Coordination and management in times of crisis. Organization of the school day and teaching content
Based on interviews with school owners, principals, department heads, and teachers about the strategies that owners and schools followed in transitioning to home schooling. It is not enough to talk about clear strategies or management. The organization of the school day and teaching content had to be largely adapted to the digital skills of teachers and students and to the home situation. Although the digital environment was largely conducive to distance learning. Many teachers say that neither they nor the students had the necessary competencies to use these tools.
A feeling of less cooperation and more individual work
Digital skills gaps are reflected in the implementation of teaching. Digital assignments and lectures were the most used methods during downtime, but here the report shows big differences, also within schools. In other words, the quality of teaching often depended on the skills, competences, efforts and preconditions of the teacher concerned. There are also differences between the programs. Common to all programs was the feeling of less collaborative work and more individual work with subjects than usual. In spite of this, the teachers managed to establish little cooperation between the students.
Practical training in most cases has been replaced by theoretical tasks
The transition to home schooling has particularly influenced practical training in curricular subjects and professional specialization. It is clear from the report that practical training has in most cases been replaced by theoretical tasks. If students were given practical tasks to be solved at home, they declared that they benefited less from it compared to performing such tasks in the curriculum subjects at school.
Learning and motivation
A major trend in the analyzes across all data sources is that most students' learning experience and motivation appeared to be impaired during the home schooling period. 60 percent of students thought they learned less during the downtime, with variations between different programs. The perceived learning effect is lowest in the case of people studying electrical engineering and the highest among students of health and education. Motivation and well-being are often associated with a variety of tasks at work, and many teachers say it was demanding to provide students with enough variety in teaching. Some teachers report that they changed their curriculum after a few weeks in home schooling. Then students could calm down and concentrate on one subject at a time.
Feeling unwell while studying at home
Most students report that they develop worse when taught at home. Compared to regular school, but about a third respond that they thrive better with homeschooling. Students at a high academic level were not particularly affected by being confined to their homes. The report shows that digital home learning may have had positive effects for some. For example, one third of teachers believed that digital learning did not necessarily have a negative impact on students with absenteeism challenges. Because many of these meetings involve treating school as a social sphere. Therefore, the report emphasizes that the conclusion that “students from challenges” they lose at school homeschool and the "good students" won in homeschool is too simple.
Little ramifications for curriculum progress and implementation
Nor has there been much to indicate that the spring 2020 closure had serious repercussions on student progress and implementation. In vocational education programs, the percentage of people who dropped out of education during the year fell from 5,8%. Up to 5,0 percent in 2019/2020, and the average grade in the most popular subjects increased in the 2019/2020 school year compared to the previous year. In addition, around half of the students who attended Vg2020 vocational subjects in spring 2 started their education in the fall of 2020.
Little influence on the choice of curriculum subjects.
68% of students believed that the coronation situation did not influence the choice they made after Vg2. While 14 percent said the situation around the crown caused them to make a different choice than they initially thought. Keep in mind that the spring 2020 closure was after the application deadline for upper secondary education, so this did not affect students' choices for the next school year.
Main conclusions:
-Coordination and management during the crisis was characterized by ad hoc solutions
-The digital infrastructure was good, but the lack of digital competences made the situation difficult
-The transition to home learning has primarily gone beyond hands-on training in curricular subjects and professional specialization
-The crisis has affected learning, motivation and well-being, but progress and implementation have been sustained
