NYKids Survey Results Show Collaboration Among Educators Weakened During Pandemic

By Aaron Leo, Kristen C. Wilcox, Lisa (Fang) Yu

Introduction

To gain a better understanding of educators’ experiences at work and feelings about their jobs, NYKids staff and research colleagues have designed and implemented a study to explore the effects of the pandemic on the education workforce. Following up on our previous post, this blog highlights additional findings from our preliminary analysis of the survey data. In what follows, we present findings which illustrate the negative impact of the pandemic on collaboration and communications between educators.

Colleague Interaction

In our previous blog detailing preliminary findings from our study, we focused on the higher amounts of stress found among educators serving a greater number of students living in poverty. Our findings also pointed to higher levels of job dissatisfaction and intent to leave among these educators. The last set of questions in our survey explore educators’ interactions with their colleagues before and during the pandemic.

In this section, participants were asked questions about their collaboration and communications with colleagues on daily responsibilities (e.g. planning and preparing instructional materials) and providing supports to students and their families during the pandemic (e.g. shared strategies for communicating with students’ families).

Overall, results from schools in our sample noted severe dips in collaboration and communications with colleagues since the pandemic started. The figure below from one school, for instance, shows that 31% of participants collaborated with colleagues “every day” before March 2020. This number dropped to 15% once the pandemic began.

Open-ended responses at the end of our survey revealed a similar trend. Respondents commented on the additional time constraints they faced in planning for remote instruction, often leaving little time for collaboration. A teacher from one school described the isolation that many educators experienced:

“I am stretched too thin and cannot even eat lunch with my colleagues to talk and destress and support one another.”

Social distancing guidelines also made it challenging for educators to meet with each other spontaneously. As an educator from another school noted:

“I do feel that the pandemic has made it more difficult to collaborate with colleagues on a regular basis as we are more isolated to designated areas at designated times with less flexibility is merging classes in common areas.”

As we have noted in previous blogs, the impact of the pandemic and school closures was experienced differently across schools with various socioeconomic profiles. The results of this third set of questions are consistent with the patterns identified in our other analyses: educators serving larger percentages of children growing up in poverty have seen the most detrimental effects on teacher collaboration and communications.

Conclusion

These findings point to the damaging effects the pandemic has had on collaboration and communications between educators. As prior scholarship has noted, collegial relationships offer a means of support for educators as well as a source of instructional innovation and professional learning. Teacher collaboration has also been found to have positive effects on student achievement.

A clear implication from this research is the need to redouble efforts to support teacher collaboration and professional learning especially with regard to providing equity of opportunity for our most disadvantaged and marginalized youth. To this end, we recommend the following upcoming opportunities:

• Sign up for a course leading to a micro-credential in continuous improvement (no prerequisites required) with NYKids R&D Director, Kristen C. Wilcox or NYKids research partner Hal Lawson. See the UAlbany fall schedule link.
• Check out a webinar or research report from the University at Albany’s Center for the Elimination of Minority Health Disparities.
• Reach out directly to NYKids at nykids@albany.edu for assistance in supporting teacher collaboration in the coming school year.

As always, please visit NYKids’ website for more information on our study and sign up for our newsletter.