Beth Clark-Gareca, State University of New York at New Paltz, New York, USA

With the impact of COVID-19, teacher educators were stunned by the speed with which universities and school districts closed their doors to in-person instruction. From one day to the next, student teaching and fieldwork experiences were halted, and teacher candidates in the midst of their clinical experiences were brought back from their K-12 placements directly to their own living rooms. In this rapidly changing landscape, teacher educators needed to solve multiple problems simultaneously: How could we ensure that teacher candidates develop the necessary skills to be effective teachers in remote settings? How could we facilitate candidates’ identity development as teachers when they had been removed from in-person clinical contexts? Answering the field’s urgent call, professional organizations began to mobilize.

The Role of Professional Organizations in a Crisis

Professional organizations quickly rose to the educational charge to meet and support the needs of educators during the COVID crisis. Online professional development (PD) delivery systems were amplified to provide wide-ranging teaching resources and informational forums to their constituents. Platforms were learned, techniques were developed, and webinars and trainings were offered to support teachers during this lockdown. In New York, the New York State TESOL (NYS TESOL, 2020) organization (nystesol.org) and the Regional Bilingual Education Resource Networks (RBERN) (NYSED, 2020) immediately responded to the closures by implementing structured, high quality, virtual professional development sessions on an almost daily basis free of charge. These sessions were specific to educators’ needs, and included the following topics among many others:

• Learning to use many different educational tools, e.g. Google Classroom, PearDeck, Kahoot, Quizlet, Padlet, and many more.
• Facilitating communication with students’ families, often in the home language, about COVID 19, distance school procedures, food delivery and academic work
• Attending to students’ socio-emotional health during these difficult times.
• Raising awareness of the suspension of language proficiency and achievement testing, and understanding newly released guidelines for identification and exit procedures for English learners (ELs).

As a teacher educator, I quickly noted the benefit of these online PD innovations and required my students’ attendance to replace some of their in-person clinical hours. These forums provided a wonderful learning opportunity for teacher candidates, not only through the micro-development of their skills as teachers, but also by helping them to begin to develop the teacher identity that comes with the first experiences in becoming a teacher.

Teacher identity development is an important component of teacher preparation programs (Olsen, 2016; Yazan, 2017; 2018). Yazan (2018) found that teacher candidates’ identities were negotiated and developed through a variety of tasks, including: a) interaction with others, b) investment in teaching practice, c) constructing new images of being a teacher, and d) aligning their fledgling practices with the community’s demands and expectations (p. 223). As Yazan describes, these online PD sessions presented candidates with opportunities to develop their teacher identity through interaction, investment, construction, and alignment. In fact, through masterful examples of online pedagogy, both new and experienced teachers continued their identity development through new models centering a) teaching and learning, b) generosity, and c) community. These models of practice developed during COVID have been identified and are highlighted below.

Models of Practice

A Model of Teaching and Learning

Teacher candidates often step into classrooms where learning structures, schedules and routines are already systematic and smooth. During COVID spring, all educators, regardless of their years of experience, were forced to invent new teaching and learning systems collectively and collaboratively. This invention spurred us all to re-examine our notions of how students learn, and new insights guided our newfound, or perhaps re-encountered, resolve to teach with purpose. My candidates had the opportunity to witness this organic process in its rawest, truest form, and they learned a great deal about how to triage pressing issues and ask the right kinds of questions to discover the best pathways for teaching and learning.

A Model of Academic Generosity

Because of the nature of our co-teaching work, ESOL teachers tend to be natural collaborators and sharers. During COVID spring, our state’s ESOL educators showed themselves to be extraordinarily generous in their craft. Again and again, teachers volunteered to showcase techniques or skills that they had developed for their own students, and after presenting that project/ lesson plan/ resource manual/ tool (that undoubtedly took them dozens of hours to prepare), with a quick key stroke, they shared this work widely with the entire professional community. The spirit to solve urgent problems and attend to the needs of ELs in a time of crisis overpowered the frequently counterproductive instinct to protect one’s own work. Generosity ruled the day, and we all became better educators for it.

A Model of Community

Even in the best of times, ESOL teachers can feel alone in their work since often there may be only one or two ESOL teachers in a school building or district. Remarkably, in this time of social distance, members of our professional community came together online in unprecedented numbers. The online forums developed by NYS professional organizations allowed ESOL teachers from all over the state to meet in virtually supportive spaces for the betterment of the profession. We became resources for each other, and the close proximity that Zoom provides allowed us to know and support each other in new ways. These gatherings would never have taken place outside of lockdown circumstances, and teacher candidates were afforded a valuable opportunity to see motivated, gifted educators mobilize into a community of practice like never before. Our newest teachers were invited into this community and welcomed with open (though distanced) arms, and going forward, they know that there is a community ready to support them in their work in the service of ELs.

Conclusion

Though we all undoubtedly yearn for a time when our work will again return to a normal, in-person rhythm, as a teacher educator, it is my hope that we can retain some of what we have built this spring. What has become clear is that we all are definitely better practitioners when we work together, and thanks to the power and vision our professional organizations, teacher candidates were provided a concrete space to do the pedagogical thinking and identity development that they needed during this time. As a teacher educator, I have seen their practice grow in new dimensions, and looking to the future, I am even further committed to connecting teacher candidates to the resources provided by professional organizations from the very beginning of their graduate studies.

References

NYSED (2020). Regional Support/RBERNs. Retrieved from http://www.nysed.gov/bilingual-ed/regional-supportrberns

NYS TESOL (2020). New York State Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. Retrieved from nystesol.org

Olsen, B. (2016). Teaching for success: Developing your teacher identity in today’s classroom. New York, NY. Routledge.

Yazan, B. (2017). “It just made me look at language in a different way:” ESOL teacher candidates’ identity negotiation through teacher education coursework. Linguistics and Education. 40, 38-49. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.linged.2017.06.002

Yazan, B. (2018). Being and becoming an ESOL teacher through coursework and internship: Three teacher candidates’ identity negotiation, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies, 15:3, 205-227, DOI: 10.1080/15427587.2017.1408014