Teacher concerns about students during the COVID-19 school closure: characteristics, development and approach

ABSTRACT

Since the outbreak of the covid-19 crisis, many quantitative studies showed disproportionate learning loss for children in disadvantaged circumstances, as a result of the school closures (Schuurman et al., 2021;Engzell et al., 2021). In this qualitative study, we aim to gain a deeper understanding of these impacts, by studying teacher concerns about students during the first school closure in the covid-19 crisis. During interviews with elementary school teachers (n=20), working in schools that serve a population of children in disadvantaged circumstances, we constructed student-portraits. These shed light on what made teachers worry about children, how much they worried, and what they did to address these concerns. We found that teachers' concerns mostly related to four domains students' school achievement, self-regulatory skills, vulnerable home environments, and parental capabilities for support. When addressing their concerns, teachers primarily focused on increasing contact with their students and their parents. After contact was (re)established, teachers differentiated in their approach, depending whether concerns diminished or increased. Teachers reported newly found ways of connecting with students and parents, which supports a sense of continuity between the two formerly distinct (learning) contexts. Findings provide promising avenues for sustaining school-parent partnerships in the future, irrespective of the covid-19 crisis.