Continuity and Adaption: Student Teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Year 2

Mostly forgotten in the discourse surrounding the pandemic were the experiences of student teachers during the second year of COVID-19. This study sought to explore how student teachers conceptualized their time in the classroom during their spring 2021 student teaching. In examining student-teacher journal entries in this qualitative endeavor, researchers hoped to answer the question “how did preservice teachers in the second year of the pandemic describe their student teaching?” Findings indicate that preservice teachers had adapted to the constraints of teaching during a pandemic. In fact, student teachers rarely mentioned the challenges of learning to be educators during a pandemic, which had become a normative experience for them. This study is a hopeful one, surprisingly, given the obstacles and panic the pandemic presented for education.