Teaching as a system: COVID-19 as a lens into teacher change

In the spring of 2020, schools and universities around the world were closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The relative lockdown affected more than 1.5 billion learners as teachers and students sheltered at home for several weeks. As schooling moved online, teachers were forced to change how they taught. In the research presented here, we focus on university mathematics professors, and we analyze how their practice, knowledge, and beliefs intertwine and change under these circumstances. More specifically, the context of the pandemic and the relative lockdown provides us with the experimental basis to argue that the new practice affected both knowledge and beliefs of mathematics teachers and that practice, knowledge, and beliefs form a system. Being part of a system, the reactions to change in practice can be of two types, namely, the system as a whole tries to resist change, or the system as a whole changes — and it changes significantly. The research presented here proposes a model for describing and analyzing what we called a teaching system and examines three cases that help to better depict the systemic nature of teaching.