Abstract:

The aim of this study is to establish the specifics and dynamics of teacher’s professional roles in online education, provoked by the crisis with COVID - 19 in the period from March 2020 to the present. The theoretical prerequisite of the research is the thesis about the nature of teaching as performance of roles (Grasha, 1996, 2002; Harden & Crosby, 2000; Brown & Douglas, 2007 аnd others) as well as empirically developed status-role models of Bulgarian teachers in the period 2010-2020.

The research is performed with а two-stage methodology:
In the first stage 200 school teachers have been studied with an ordinal scale “Teachers professional roles (in on-line education)”, which represents the ranking of 38 professional roles in order from 1 to 38 according to the following dichotomous indicators: most important – least important; most preferred – most unwanted; easiest to implement - most difficult, burdensome; best prepared to perform – most unprepared to perform. The results are analysed by determining the weighting factor for each role in the scale, as well as by deriving the Spearman rank correlation coefficient (Rs) and the Kendall concordance coefficient (W). Based on the data from the statistical analysis, a matrix of the role identification of teachers in online training is derived.

In the second stage of the study 20 online lessons in different subjects and in different classes were monitored - 10 lessons for primary school and 10 lessons for junior high school. Through structured observation by 10 indicators the professional roles of teachers in the real conditions of online teaching are analyzed. A comparative analysis of teachers' attitudes towards professional roles in online learning and their actual performance was made.

Keywords:

Teachers professional roles, on-line education, status-role models.