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The study describes the experiences of a cohort of instructional technology students in an online practicum, all of whom were current K-12 teachers in the United States at the onset of the pandemic. Data were obtained from students' responses in online journals; reflection prompts focused on their transition to emergency remote teaching during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Analysis revealed that these teachers were unprepared to teach remotely due to lacking training, technology tools, and support. Additional preparation is needed to facilitate the needs of in-service teachers and their students in case future shifts to remote teaching are required.
Introduction
K-12 teachers faced an emergency due to the COVID-19 global pandemic in March 2020 and were forced to leave their traditional classroom instruction and teach remotely. Hodges et al. (2020) referred to this as "emergency remote teaching." They defined it as a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternative mode due to a crisis. Selected characteristics of emergency remote teaching that distinguish it from typical online learning include implementation with little planning, the hope that this transition was temporary, limited professional development, and primarily synchronous instruction provided to the class as a whole (Digital Learning Collaborative, 2022).
Teachers and schools were not prepared for this unplanned instructional transition to the online setting (Barbour, 2021; Crompton et al., 2022). Barbour (2021) noted that, prior to the pandemic, it was estimated that only 5-8% of K-12 students had experience with online learning. However, school closings for 1 week or longer due to natural disasters, inclement weather, and even teacher strikes are not new in the United States (Jahan et al., 2022). Given this, sustainable online teaching and learning plans must be developed in preparation for future emergencies that impact K-12 schools and their stakeholders.
However, there needs to be more teacher preparation for online teaching. In a previous study of K-12 online teachers (defined as teaching one or more online courses), Archambault and Larson (2015) found that the majority of individuals were self-taught or were provided training when hired to teach online; very few had participated in an online internship or had even observed an online class or teacher prior to teaching their online course. Several of their study participants noted that a...