New teachers’ responses to COVID-19 in Scotland: doing surprisingly well?

The recent special issue of JET showed narratives of schools shifting to emergency online teaching centred on coping strategies and struggling with online tools. Even where the sense of emergency helped to overcome long-standing resistance to pedagogical change, as in Leacock and Warrican
(2020), the emphasis remained on “coping” and the exposing of unmet need for teachers to be able to adapt from traditional classroom pedagogies. The sense of being unprepared was echoed in the sense of “struggling” in Ontario (Van Nuland et al. 2020) and teachers in Brazil where “83.4%, feel little or not prepared at all to teach remotely” (Prata- Linhares et al. 2020, 3). In contrast, one response to a hastily-added question in our annual survey of early career teachers showed a much more positive response which we feel merits further investigation using qualitative methods.