The process of school digitalisation has been on the rise in recent years, but the relationship between technology and teachers has had a strong acceleration during the global pandemic due to the coronavirus disease 2019. 198 teachers from primary to high school fill a questionnaire about demographic variables (age, gender, education level, school…

An appreciative inquiry approach oriented eight semi-structured interviews conducted with teachers from Australia, New Zealand, Austria, Italy, Spain, Canada, Bangladesh and India to identify their intrinsic and extrinsic strengths and understand how they were able to translate them into practice during the first COVID-19 lockdown in 2020.…

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged educators to shift their practices and utilize technology to reach and teach learners at a distance. This study presents data collected in situ from 265 K-12 educators who adapted their practices during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. Findings revealed that educators relied on multiple…

The worldwide school closures in early 2020 led to losses in learning that will not easily be made up for even if schools quickly return to their prior performance levels. These losses will have lasting economic impacts both on the affected students and on each nation unless they are effectively remediated. While the precise learning losses are…

This work presents 'Dove sta di casa la scuola', an online course for teachers promoted by the Small School Movement during the COVID-19 emergency. The course aimed to provide alternatives to lecture-based distance learning using the domestic environment as a context for 'low-intensity' digital learning. Such an experience, involving 7000 Italian…

The COVID-19 crisis has strongly affected the school system. In Italy, at-distance forms of didactics have been activated, changing the physiognomy of schools in terms of social interaction, practices and the identity of the individuals. In this paper, we address the issue of how teachers are facing the crisis: our focus is on assessment, as a key…

The aim of this report is threefold. Its first section provides an overall sketch of the situation across Europe and the underlying mechanisms for the differences in European countries. The second section focuses on the heterogeneities within each country. It examines the disparities among students in order to understand which of those correlate…

Italy was the first country in Europe to implement a nationwide lockdown. Children and their families lived in nearly complete isolation for almost two months. Students missed 65 days of school compared to an average of 27 missed days among high-income countries worldwide. This prolonged break is of concern, as even short breaks in schooling can…

The pandemic has highlighted and accentuated some potential risks and critical issues already present in several educational contexts: the widening of educational poverty, the increase in the digital and cultural divide and the expansion of learning loss and of the implicit and explicit early school leaving. In this regard, the case study…

The M@t.abel2020 project supported Italian teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic period, proposing activities based on the mathematics laboratory teaching method which are suitable for distance learning situations. The project resulted in the establishment of an online community of 1,500 teachers. In this paper we present an exploratory study…

During the education emergency, teachers' leadership was indicative of their capacity to stay resilient and innovative in a changed educational environment. This study analyses their capacity to act as leaders and to promote equity in relation to the specific aspects of the French and Italian school systems. A pool of 16 interviews constitutes a…

This study aims to explore how teachers from four countries--France, Israel, Italy, and Germany--manage their teaching--learning activity in the context of lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. About 700 teachers from the four countries participated in this study. They were given an online questionnaire that involved 22 open-ended items, in which…

In 2020, 1.5 billion students in 188 countries/economies were locked out of their schools. Students everywhere have been faced with schools that are open one day and closed the next, causing massive disruption to their learning. With the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic still raging, the disruption to education has extended into 2021 and many…

We compare national education policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in England, Germany and Italy to explore negotiations about the public good and identify the role that research has played in framing, legitimating and rendering trustworthy the settlements reached. National data, comprising news media reports and publically available…

Strategic government interventions in public education have shifted and blurred the boundaries between state, market and civil society modes of governance. Within this matrix of interdependent relations, schools operate under increasingly hybrid accountability arrangements in which public accountability can both complement and compete with market…