Analysis of teaching practices during the pandemic: teachers’ goals and activities in virtual classrooms

Abstract

To research teachers’ priorities on what was to be taught and learned during the COVID-19 lockdown, we asked Spanish Primary and Secondary teachers to choose and describe the activity they preferred among those carried out with their students during the pandemic. Our interest was to investigate what really happened in the classrooms, the type of learning favored by the practices (reproductive vs. constructive), and the agreement between the teacher’s goals and their teaching We obtained 272 activities that we analyzed according to the proposed goals, the types of learning worked (verbal, procedural, and attitudinal), and the kind of teaching promoted (content or student-centered). Results showed that most teachers proposed content-centered activities, oriented above all to verbal learning. There were clear differences between the proposed goals, partly student-centered, and what was really taught, essentially content-centered. We obtained two teaching profiles, one reproductive and the other constructive.