The COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on teacher education

When, in the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 hit the city of Wuhan, people in the rest of the world could not suspect that the virus would travel all over the world and change the way we live, interact, work, teach and learn. The implications and effects of the pandemic on education are yet to be known, but they will surely be more challenging for educators and learners in more fragile and unstable contexts. Most countries in the world experienced an unprecedented total or partial lockdown which led to the immediate closure of universities and school. As such, teachers and students had to learn instantly how to adapt to remote teaching. This is also true for teacher education. The need to rapidly adapt to new contexts of teaching and learning online has revealed how teacher education institutions and teacher educators encountered and experienced the challenges and opportunities to carry on their job in such unexpected circumstances (e.g. Flores and Gago 2020; Nasri et al. 2020; Quezada, Talbot, and Quezada-Parker 2020). In this context, among other issues, it is important to look at how teacher education has adapted to the restriction in interaction and moved to new ways of teaching and learning in the preparation of future teachers for a world marked by uncertainty. The reality resulting from the COVID-19 crisis raises questions about the nature of teaching and ways of supporting the learning of student teachers, but it also challenges teacher education to (re)think ways of (re)educating teachers for scenarios that are unpredictable and unknown but which raise questions related to equity and social justice.

This special issue is devoted to the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects on teacher education. It includes contributions from a variety of contexts and from authors who systematically reflect on the consequences of the pandemic and present findings from research focusing on the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the work of teacher educators and (student) teachers.

The issue starts with a paper that addresses themes linked to reflections and debates in ‘Preparing Educators for the Time of COVID … and Beyond’. Linda Darling-Hammond and Maria E. Hyler, from the USA, discuss what needs to be done by policy makers in order to support educators in meeting the social emotional and academic needs of students in challenging circumstances which are the result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among these are issues of learning loss and unpredictable combinations of distance learning, blended learning, and in-classroom learning. The authors draw attention to equity-focused teaching and learning and their implications for educators and for their preparation. They conclude with a number of strategies that they consider important to navigate teaching and learning during the pandemic and beyond.

The second paper, ‘COVID-19 and Teacher Education: A Literature Review of Online Teaching and Learning Practices’, by Carmen Carrillo from Spain and Maria Assunção Flores from Portugal, provides a review of the literature about online teaching and learning practices in teacher education. The authors analysed 134 empirical studies about online teaching and learning practices. The findings highlighted the need for a comprehensive view of the pedagogy of online education that integrates technology to support teaching and learning. This study shows that practical learning areas such as learning design need more attention. Also, more attention needs to be directed towards pedagogical issues of teaching and learning. The authors identified areas for further research to evaluate the impact of an integrated pedagogy of online teaching and learning.

In the third paper, ‘Reconceptualising Relatedness in Education in “Distanced” Times’, Clíona Murray, Manuela Heinz, Ian Munday, Elaine Keane, Niamh Flynn, Cornelia Connolly, Tony Hall and Gerry MacRuairc, from Ireland, report on how a multi-disciplinary teacher education faculty found ways of working in challenging times and develop a new set of orienting priorities for teacher educators. The authors reflect on dynamics of care, control and power inherent in educational relationships. They argue how relatedness in education expands beyond the human and the local towards fostering a common sense of global and ecological responsibility.

The fourth paper, ‘Implications for European Physical Education Teacher Education during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cross-institutional SWOT analysis’, is from an international group of authors. Wesley O’Brien, Manolis Adamakis, Niamh O Brien, Marcos Onofre, João Martins, Aspasia Dania, Kyriaki Makopoulou, Frank Herold, Kwok Ng, and João Costa focus on a subject that seems specifically problematic for teaching online: Physical Education in Teacher Education (PETE). Each team completed a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis on proposed measures of change required for programme delivery during the academic year of 2020–21. The findings show how each PETE programme is seeking to manage the tension between the experiential nature of Physical Education as a subject in light of the institutional and external constraints of online and blended approaches.

The remaining papers report on empirical studies. Ramona Maile Cutri, Juanjo Mena and Erin Feinauer Whiting report, in their paper ‘Faculty Readiness for Online Crisis Teaching: Transitioning to Online Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic’, on a mixed-methods study carried out in the USA. The authors found that the negative connotations of risk-taking and making mistakes while learning to teach online seem to have been mitigated by a combination of affective factors such as humility, empathy, and optimism. Ramona Maile Cutri and her colleagues discuss the implications of the findings of their study for teacher education.

In the sixth paper, ‘The Covid-19 Pandemic and Its Effects on Teacher Education in England: How Teacher Educators Moved Practicum Learning Online’, Warren Kidd and Jean Murray, both from the UK, focus on the challenges for teacher educators to develop and supervise the practicum online. Using qualitative research methods and concepts from spatial geography, the article explores how pedagogies adapted as the removal of the practicum relocated learning communities to new online spaces. Despite the relocation to newly-formed online spaces, many principles and ‘intentionalities’ of practice remained unchanged, as did the teacher educators’ orientating values. The authors conclude that overall there was a sense of both sameness and difference in some of the innovative pedagogies developed on the (g)local level.

In a similar vein, the seventh paper ‘Come to a Screeching Halt’: Can Change in Teacher Education during the Covid-19 Pandemic be Seen as Innovation?’, authored by Viv Ellis, Sarah Steadman and Qiming Mao, reports on a small-scale exploratory study conducted by way of a rapid response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the professional preparation of school teachers. Through interviews with a sample of leaders of initial teacher education programmes from universities in four regions of the world, the researchers sought to understand how these leaders addressed the challenges that COVID-19 presented to ‘business as usual’ in the practices of pre-service teacher preparation. They also consider whether the responses gave any insights into how initial teacher education practices might develop in the years ahead and whether screeching to a halt had, in any way, created opportunities for innovation.

The eighth paper, ‘Rethinking Teacher Education in a VUCA world: Student teachers’ Social-Emotional Competencies during the Covid-19 Crisis’, is a contribution by Linor L. Hadar, Oren Ergas, Bracha Alpert and Tamar Ariav, from Israel. The aim of this study was to examine the extent to which student teachers were able to cope with the dramatic changes brought about by the COVID-19 outbreak as seen from the perspectives of both students and teacher educators. They used the concept of VUCA: Volatility; Uncertainty; Complexity; and Ambiguity. Within this context, the arrival of a Black Swan like the COVID-19 is an extreme condition. From the research we learn that the teacher education curriculum should enable and develop students’ social-emotional competencies using a variety of methods, such as mindfulness, stress management techniques, case studies, teamwork around problems that happened in education during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital support platforms and familiarity with research on crisis management. Teacher educators are key figures in teacher education to help scaffold the skills, dispositions and know-how of prospective teachers to be better prepared for other Black swans they might meet in their teaching career.

In turn, Paulina Sepulveda-Escolar and Astrid Morrison, from Chile, in their paper ‘Online teaching placement during the COVID-19 pandemic in Chile: Challenges and opportunities’, look at how student teachers doing their remote teaching placement experienced this new scenario. The authors conclude that aspects such as the lack of direct interaction with learners and the adaptation to online teaching strategies affected the participants’ learning process. They discuss the implications of the findings for teacher education in such challenging circumstances.

The tenth paper ‘Adapting to online teaching during COVID-19 school closure: Teacher education and teacher competence effects among early career teachers in Germany’, by Johannes König, Daniela J. Jäger-Biela, and Nina Glutsch, reports on a study of early career teachers and the ways in which they have adapted to online teaching during COVID-19 school closure. The authors found that all participating teachers have maintained communication with students and their parents and the majority of them reported having introduced new learning content in addition to assigning tasks and providing feedback to their students. However, information and communication technologies (ICT) integration, such as online teaching and online assessment, were mastered to a lesser extent. König et al. conclude that digital teacher competence and teacher education opportunities to learn digital competence are instrumental in adapting to online teaching. Implications of the findings for teacher education are discussed in the end.

Similarly, in the eleventh paper, ‘Teachers’ Online Teaching Expectations and Experiences during the Covid-19 Pandemic in the Netherlands’, Irene van der Spoel, Omid Noroozi, Ellen Schuurink and Stan van Ginkel, from the Netherlands, present findings from a study aimed at analysing teachers’ perception about their online teaching expectations and experiences. The authors found a significant change in the perception of teachers regarding their resolutions to implement technology in their lessons in a post-COVID-19 era. They discuss the implications of the findings for teacher education and professionalism.

In the final paper, ‘Novice Teachers in a Changing Reality’, Orna Schatz-Oppenheiemer and Nurit Dvir, from Israel, examine novice teachers’ experiences during the Covid-19 crisis, particularly in regard to their professional identity development. Based on 32 narratives, the authors conclude that challenges and opportunities reported by the new teachers focus on three key dimensions: technological, pedagogical and educational system. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for research on teacher professional identity.

From the collection of articles included in this special issue we learn that the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on a global scale has shocked teachers at all levels and at the same time inspired them to find solutions to problems they have not encountered before. These papers help to understand the major task student teachers, teachers and teacher educators have encountered since the pandemic started and will have to face in the near and not so near future. The research studies include a wide range of subjects and methodologies that also inform us about the ways in which the ‘new normal’ in (teacher) education can be studied and how these studies can support innovation and improvements of traditional and online teaching and teacher education. If one thing becomes clear it is that more and more organised research is needed to contribute to a body of knowledge, theoretical and practical, for teacher education to use in the changing educational landscape.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.