COVID-19 Global Pandemic Upheaval: CTE Teachers Response in the United States

The United States along with the rest of the world has experienced an unprecedented disruption in daily life due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost everyone has experienced some sort of stay at home order resulting in an economic catastrophe greater than the Great Recession of 2008 and on par with the Great Depression almost a century ago. Educational institutions at both the K-12 and post-secondary levels have not been immune from the shutdown, with many schools closed from mid-March through the end of the 2020 school year. Many schools moved classes to remote, distance delivery platforms. Career and Technical Education (CTE) teachers were tasked with creative engaging learning activities online for curricula which is taught in a hands-on contextual learning environment. This paper will present preliminary results from research conducted by a collaborative group of nine researchers from across the United States with collectively over 200 years of career and technical education experience. The conceptual framework used for this study was Danielson’s Framework for Teaching and Enhancing Professional Practice and Foundations of Career and Technical Education including Constructivism. 3,267 participants representing all 50 states responded to the 37-item survey. The research objectives included description of participants and identified challenges to planning and delivery of CTE content when schools were closed, and instruction was moved to remote/distance/online platforms. Participants ranked their challenges as instructors and their perceptions of challenges that were experienced by their students. CTE teachers ranked replicating classroom or lab environments online and lack of experience teaching online as their biggest challenges. The perceptions of the participants concerning challenges for their students included motivation to guide and manage their own learning and students’ access to reliable internet connection. The emergence and prevalence of the COVID-19 pandemic added a layer of complexity to educational practice that was not foreseen and for which no intentional preparation had occurred. Understanding how CTE teachers and instructors responded to this call, and the challenges they and their students encountered, is important to efforts to improve practice in the future and to be in a better position should another crisis occur that forces learning to be delivered in alternative formats from that of the traditional face-to-face classroom. Keywords: COVID-19, career and technical education, remote learning