A Multiple Case Study of English Teachers' Use of Curriculum Resources During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Despite new challenges in selecting and using curriculum resources during the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers continued to use existing resources published by the ministry or global textbooks. Understanding how teachers use curriculum resources is necessary for designing more effective curricula and drawing lessons for professional development. This study investigates how high school English teachers used curriculum resources during COVID-19. Following maximum variation sampling, we used a holistic multiple-case design with six volunteer experienced English teachers from four different types of schools in Izmir. As recommended for case studies, classroom observations, document reviews, and semi-structured interviews were conducted. The data were analyzed by using theoretical thematic analysis. The findings reveal that teachers mostly favored the offloading approach in the use of curriculum resources in synchronous online and face-to-face teaching, and the second most frequently used approach is adaptation during the pandemic period. Omitting and improvising were the least preferred approaches. When the synchronous online and face-to-face lessons are compared, the approaches to using curricular resources appear to be broadly similar. In other words, the approaches to using curriculum resources did not change much during synchronous online and face-to-face lessons. The curricular resources are tried to be used by offloading so that the students do not experience learning losses, and adaptations are made by using web 2.0 tools and various digital resources.