“Everything Works Better in Person”: Kindergarten Educators’ Experiences During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on education worldwide, leading to school closures and radically different classroom practices when schools opened back up. This study looked at the effect on five Kindergarten educators of shifting to an online delivery model for Kindergarten students in Southern Ontario, Canada. Participants reported on struggles with engaging their students on a computer screen, the inequities between students that surfaced during this time, and the lack of support throughout the process of pivoting from online teaching to in-class teaching and vice versa. The study findings indicated that more research is needed to fully understand the impact of teaching virtual Kindergarten on both educators and students, but a lack of support from school boards and administrators is an issue that negatively impacted the kindergarten educators in this study.