Abstract:

A year into the Covid-19 pandemic, the journey has been stressful, particularly for educators. Countries like India with a population of over a billion struggled in the initial stages of the pandemic to respond to health and educational crises. Indian schools had to be closed indefinitely, school boards postponed or canceled examinations, students lost months of their academic year, and eventually, a sudden transition to teaching and learning online was inevitable. Researchers termed this sudden shift to an alternate mode of delivery due to crisis situations, as Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) (Hogdes et al., 2020), in contrast to online learning, which has been designed specifically to impact instruction and learning. This shift to ERT required teachers to take more control of how they design and implement the courses, with support through Professional Development (PD) for the skills required to teach in an online environment. Globally, teachers faced challenges like content creation for online learning, delivery tools, online and digital pedagogy, engaging students, and understanding and implementing pedagogies due to the sudden transition; but Professional Development (PD) programs were helpful in supporting them (Hartshrone, 2020).

However, in the Indian K-12 context, the emergence of pandemic highlighted teachers' lack of preparation to move from face-to-face to ERT using online and digital technologies. When the schools reopened online or hybrid, teachers tried to replicate their in-person, lecture-based methods via online video platforms, with little focus and assessment on how these methods are impacting student learning outcomes. This was due to the existing structure of the teacher education and professional development programs in India, which have not adequately introduced them to online learning and technology integration before COVID-19, so teachers had no familiar practices or continuous support to work from. The purpose of this paper, structured as a literature review is to map the current teacher professional development programs for K-12 public school teachers in India before COVID-19, and how and why they need to be repurposed going forward. The review also looks into some effective global examples of teacher PD that have helped teachers before the pandemic and more studies and programs that supported teachers during COVID-19 and Emergency Remote Learning. This paper aims to provide a few suggestions to restructure the existing teacher PD programs in India, taking caution from the pandemic crisis. Strategies like designing more situated, contextual, collaborative and reflective teacher PD models have been studied to be effective globally, before and during the pandemic, that helped teachers around the world to engage students and enhance their learning outcomes. This paper delves into how these models can be recontextualized for the Indian K-12 context, to introduce more student-centered, constructivist pedagogies to Indian teachers whose PD programs until now only included skill-based, technical workshops and lecture-based pedagogies. This review also hopes to bring a developing country’s perspective in fighting the pandemic with a focus on education, provides some suggestions to restructure the PD for teachers, and also seeks scholarly perspectives at a global conference setting.

Keywords:

Emergency Remote Learning, Teacher Professional Development, Collaborative and Online Learning, COVID-19.