Abstract
To depict the situation during the school closures in spring 2020 that were implemented to contain the spread of COVID-19, we conducted a self-constructed online survey on distance teaching among teachers regarding their teaching practices in this new situation, the challenges they experienced, and the prerequisites for successful distance teaching. The sample consisted of voluntarily participating German elementary (n= 857) and secondary school teachers (n= 1,590) from a sample of randomly drawn schools in four federal states in Germany. We describe the main survey findings and examine the importance of different distance teaching aspects for teacher reports of students attaining their learning objectives and students’ learning progress during distance teaching. Our results particularly highlight the necessity for students and teachers to remain in contact in all the surveyed school types. In elementary school, regular contact between teachers and parents is similarly important. The key challenges highlighted inadequate digitalization, the participation of all students, and students’ motivation. Correspondingly, adequate technical equipment for schools, teachers, and students, together with teachers’ and students’ competence to use technical devices and digital media as well as students’ motivation to participate in distance learning were found to be necessary prerequisites for successful distance teaching. We conclude that efforts should be devoted to enabling teachers and students to better communicate using digital devices, for example, expanding the digital infrastructure in combination with training teachers and students in the use of technical devices and digital media.
Highlights
Containing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 was one of the main aims worldwide in 2020 and is still an issue in 2021
The statistics describing the implementation of distance teaching in elementary and secondary schools in Germany following the sequence of aspects outlined in the introduction are reported below
We conducted an exploratory examination of the importance of different variables including teaching practices for teacher reports of students’ attainment of learning objectives during distance teaching and their learning progress compared to regular classroom teaching
Summary
Containing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 was one of the main aims worldwide in 2020 and is still an issue in 2021. More than 1.2 billion students had to deal with the closure of elementary schools, secondary schools, or higher education institutions 80 percent of children and young people worldwide were forced into being educated at home (Van Lancker and Parolin, 2020), millions of teachers suddenly faced the challenge of having to reorganize their lessons, and both teachers and students had to adjust to distance teaching. In the sense of responsible science and to add empirical evidence to the research scope on distance teaching during the pandemic (see Helm et al, 2021, for a systematic overview of the state of quantitative research on teaching and learning characteristics during school closures due to the coronavirus), our aim was to describe the impact of the necessary school closures on education in Germany from the teachers’ perspective. Together with results from surveys on, for example, school administrators, students, and/or their parents, might be especially beneficial for developing pedagogical plans to better cope with comparable situations in the future
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