Exploring the impact of COVID-19 on the grammar of schools in project-based learning contexts

Abstract

While scholars and public figures have positioned the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity for school reform, the response to this potential for change by teachers remains underexplored. In turn, we attend to the following research question: how do teachers at project-based learning high schools conceptualize the changes to education that have occurred in response to the COVID-19 pandemic? In analyzing temporally dispersed interviews with eight teachers from four different schools in the United States between 2020 and 2022, we found that participants recognized changes in the pedagogies, curricula, assessments, and structures in their school systems. In particular, teachers conceptualized these educational shifts through the lenses of technological change, a push for student-centered practices, and an embrace of real world applications of learning. However, they also described a reversal of these changes once in person schooling returned, illustrating an inability of the pandemic to affect the “grammar of schools” (Tyack & Tobin, 1994).