A Voice for Ontario Teachers in Disaster and Emergency Planning: A Case study of Teachers’ Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

This section identifies the main themes derived from the interviews.  These themes are amplified further to illustrate the major impacts on the delivery of education resulting from teachers being excluded from the system-level decision-making on the delivery of education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Impacts include: 

• Hindered classroom planning,  
• Diminished quality of education, 
• Frustration stemming from a lack of institutional support, and
• Harm to the well-being of teachers. 

Hindered Classroom Planning

All participants stressed that the classroom planning process is foundational to successful teaching. Chris described planning as an ongoing effort throughout their career, “In my experience as a teacher, you[‘re] never done planning and learning and getting ready to be a teacher.” Pursuant to this, participants frequently discussed that the reactive decision-making and frequent changes to mandates hindered their ability to plan effectively. Chris described the reactive decision-making they observed during the COVID-19 pandemic response, “Teachers have kind of felt that the government makes decisions and then, what one decision sounds like the best plan, a week later they do something different […] We’ve basically gotten used to being told that tomorrow, anything can change.” Chris later described the numerous changes teachers had to adapt to during the first year of the pandemic:

Imagine you go from the spring teaching, which had its own complexities, to this now, teaching the same course and it has to be done in 22 days. […] By Christmas we were told we weren’t going back [in-person], and we were in the red zone and so we shifted again. […] Then all of January I taught remotely online through a synchronous daily lesson. […] And in February – it was either 11th or 12th – we showed up back in the classroom and just pivoted again. So, [we] went from the online environment back to the human being, in-person, environment.

Andrea echoed the importance of planning and elaborated on the impact that the frequent changes have had on their ability to teach: 

The hardest part about this is not being able to plan anything – ever. […] It’s the yo-yo[ing] that makes it so hard. There’s no consistency. […] The unknown is always hardest. We’re a culture of control freaks who like to plan everything. And when you have no control and can plan nothing, it is really hard.

In response to recommendations from the Ministry and school boards, some teachers were put in a position of having to plan for and teach in a hybrid model (in-person and virtual). Tim described additional frustration with trying to plan for this, “I got to come up with the lesson for tomorrow’s asynchronous class and what the hell am I doing in my in-person class while that’s going on? Your brain is just going in seven different directions”. Overall, Chris summarised the impact of changing expectations from the Ministry and school board on teachers’ ability to plan, “We’ve just thrown out the consistency that used to exist in our job. […] Now there’s no sense in planning officially more than a couple days ahead. […] It has obliterated our ability to do long-range planning.”

Diminished Quality of Education 

Multiple participants expressed feeling like their ability to teach was hindered to the point of comparing their current practice to being a brand-new teacher. This sentiment conveyed feelings of frustration and inadequacy as participants attempted to cope with the prescribed changes while delivering quality lessons. Chris described how the transition to virtual learning impeded their ability to use their experience:

Introducing COVID in my 11th or 12th year of teaching, in my experience, it was almost the equivalent to being pushed back 10 years and starting as a brand-new teacher. Your tools in the classroom are very different; the online environment doesn’t present the same opportunities for human connection. […] You don’t know how your audience is responding to your teaching […] there’s a lot of not really being sure, or confident that what you’ve said has stuck or was understood by your students. So, in the online environment, I really do feel […] that we almost went from being seasoned teachers to brand new teachers overnight.

Tim echoed Chris’ comments, emphasising that teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic was more challenging than early in their career, “first-year teach[ing], that is the worst year of your life. […] I’m working harder now than I did [in] my first year.” 

Despite their best efforts, most participants expressed concern regarding the quality of education they were providing. The exception to this was teachers who worked in alternative classrooms, such as play-based kindergarten or Montessori teachers. Chris expressed the shared experience of many participants who felt they no longer had the training and tools to provide quality education and experience for their students, “There were times when you felt like you were doing a bad job [teaching] because you just didn’t have the toolkit or the experience to do what would be a good job.” Robin, whose school had adopted students taking a single condensed class, explained they are unable to provide the same level of support to students, “you don’t have the time to pick up kids that have fallen behind and they fall behind so quickly. […] If a kid misses a day, in my mind, they’re missing an entire week of work”. They later emphasised that the current teaching guidelines were not in the interest of students’ learning, “This is not about kids learning – it is about me [meeting deadlines].”

Participants teaching experiential courses expressed additional difficulty planning and delivering the curriculum as the health restrictions did not allow the students to engage directly with the subject material. Meghan, a music teacher, explained, “Arts and music teachers, in particular, are trying to keep their programs going through a time when we can’t even do ‘the thing.’ It’s like teaching French without being able to speak French in class”. Tim shared the difficulties they faced as a physical education teacher, “Now this course exists where 90% of it is effectively gone. So now you’re just constantly struggling with […] what am I doing? How am I going to teach this? What can I replace this huge chunk of course with?” In addition, multiple participants explained that the loss of experiential learning was detrimental to students and described education now as “two-dimensional” (Meghan), having “lost the fun” (Chris), and was outright “boring” (Meghan).

Participants described feeling that the school boards and the Ministry of Education prioritised the continuation of education over the quality of education and facilitation of student learning. Meghan explained that this prioritisation resulted in poor and ineffective education delivery: 

The kids need to be in school, so whatever happens, there is at least better than nothing, but is that a good way to approach this? Probably not. Two years of education – or maybe next year too – are just going to go down the tubes.

Chris elaborated on this sentiment and described compromising the quality of education to meet the demands of the school board and the Ministry of Education: 

You’re sending out a lesson and sometimes you feel like “This is junk, I wouldn’t want to do this if I was a student.” But at this moment, this is what we have to do in order to check that box [to meet] the expectation of our employer.

Robin reflected on the impact that this trade-off may have had on the students’ education, and their feeling of uncertainty for their future, “I think this will come out years later – whether the [students] retention is any good. […]  We don’t know yet how that’s going to affect the kids.” 

Lack of Institutional Support

Participants frequently stated that the burden of implementing the guidelines set by the Ministry of Education and/or school boards was placed entirely on the teachers with little support from the Ministry of Education or school boards. Chris explained that the reactive decision-making, in combination with the lack of support, highlighted the detachment between decision-makers and classroom teachers:

I feel like I’ve been supported by families and parents, but not necessarily by our government. […] It seems like there’s a bit of blind decision-making that’s pretty rash. […] School board directors, and superintendents, and the Ministry of Education bureaucrats, those people are quite distant from the classroom, and they often make decisions that sound like good decisions from their perspective in the education system but don’t necessarily line up with the day-to-day operations of a classroom teacher or a student.

Emphasizing their frustration, Tim explains that no one is even asking the teachers what’s going on, or what they need:  

Nobody has listened to teachers in this. Politicians have talked a lot of crap; unions are sending us emails that are honestly just out of touch. The board is making statements […] This [interview] is going to be the first time somebody who’s not my family [or] friends has asked me what’s going on.

Meghan indicated that teachers attempted to ease the burden by supporting one another, but that the support of colleagues wasn’t enough, “Teachers [are] helping each other do the work that someone else is downloading on us, but no one’s helping us. […] The crux of this whole thing is that the expectations are impossible.” Tim discussed feeling that the changing guidelines, a lack of support to adapt, and the expectation to continue delivery were unreasonable, “What they’ve done in this disaster and emergency scenario is make us responsible for our own training on our own time, while we’re dealing with a disaster and emergency scenario in our lives.” Later Tim added that: 

I’ve gone a long way in terms of understanding how I can do this [virtual education] better, mostly through trial and error because we’ve been given […] jack shit in terms of training. […] We’re not supported in any way, and then we’re asked to do too much.

Meghan echoed the sentiment of poor support with implementing frequent changes:

We get these things thrown at us all the time. All of these changes, and we have to create them ourselves. I’ve had to create a whole different program [and] new content. I’m creating all new assignments, all new ways of delivering all of my information. […] Every single step, we have to reinvent it. 

Harm to Teacher Well-Being

The erosion of the ability to plan a teaching program and its effect on the quality of education delivered, left many participants feeling stressed, frustrated and frankly exhausted. Participants expressed their commitment to their students but emphasised that it came with personal sacrifice. Chris discussed how these challenges, coupled with a lack of support, impacted their well-being:

What teachers do best is they make it work. Whatever we have to do, […] [we teach], we coach, we mark, we plan, and we don’t stop at the end of a bell. I think that teachers just made it work, and at the expense of their mental health. 

Jenna describes having to choose between their own children and their students, “You’ve got multiple kids at home and then you’re trying to work. It’s like you’re doing a bad job at one or the other. You can’t be doing a great job of both.” Participants frequently described having to adapt to the changing guidelines through significantly increased workloads. Joan explained the substantial amount of effort required to maintain the delivery of education for their students, “It’s honestly been an exhausting year, to say the least. I feel like I’ve worked twice as hard. […] I’ve worked so much harder trying to plan, [and] trying to make things engaging.” This feeling of exhaustion and burnout was echoed by many participants, with Meghan explaining that they, “work every night until midnight.” Jenna acknowledged that counselling was made available to them, however, it was inaccessible: 

Counselling is provided anytime for anyone. […] [But] when you are in the thick of it, and you need the most support, […] that’s when you can’t access it because you’re just overwhelmed, and reaching out is one more thing that you just can’t do. 

Adding to the harm of their wellbeing, many participants expressed feeling unsafe in the classroom environment and the inability to implement certain public health guidelines.  John explained their experience in the classroom: 

There’s no way that [the students] could possibly be keeping any safe distance from each other, and me from them. So, we hope that the masks help, but certainly we can’t maintain the kind of distance that is continually recommended. It’s just not, it’s not being made possible with 30 plus students in a room.

Tim emphasized the severity of the situation by comparing schools to long-term care facilities: 

The only difference between schools and long-term care is our patients are asymptomatic and their patients die. […] And the government has refused to acknowledge it. […] They are playing Russian roulette with everybody that is in a school and their families.

Referring to the whole experience, Meghan reported abnormally high levels of stress in themself and in their colleagues, “a teacher was crying at our union meeting, in front of all of her colleagues. That is not normal behaviour. Everyone’s very stressed. […] Teachers are going on leave.”