The COVID-19 pandemic has created radical changes in our lives. Homes have become schools. While most parents continue their work from home, they also try to manage their childcare responsibilities. These care responsibilities included tasks such as following up on remote schooling at home. In these brand new conditions, teachers had to complete the curriculum and prepare students for the future psychologically and socially by using technological opportunities they were not very familiar with. Although students were familiar with digital life, they were not quite ready for digital or remote schooling. In many cases, management teams struggled under the crisis conditions created by the pandemic, and the uncertainty of how to prioritize and use technological opportunities was challenging. Psychological counseling and guidance services sought ways to keep up with the increasing needs and expectations of children, families and teachers.

Considering that the course of the pandemic remains uncertain, we think that we will continue to feel these effects in the 2020-2021 school year, and we believe that supporting the social-emotional development of school stakeholders (mainly parents, students, teachers, administrators and the guidance service) will be of great importance.

We would like to share with you the report containing the findings of the “Return to School During the Pandemic” research, which we conducted in order to identify and characterize the crises, challenges and solutions experienced in schools during the pandemic, to identify the difficulties that may be experienced during the return to school process, and to determine the skill development needs of school stakeholders to be prepared for the challenges in the new education period.

In the research we conducted as a team, we obtained qualitative data through focus group meetings with principals and psychological counselors working in private schools, as well as data obtained from a mobile survey application with 358 participants, including teachers (67%), psychological counselors (15%), administrators (10%) and parents (8%).

We would like to thank all our participants for their valuable contributions in helping us characterize how the pandemic process is experienced in schools.

You can review the research report, in which we evaluated and interpreted the data we collected at the end of June, in the file below.

You can send your opinions and comments to kurumsal@guzelgunler.com .