Online teacher education during COVID-19 pandemic
Vignette #42
Context
I am a teacher educator who is training trainee teachers in their final year when they start teaching their own classes. Due to the repeated lockdown of schools since spring 2020 our team of teacher educators continously has improved the training of trainee teachers for distance learning. We want our teachers to be well prepared for inclusive online teaching. Especially during these lockdown phases teachers have to have an eye on pupils with low socio-economic background and little support from home. Here, online collaboration and communication amongst teachers, trainee teachers, teachers and their pupils etc. are essential. As schools are working with all kinds of ICT learning management, communication and collaboration systems, we have intended to offer our trainee teachers the possibility to get to know a variety of these systems. We have intended to implement distant peer-coaching such that the trainee teachers learn to support each other. Our current ICT system has high standards in data privacy but it is an inflexible top down learning management system. So the possibilities for our trainee teachers are very reduced to form online-groups themselves for data exchange, video conferencing, chat or online collaboration on documents, i.e. to learn to collaborate and communicate online, self-regulated and indenpendently from their teacher educators. Other systems are not implemented. Thus it is difficult to train our teachers on different platforms as they would need it for their schools. It is unquestioned that data privacy standards are important but for the moment where we do not have a flexible plus high standard data privacy system, we might have to choose the flexible one to meet our teacher training goals.
Dilemma
How can we decide what is more important at the moment? How can an interprofessional team (ICT, teacher educators, policy makers etc) cross boundaries and come to decisions about ICT for teacher education?
Choices
- We have to prioritise the goals for our teacher education team. (tool 28)
- We have to clarify, what information, knowledge and competences we need to share? ( tool 20)
- We need a tool to improve our (inter)professional competences/decision process? (tools 16, 30, 32)
- We must make a plan on whom to involve in the long term to serve as a support team in such matters.