“We Always Make It Work”: Teachers’ agency in the time of crisis

As of mid-April 2020, 1.5 billion learners were affected by school closures across 191 countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic (UNESCO, 2020). During the weeks of school closures, teachers were expected to become online teach- ers overnight. As teacher educators, we were curious about teachers’ readiness for online practice. In the Teachers’ Read- iness Online (TRIO) survey (Gudmundsdottir & Hathaway, 2020), distributed internationally, we collected perspectives from 1186 teachers about their experiences related to online teaching in the early weeks of COVID-19 school closures. In this paper, we present preliminary data from Norwegian and US teachers related to previous experiences with online teaching and elaborations on readiness. We examined data for evidence of pedagogical, ethical, attitudinal, and technical (PEAT) dimensions (Dicte, 2019) to determine how teachers’ agency was activated in the times of the COVID-19 pandem- ic. Findings highlight that despite teachers’ inexperience and unpreparedness for online teaching, they were moderately prepared to use various digital tools and willing to make on- line learning work for them and their students.