TEACHING IN THE COVID-19 ERA: UNDERSTANDING THE OPPORTUNITIES AND BARRIERS FOR TEACHER AGENCY

The school closures necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic created a rapid shift to alternative modes of educational delivery, primarily online learning and teacher-supported home-schooling. This shift has revealed deep inequities in education systems worldwide, as many children lost access to teachers and schooling. An effective response to these changes has tested teachers’ personal capacities and individual and collective agency intensely. The research lab we report on within this paper aimed to develop a better understanding of teacher agency in meeting the challenges of the pandemic and the physical and relational enablers and constraints of their environment. Drawing on case study reports from six international contexts and a series of online discussions with research lab participants, this study explores teachers’ enactment of agency in the context of various circumstances and environments. The authors argue that it is imperative that education systems support the enhancement of teachers’ personal and collective agency in the face of continued disruption to schooling and ongoing challenges to educational equity. inform the report. The approach was specific to each country, taking into account an emerging issue where data collection was restricted due to (part or full) closure of schools. In the third session, the profiles were discussed in the context of the original research questions to explore how the findings compared against the conceptual framework and where additional country-level information was needed. The country profiles were then developed alongside the conceptual framework and a draft paper, which was discussed and finalised in webinar four. Appendix A offers a summary overview of the reports and data we drew on for each country profile.


INTRODUCTION
Since March 2020, governments around the world have temporarily or partially closed schools in an attempt to contain the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has had considerable implications for members of the teaching profession as schools move to online and hybrid models of learning. Where schools have reopened, teaching is typically taking place under very different conditions involving strict hygiene measures and physical distancing. In response, teachers have been forced to adapt their practice in order to meet the diverse needs of their pupils and wider communities. The extent to which this has been achieved varies according to many contextual factors. However, emerging evidence suggests young people from the most disadvantaged backgrounds have been disproportionately affected by these circumstances (UNESCO, 2020). This paper presents the outcomes of an online research lab, involving 13 colleagues from 10 countries, established to understand the extent to which teachers have been able to change their practice to ensure (the continuation of) learning and students' well-being during the pandemic and the conditions that have facilitated and/or impeded this. We use the term "practice" throughout to refer to the technical core of teaching, such as teaching and assessment, either online, in school or through blended modes.

CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK
The conceptual framework that underpins this paper focuses on the challenges and demands that teachers across the globe face in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing from the concept of agency, more specifically pragmatic agency as the "ability to innovate when routines break down" (Hitlin & Elder, 2007: 176), whilst simultaneously acknowledging the role of the environment in the display and enactment of individual and collective agency. In this section we further elaborate our understanding of teacher agency and how this concept is relevant to understanding how teachers have responded to the challenges the pandemic has had/is having on them.

COVID-19 and challenges for the teaching profession
UNESCO's Global Education Monitoring (GEM) report (2020) paints a clear picture that the pandemic has been significantly more disruptive to disadvantaged students across all levels of education, a fact that may have long-lasting implications for intergenerational mobility, income inequality and health disparities. Throughout the pandemic, children from poorer communities as well as girls, the disabled, immigrants and ethnic minorities in many countries have been, for a multitude of reasons including poor connectivity and a lack of parental support, at a distinct educational disadvantage. According to the 2020 GEM report, educational inequality was already high with 258 million children and youth excluded from education globally, but these disparities have worsened during the pandemic, which has seen over 90% of the global student population affected by school closures. Lessons from the Ebola crisis indicate that health crises can leave many behind, in particular, the poorest girls who tend to leave school altogether.
Overcoming these growing inequalities requires extraordinary resilience, skills and a redefined understanding of teachers´ professionalism and professional identity. Not only are teachers expected to have the technical proficiency to cope with the challenges and consequences of school closures, they are also required to be attentive to local values and establish educational partnerships with parents and communities to ensure an inclusive and effective approach to repairing the learning loss and socio-emotional damage to child development brought about by the pandemic. Such professionalism requires collective agency: the ability of individual teachers to act collectively and draw on systems of mutual support. This professionalism also requires personal agency: the mindset and dispositions to respond to changing conditions in order to serve the learning and well-being needs of students appropriately.

Teacher agency
Teachers' mindsets and behaviours as well as whether and how they engage in change processes have been the object of significant past research. Bandura's (2006) social cognitive theory emphasises the evolvement and exercise of human agency and that people can exercise some influence over what they do. Bandura defines agency as "the capacity to exercise control over the nature and quality of one's life" (2001: 1). Human agency sees people as self-organising, proactive, self-regulating and self-reflecting, where self-efficacy affects one's goals and behaviours and is influenced by one's actions and conditions in the environment (Schunk & Meece, 2006). This conceptualisation includes individual characteristics that allow for agency ("capacity"), while also connecting agency with action: work-related activities and behaviours individuals or collectives engage in and how these shape their professional identity. According to Eteläpelto et al. (2013: 61) "professional agency is practiced when teachers and/ or communities in schools influence, make choices, and take stances in ways that affect their work and their professional identity". Imants and Van der Wal (2020) explain how agency is associated with individuals who, alone or in groups, in a given situation, make decisions, take initiatives, act proactively rather than reactively and deliberately strive and function to reach a certain end. This implies that agency is about individuals and collectives who are interacting with and within specific contexts. Below we will further explore the capacities individual teachers would need to exercise agency in response to the pandemic (knowledge, skills, selfefficacy), as well as the environment that allows and prevents the enactment of their agency.

Teachers' individual capacities
Teachers' personal competencies (skills and knowledge), beliefs (professional and personal) and values are shaped in the past, acted out in the present, but also structure orientations towards the future in shaping someone's aspirational capacity. Teachers' skill level affects their perceived self-efficacy as it is a function of the specific demand of a task and the challenge teachers face to be able to fulfil their role effectively. Bandura (2006) explains how someone's self-efficacy appraisal reflects the level of difficulty individuals believe they can surmount and this will relate to whether the activity is easily performable. Those teachers who require further development of their own skill set are likely to have more limited aspirations. Bandura's (2006) theory explains how perceived self-efficacy is an important element of agency as it determines how environmental opportunities and impediments (such as school closures) are perceived, how these affect the choice of activities, and how long people will persevere when confronting obstacles (Pajares, 1997). Perceived self-efficacy is concerned with "people's beliefs in their capabilities to produce given attainments" (Bandura, 2006: 307). Although efficacy beliefs are multifaceted, social cognitive theory identifies similar subskills underlying proficient performance across different spheres of activity and domains of functioning, such as skills for diagnosing task demands, constructing and evaluating alternative courses of action, setting proximal goals to guide one's efforts and creating self-incentives to sustain engagement in taxing activities and to manage stress (Bandura, 1991). Moreover, teachers' self-efficacy depends, according to Vieluf, Kunter and Van de Vijver (2013), on an evaluation of their own competences, but also the conviction that student performance is malleable. We consider self-efficacy to be highly relevant for teachers to respond to the challenges of a pandemic and thus contend that teachers who have high perceived selfefficacy are likely to believe in their ability to affect student performance, regardless of students' home environments, and perform teaching tasks at a specified level of quality in either an online environment or one of reduced access to in-school learning.

Collective agency
The literature on teacher agency is consistent in arguing that agency is simultaneously an individual and a socially mediated phenomena (Bandura, 2006;, Hökkä, Vähäsantanen & Mahlakaarto, 2017. As Hökkä et al. state, "individuals can be regarded as actors who are goal-oriented, and whose behaviour is determined by both self-efficacy and collective efficacy" (2017: 37). Therefore, teacher agency in the context of the pandemic may be presumed to reflect an enactment of both individual capacities, the confidence and competence of individual teachers and collective agency and the ability of the systems surrounding teachers to enable and support their collective capacity.
2.6 An enabling environment: Physical and relational constraints Priestley, Biesta and Robinson (2015) and Bandura (2006) explain that whether a repertoire of potential practice is translated into action not only depends on the repertoire itself and individual capacity, but also on the contextual conditions in which individuals operate. In the context of a pandemic, these conditions are particularly relevant and include students' home environment and its suitability for learning (including access to a computer, internet connectivity and physical learning space). These elements refer to what Priestley et al. (2015) describe as material aspects of the context i.e. the availability of physical resources and the nature of physical constraints.
Secondly, we highlight home-school relations as a relevant condition to teacher agency. In the context of the pandemic, relations extend beyond the school gate and include relations between teachers and parents. These educational partnerships are particularly relevant when schools are closed as teachers have to rely on parents to support learners in accessing and participating in home-schooling and online learning. Various studies indicate that strong educational partnerships between teachers, parents and the local community contribute positively to the development of students. Reviews by Goodall (2017), Epstein (2011) and Menheere and Hooge (2010) describe the type of coordination, two-way communication and knowledge sharing that is needed to establish such partnerships, as well as the interventions that are effective in supporting parental involvement, particularly of parents who are either not significantly involved in their children's education or who are not involved at all.
Both physical and relational conditions have a temporal dimension as they change over time, such as when students are provided with laptops to access online learning, or when teachers improve their communication with parents. Priestley et al. (2015) emphasise this temporal dimension as they conceptualise agency as an emergent phenomenon of the ecological conditions through which it is enacted, rather than a (singular) property or competence residing in an individual. Teachers are seen as acting according to their environment rather than simply in their environment and so their agency results from the interplay of individual efforts, available resources and contextual and structural factors. Although the social context in which they work constrains their work, they can also influence their environment and the extent to which they will do so will depend on their interpretation of these contextual constraints and boundaries.
The research lab we report on within this paper aimed to develop a better understanding of teacher agency in meeting the challenges of the pandemic and the physical and relational http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2519593X/pie.v39.i1.5 Ehren, Madrid, Romiti, Armstrong, Fisher & McWhorter Teaching in the COVID-19 era constraints of their environment. Below we outline the methodology used in the research lab before presenting findings from the countries represented in the lab.

METHODOLOGY
The methodology underpinning this paper is an online research lab with members from the International Congress on School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI). A research lab is a collaborative research initiative structured around a set of webinars with further research activities in between sessions to analyse and share data from existing studies and work towards a joint outcome. The method was developed to continue comparative research in a time where international travel is restricted due to COVID-19 and concerns about climate change.

Sample of country participants
ICSEI members were invited to sign up for the research lab in April and May 2020. The group of participants who started the work in June 2020 consisted of 13 academics and practitioners from 10 countries (Netherlands, Canada [Ontario and British Columbia], England, Wales, Australia, US, Trinidad and Tobago, Indonesia, Italy and Chile). Findings reported here are from a sample of countries in italics.

Data collection and analysis
At the core of the lab is a series of four webinars. These were used as a forum to organise, structure and consider the collection of country-level data and to facilitate small group discussions to review existing and relevant research being undertaken by participants between webinar sessions. The first webinar started with the scoping of the question and defining themes for further study. Between the first and second webinar, participants worked in small groups on conceptualising and describing the theme and research questions and scoping the type of data/information/examples to collect. In the second webinar, each small group presented their thematic description and highlights from the initial scoping/data collection with input from the wider group. Following the second webinar, each country participant worked towards a country profile, addressing the questions agreed on in the initial two lab meetings. Participants collected new data or analysed emerging data from other studies and/ or documents and national monitoring reports to inform the report. The approach was specific to each country, taking into account an emerging issue where data collection was restricted due to (part or full) closure of schools. In the third session, the profiles were discussed in the context of the original research questions to explore how the findings compared against the conceptual framework and where additional country-level information was needed. The country profiles were then developed alongside the conceptual framework and a draft paper, which was discussed and finalised in webinar four. Appendix A offers a summary overview of the reports and data we drew on for each country profile. http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2519593X/pie.v39.i1.5 Perspectives in Education 2021: 39 (1) teachers initially shifted their pedagogical approaches however varied within and across countries and seems to be a function of whether they see the long term benefit of developing new practices as well as the wider expectations, guidelines and/or requirements to change and their available time to do so. Concerns raised by teachers in Ontario when schools were closed (end of the 2019-2020 school year) reflect the experiences in many other countries: they felt challenged in working from home with school aged children who also needed support and help with home-schooling and online learning.
Teachers initially seem to make no or limited changes to their approach; where there are changes these would include a copy and paste of existing timetables and set of activities to an online mode. Teacher surveys from England suggest that almost half of exam-year pupils in Years 11 and 13 were not provided with work by their school, and just over half of all pupils taught remotely did not usually have any online lessons, defined as live or real-time lessons. Furthermore, offline provision, such as worksheets or recorded video, was much more common than "live" online lessons (Eivers, 2020;Moss et al., 2020). Survey data from this context also indicated that students had uneven access to resources whereby teachers had to prioritise resources that did not require online access accordingly, such as the worksheets they would normally use in class or for homework Lucas, Nelson & Sims, 2020).
The initial phase of school closures was dominated by a sense of crisis where teachers not only had to learn skills but also had to ensure students' access to IT and student wellbeing, e.g. checking how families are coping in terms of basic food, health and emotional needs (Lucas et al., 2020). Workload is often high and, in British Columbia, the Netherlands and England, teachers managed by paring down curricula expectations, with a heightened focus on basic academic subjects, key learning objectives, reinforcement of previous learning, revising content and/or teaching new content over a longer period of time Fisher et al., 2020).
Workload appeared to decline following the initial phase of the pandemic as teachers started to develop new skills and practices and students gained access to virtual learning technology and became familiar with new routines (TeacherTapp, 2020). Over time however, teachers seemed to adapt to online teaching; findings from England suggest that teachers engaged more with the format of online learning over the course of the lockdown. Data suggest that between April and July 2020 the percentage of teachers delivering online video lessons jumped from 7% to 29% in primary schools and 15% to 35% in secondary schools. In addition, compared with the previous year (41%), nearly 90% of teachers have taken part in online professional development during the pandemic, suggesting there is an appetite amongst teachers to engage with online learning for their own development and to support student learning . However, when schools partially reopened, teachers had to adapt their routines once more to accommodate blended learning models and physical distancing in schools. During this phase, teachers from the Netherlands and in British Columbia again reported an increase in workload (AOb survey, 2020) Agency seems to be enhanced when teachers see the long-term benefits of investing in the development of high-quality online teaching and development of their skills and when leadership ensures a coordinated response. With respect to the first condition, Dutch teachers in a study by Van der Spoel, Noroozi, Schuurink and Van Ginkel (2020) pointed to long term benefits of the invested time in having substantially developed their ICT skills which would allow them to continue using technology in their teaching, particularly for formative http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2519593X/pie.v39.i1.5 Ehren, Madrid, Romiti, Armstrong, Fisher & McWhorter Teaching in the COVID-19 era assessments, activating students and collaborative learning. These teachers felt that their enhanced ICT skills enabled them to teach more efficiently in the long run and be better able to differentiate their teaching and be more goal-directed in their teaching. In British Columbia another long-term benefit was that many teachers adopted a more individualised approach to instruction and assessment facilitating a welcome shift towards more inquiry-based and personalised approaches to practice. Teachers who see the long-term benefits also tend to experience less stress it seems. Dutch teachers with the highest level of working extra hours reported less stress when having high job satisfaction and a supportive work climate.
Not all teachers see the long-term benefits of home-schooling and online learning. A survey by the Canadian Teachers Federation of 17,744 teachers across Canada (of which 7237 teachers, or 41.49% of the total respondents from Ontario) suggests teachers do not believe that online teaching and learning offers a good alternative to in-school teaching; more than 7 in 10 teachers are concerned about ensuring that students get what they need to be successful through online instruction, and two thirds of teachers are concerned about the impact of digital technologies on students. One of the reasons may be the absence of a confirmed "best practice" and methods for online teaching. A small-scale (unpublished) study in England (Greenslade, 2020) of over 400 humanities teachers in primary and secondary education, for example, highlights the lack of a purposeful and widely accessible framework to enable effective distance learning. This study also indicated that teachers felt online delivery requires a trade-off between pupil participation and workload. In British Columbia on the contrary, teachers in Fisher et al.'s (2020) study indicated how, in some cases, teaching online led to the development of stronger, richer and closer relationships between teachers and students (and their families) where teachers gained a far more holistic view of their learners.
Research from the Netherlands (AOb, April 2020) furthermore points to the importance of coordination between online teaching and virtual platform usage, particularly in respect of parental communication. For example, 70% of teachers in secondary education and VET experienced a particularly high workload when there was a lack of coordination over online teaching and communication where teachers have to use multiple platforms to communicate with parents and students. The lack of clear boundaries between work and home adds to the stress, particularly when teachers also have to home-school their own children, or when their school has little capacity to support online teaching. This finding was also reported in British Columbia. Findings from England indicate that some larger schools had more staff and worked on a rota basis to spread workload; where this was not the case, teachers' workload increased dramatically .

Enabling environment: School and community level (resources and relationships)
Teachers' agency is particularly conditioned by pupils' home environment including access to appropriate technology and suitable learning space and conditions. Such access has been problematic for disadvantaged families living in deprived areas. In Chile, a study by an NGO "Educación 2020" in March and April 2020 showed that 50% of the students do not have permanent access to a computer and that over 75% of the students do not feel they have the conditions for learning at home (i.e. they do not have a private room where they can study or learning support from someone in the home).
Furthermore, families in poor socio-economic circumstances often lack the social capital to support home-schooling and online teaching. A survey by the Dutch Inspectorate of http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2519593X/pie.v39.i1.5 2021: 39(1) Education 1 (administered between 15 and 23 April 2020) and the AOb, early April (2020) indicated that 10% of the student population was not accessing online teaching due to a lack of parental supervision, parents not having the IT skills or not speaking Dutch. Similar findings come from British Columbia, Italy and England where teachers reported a complete absence of some children and their families or where parents were unable to support learning at home. Survey data from England indicated that the type of remote learning teachers offered (particularly through worksheets) was unmanageable for parents and not enabling students to progress. Students thus required more live online lessons (43%), direct communication with their teachers (42%) and video clips to explain subject matter (42%) .

Perspectives in Education
Similarly, research undertaken in Italy with 16,000 teachers highlighted the difficulties of the new relationship with families including interference and inadequate support from parents (SIRD, 2020). In Italy, the pandemic revealed parents' unequal access and use of an electronic school register, used to check student attendance, absences, delays, classwork, homework and assessments, where such lack of access would normally be handled (at least in part) through face-to-face communication (Soriani, 2020).
In some cases, the local community may alleviate some of the constraints. An example from Italy (Soriani, 2020) shows how parents can support each other in using digital platforms, managing homework and structuring the communication with schools through WhatsApp groups and online mailing lists. However, parents who do not speak Italian or have poor digital skills would often also be excluded.

Enabling environment: Capacity at the system level
Relevant conditions for teacher agency are also located at the system level. Burns (2012) for example talks about social capital of education systems and how this "intangible capital stock" would allow people to have greater access to resources, share new information and collaborate to improve practice.
A coordinated approach by the national councils for primary and secondary education, the ministries for education and economic affairs and a national association of school boards in the Netherlands ensured that all students had access to online learning when schools were closed. These organisations collectively investigated how many students and teachers did not have an internet connection or laptop at home. Based on this information, telecom providers searched for the best solutions together with the parties involved, such as issuing hotspots or public Wi-Fi networks and arranging laptops for vulnerable children where needed. In addition, NPO Z@ppelin, a national broadcaster, initially offered instruction on television for children without a laptop/tablet. Clear communication by relevant authorities and sharing of information ensures that responses of various stakeholders are lined up and enable teachers to know which practices they need to change and how and are enabled to do so. For example, in British Columbia there was clear communication of an expectation that all teachers should connect with each family before beginning remote instruction where they could choose the type of medium that was most suitable to the families' access to, and use of, media (e.g. phone, email, text message, messenger or drive-by visits) (Fisher et al., 2020). http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2519593X/pie.v39.i1.5 Ehren,Madrid,Romiti,Armstrong, Examples where this was not happening are from Ontario where education policy regarding school re-opening in September changed over time, causing a great deal of confusion and anxiety among teachers, students, parents and school/system leaders. The confusion was similar to the situation in England, also caused by a stand-off between teacher unions and government relating to when it would be safe for teachers (and pupils) to return to school. This created an unfortunate situation in which teachers (and leaders) were effectively caught between very reasonable personal concerns over their own health and safety and professional concerns over the detrimental effect of school closures on the learning and pastoral needs of their students. Certain factions of the media stoked this issue with accusations of laziness directed at the teaching profession, a perspective that found some support amongst members of the public and left many teachers and school leaders feeling undervalued and unappreciated with potential consequences for their level of stress and perceived self-efficacy.

CONCLUSION AND DISCUSSION
During the early phase of the global pandemic, schools across the world were fully or partially closed only reopening (in many cases not fully) as infection rates began to level off or decline. As schools have started to work towards operating at higher levels of capacity there have been significant changes to the teaching and learning environment. Physical distancing (particularly at secondary/high school) between and amongst staff and students is now commonplace whilst the need to self-isolate to prevent the spread of the virus has also led to frequent interruptions to teaching schedules often with entire cohorts or year groups of students sent home for prolonged periods.
These constant changes have required teachers to be active agents in ensuring a continuation in their students' learning. They initially had to make a rapid shift to alternate delivery to develop online materials, ensuring all students have access to a laptop and internet connection. In the second phase teachers were asked to develop a hybrid approach with a combination of online learning and face-to-face teaching to halved groups. Hygiene measures and physical distancing in the third phase then required them to change their teaching practices to reduce close physical interaction with students. In secondary education, students for example do not change classrooms anymore while the amount of collaborative learning and small-group work with teachers will now have to meet physical distancing guidelines at all levels of education. In the third phase of reopening, teachers are also faced with pupils who need to catch up on learning, as well as in their development of social-emotional skills and competences. Some pupils' general well-being will also be cause for concern, particularly those where families have struggled/are struggling financially, emotionally or health-wise.

Teacher agency
Our findings suggest variations in teachers' agency within and between countries and that agency also varies over time such as when environmental constraints change and teachers develop new knowledge. In the context of the pandemic, teachers who, prior to the closure of schools, were used to adopting innovative learning materials, varied learning strategies and focusing on student autonomy in organising their learning were predisposed to adapt more readily to work in the new context of distance learning. In addition, those who possessed a high level of digital literacy and IT skills were better able to rapidly adapt their practice to ensure continuation of their students' learning. http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2519593X/pie.v39.i1.5

Perspectives in Education
2021: 39 (1) As time progresses, teachers learn about what works and does not work and invest time in delivering and mastering new approaches. They particularly do so when they feel there is a long-term benefit or need to change their practice (e.g. because they expect schools to be closed for a longer period of time or a returning phenomenon), when they have time, resources and a personal interest to/in develop(ing) new techniques and approaches and when external conditions enable and/or motivate them to do so. Where teachers had already developed relevant IT-skills pre-COVID and their home situation (e.g. not having dependent children who needed to be home-schooled) was conducive to developing new approaches, they were better able to move to online teaching quickly.
The external conditions that seem particularly relevant for teacher agency are their students' access to IT and home support for learning, existing educational partnership with parents, the existence of collaborative support networks, the leadership and level of coordination of/in their school and the external support and guidance offered by relevant authorities. Where education systems have high social capital, national agencies would be working together to enable teacher agency, such as by providing clear health and safety guidelines, communicating clear expectations about how to move to online teaching or blended approaches and collaborating to provide teachers with an enabling environment where they and their students have access to required hardware and technology for online/remote learning.

The dynamic nature of agency
The evidence reviewed from the different countries emphasises the idea of the reciprocal interaction of agency and structure/environment. That means that as teachers´ agency is modulated by the environment, they can also affect and transform it. At the same time, agency is not a static concept but develops over time, such as when teachers develop their skills, when collaborative structures provide support, when parents learn how to integrate their new role of "home-schooler" into their daily schedule and wider (work-related) responsibilities and other local/regional and/or national actors coordinate their work to ensure student learning (either at home or under changed conditions in school). Emirbayer and Mische (in Priestley et al., 2015) talk about the social context of agency and how agency is always a dialogical process by and through which actors immersed in temporal passage engage with others within collectively organised contexts of action. Vieluf et al. (2013) explain how previous experiences in particular, beliefs and behaviour are a powerful predictor of teachers' perceived self-efficacy and as such, of future behaviour and teaching practices. This means that teachers who have had successful and positive experiences of teaching with innovative tools or methodologies in the past, will likely be more motivated and feel greater agency to change their practice in response to the pandemic.
Collaboration between teachers in professional networks, within their schools and with teachers in the area who face similar challenges, allows them to be more effective in their learning and response. Rather than "inventing the wheel" individually, such collaboration creates collective agency of teachers and allows them to revitalise their profession in leading the development of their practice to meet the continuing challenges of the pandemic. Given the concerns over long-term learning loss and rising inequality, such professional networks become ever so important.
The considerable challenges to teaching and learning created by the pandemic require that teachers be supported to exercise their personal and collective agency in order to at least