacher commented: “the better the school is, the better the teachers think they are” (the concept of ‘better’ schools here being a short-hand for student advantage, translated into results and rankings).

Teacher experiences in school with average ICSEA

Indeed, for teachers working in schools with more average ICSEA values the picture looked a little different. Although these teachers were kept busy with various extra-curricular demands, they were also regularly rewarded with explicit and overt student and parent appreciation from cohorts who were described as feeling reasonably comfortable, and sometimes quite actively allied with, the systems and structures of formalized schooling.

One case teacher in a public school with an above average ICSEA described how one of the things she liked most about her job was “when the students say thank you”, something which occurred frequently and which made “a huge difference”. While this is not to say that students in schools with lower ICSEA never say ‘thank you’, in schools with average ICSEA, students more commonly seemed to bring pre-existing feelings of inclusion within schooling spaces that potentially reduced some pressures around creativity and resilience for their teachers.

Teacher experiences in school with highest ICSEA

Finally, for teachers working in the schools with the highest ICSEA values, a similarly aligned relational dynamic between students and teachers was evident. Like in the average-ICSEA schools, teachers here described teaching “compliant” students.

Those in private sector schools, particularly, also described an abundance of material and human resources, such as “adults who don’t teach” – referring to administrative, specialist and other support staff. There was little awareness that there aren’t many “adults who don’t teach” in other kinds of school settings. Interestingly, however, the increased human and other resources evident in these private sector schools did not always seem to translate into reduced teacher workload. Instead, in all cases, the school-level management of staff emerged as significant in creating positive employment contexts.

The teachers in this study came from more privileged backgrounds. If teachers do tend to come from relatively privileged and successful backgrounds, not all of their students will. While some research has looked at this issue particularly in relation to contexts of ‘disadvantage’ (see here and here for some examples), this study has been one of the first to question what this might mean within the context of the large and complex NSW system as a whole.

I believe that specificities of context, exacerbated by a market-based policy approach which has driven greater levels of differentiation between schools, have particular consequences for teachers, both in the nature and scale of work that is required of them.

Dr Meghan Stacey is a lecturer in the sociology of education and education policy in the School of Education at the University of New South Wales. Taking a particular interest in teachers, her research considers how teachers’ work is framed by policy, as well as the effects of such policy for those who work with, within and against it. Meghan completed her PhD with the University of Sydney in 2018.Meghan is on Twitter @meghanrstacey

You can read more about my work in my recently published article summarising some of these findings, and in my forthcoming book due out later this year (The Business of Teaching: Becoming a Teacher in a Market of Schools, Palgrave Macmillan).