COMPARING THE EXPERIENCE OF KAZAKHSTANI TEACHERS BEFORE AND DURING COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

Global COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to change. This affected various institutions including educational ones. The current research is focused on the comparison of the teaching experience of Kazakhstani school teachers before and during pandemic starting from March 2020 until May 2021 while teaching was completely distant. The aim of the research is to study the response of the local teachers and through using grounded theory as a method, to propose an original theory about the COVID-19 situation using teachers’ viewpoint. The data was collected through individual semi-structured interviews with 12 teachers of different subjects including math, physics, English language, Kazakh language, and biology in schools. According to the results, the age of the teacher is an important factor that affected the process of adaptation to online teaching and its hardships, estimation of the effectiveness of pre- and during pandemic teaching, preference of methods of teaching. The older was the teacher, the more traditional ways like textbooks and offline teaching were preferred. The younger was a teacher, the more digital and creative were methods of teaching such as games, competitions, group works, Youtube, and online teaching were applied. It was also established that adaptation of teachers of STEM subjects was harder than for teachers of languages because of the need to compensate the absence of laboratory works in physics and biology classes during online teaching lack of variety of methods of delivering. Finally, it was found that the main obstacles faced during shifting to distance teaching are lack of support from school administration, issues with separating work and family, social pressure, lack of motivation, stress, caused by mostly social triggers.