Browsing by Author "Salo, Janette"

Goal. The corona pandemic during spring 2020 led to closing of schools. Therefor majority of the teachers had to move to distance education. The teachers were in a whole new situation and had to rapidly develop a new way to teach. Co-teaching is an approach becoming more common. It refers to a situation where two or more teachers cooperates. The objective of my study is to figure out how the teachers who were working as co-teachers executed distance education during Spring 2020. Furthermore, I study possible advantages and challenges the teachers experienced from the co-teaching in the distance education. My goal is to add knowledge and understanding of the foundation pillars of co-teaching and distance education through this study. Methods. I sent an e-mail to ten co-teachers where I asked their willingness to participate in my study and three teacher pairs were willing to be a part of my study. Therefor there were three cases in my study. Materials were collected with pair interviews and the theme interview was selected to be a survey. As an analysis method I used the content analysis. Results and conclusions. All Teacher pairs considered it most reasonable to divide their pupil into two separate groups. Each pair had about an hour lasting virtual study hall in a day through video conference. After this the lines were left open so that for example the pupils who needed support were able to stay and work with teacher's assistance. In all three cases the benefits from work pair were mainly the same. Some of the found advantages were divided responsibility, the colleague's support and work stress relief. Challenges due having a work pair were minimal. The reason can be the fact that the interviews were carried out in a pair. One case brought up the occasional disagreements and additional work through work phone. One case experienced that here had been some challenges with communication and it had lead to a few misunderstandings. However, all the teacher pairs emphasised that none of these challenges were a threshold question.