Abstract:

The first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic showed country leaders - as well as school leaders - the importance of crisis planning. When - in the context of the first wave of the pandemic - it came to school closures in spring 2020, educational systems were not prepared for such a challenge. During the summer holidays in 2020, governments worldwide had a unique opportunity to work out crisis plans and get prepared for the eventuality of any kind of crisis in the future. Experience from Slovakia shows that despite certain attempts to improve the quality of online education by the government and NGOs, school leaders and teachers remained the two decisive factors from the aspect of the quality of the educational process during the second wave of the pandemic as well.

In the proposed paper, the results of a questionnaire survey on Slovak teachers’ experiences gained during the second wave of the pandemic are presented. The survey represents a continuation of a project focused on the limits of online learning in secondary schools and on new opportunities brought by the involuntary transfer from school-based learning to distance learning during the pandemic crisis. In 2020, the authors of the paper conducted a research on the experiences of teachers who delivered live streamed lessons during the first wave of the pandemic, their students, and the students’ parents, the results of which have already been published. In the presented questionnaire survey, teachers from the same institution were asked about their distance teaching experiences gained during the second wave of the pandemic with an emphasis placed on the question whether it came to a qualitative shift as for the conditions for online teaching or any kind of support they received. Even though teachers did not have many opportunities to improve their online teaching skills during the summer holidays in 2020, they showed overall satisfaction with the quality of their online teaching and the educational process as such.

Keywords:

Teachers, COVID-19, distance learning, crisis planning, online education.