Professional insights into the journey of changing from a classroom teacher to an online teacher Kirsty Phease Hawthorn-Melbourne English Language Centre, Melbourne
Context In March 2020, Covid-19 turned our industry upside down. In the space of two weeks, my workplace, HawthornMelbourne English Language Centre (HELC), went from being a large English language centre that had face-to-face classes with General English, Academic English, school and bridging students to a completely online school. My role as Senior Teacher for Blended Learning changed from in-person support for teachers, many of whom were unsure and uncomfortable with educational technology, to something else entirely. At the time of this change, the HELC teaching staff were predominantly teachers with decades of classroom teaching experience and a widespread scepticism of educational technology. And while the teaching staff rose to the challenge of learning the skills they would need to become online teachers in this emergency remote teaching environment (Hodges, Moore, Lockee, Trust and Bond 2020), it soon became clear they would need a different kind of training and support from the school's senior staff to help them navigate new anxieties and challenges. In this new context my attention rapidly turned to how this information, support and training needed to be reframed and delivered. My action research (AR) project changed quickly from how I could provide teachers with in-class and live support to identifying what our teachers needed, when they needed it and how it should be delivered.
My project While my main research question was identifying the teachers' training and support needs, it was also important to understand their contexts and perspectives. This improved understanding would then drive the interventions I would pursue.
My research questions To better understand what our teachers were experiencing in this adaptation to online teaching I embarked upon the first stage of my AR by working with five teachers, individually, as collaborators. I interviewed these five teachers in a series of half-hour semi-structured (Zoom) interviews over a period of approximately three months. I wanted to see what I would learn from the interviews and which direction they would take me, but started out with three general lines of questioning. To that end, the initial interviews started with the three questions below. The question shown in bold was my primary research question, but I planned to remain open to each participant’s answers to all three questions when considering the path of the interview process.
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CAMBRIDGE ASSESSMENT ENGLISH – RESEARCH NOTES: 80
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