School Hybrid Configurations During COVID-19: Implications for Teachers' Work

• In Event: Pandemics and Organizational Dynamics in Schools

Abstract

The term “hybrid” emerged as a common descriptor of schooling configurations at the outset of the 2020-2021 school year, as the pandemic affected schooling options. The rationale for hybrid schooling included: enabling safety protocols; increasing choice by offering families modality options; and improving the quality of the learning experience by creating an in-person aspect to augment the perceived limitations of remote-only schooling. An October 2020 survey of educators found that “close to two thirds of district leaders said their school systems are doing hybrid learning” (Lieberman, 2020). Yet the term hybrid is often invoked with little definition or detail beyond the implication that some combination of in-person and remote instruction is offered. What little is specified generally refers to student learning configurations (Hanover, 2020) but there is less discussion, with some exception (Kraft et al., 2020), of what the hybrid terminology signifies for teachers’ work and their relationships with students.

This paper examines teachers’ work during the pandemic to 1) distinguish three models of hybrid schooling; 2) analyze how each model enables or constrains the achievement of the stated goals of choice, safety, and quality of educational experience; and 3) consider the implications of these models for the organization of teachers’ work, including the differing demands of each. The analysis is drawn primarily from survey responses from seventy-five teachers (November 2020, February 2021, & June 2021), and three semi-structured interviews with thirty-six focal teachers (Summer & December, 2020 & Summer 2021) across nine states, all focused on teachers’ navigation of pandemic teaching.

Hybrid teaching assignments of the thirty-six focal teachers were coded for school-level hybrid offerings, hybrid student learning configurations, and hybrid teaching assignments. Of 36 focal teachers, 22 (61%) reported working in a hybrid school model in Fall 2020. However, the school-level “hybrid” descriptor does not capture the degree to which individual students and teachers engaged in a combination of in-person and remote learning and teaching. Analysis yielded three hybrid classifications that we termed parallel, alternating, and blended.

Findings indicate that the three hybrid models were differently positioned to achieve stated goals and created significantly different demands on teachers. Teachers found the parallel structure, in which they taught students either remotely or in-person, but not in both modes, to place the fewest demands on planning, pedagogy, and student relationships. The alternating model required teachers to manage a combination of in-person and remote pedagogies, but not at the same time. In the most stress-inducing arrangement, the blended model — often introduced despite teachers’ voiced concerns —placed substantial demands on teachers to juggle the divergent pedagogical requirements of in-person and remote instruction simultaneously. Teachers in rural communities and in states with weak labor protections were most likely to confront the blended model. By specifying the variations subsumed under the broad "hybrid" category, identifying the contexts in which each model prevailed, and attending to teachers’ reported experience, this analysis surfaces working conditions that bear on teachers’ felt effectiveness and commitment.

Authors

• Lora Bartlett, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Riley Collins, University of California - Santa Cruz