Focus Areas: Teachers Work
The purpose of TITUS is to develop a measurement tool that provides a detailed portrait of teachers’ work. Team members believe that data from the tool will be useful to researchers and educators. The tool, called the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), has been used to measure the daily life experiences of adults in the general population but has not been used with teachers to date. The novel measurement tool, in which teachers report on the episodes of their day, has been shown to be more accurate than standard surveys. UERC partners for this study include researchers at Boston University, University of Cincinnati and the Albert Shanker Institute. The study is funded by the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education.
The study has collected data on how teachers’ practices and their feelings during work changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first direct evidence of teachers’ work before and after schools closed as a result of COVID-19 (all studies to date rely on retrospective reports of change). We found that teachers spent less time on instruction, and more time on planning, grading and assessment after the widespread move to distance education. We also found that after the switch to online teaching, teachers reported feeling more positively when engaging with students compared to their feelings during other activities. These results are summarized in the working paper and policy brief linked below.
