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COPING STRATEGIES OF RUSSIAN SCHOOLS TEAMS DURING THE PANDEMIC: GET AHEAD OF THEMSELVES VS SURVIVE AND FORGET
Unlike organizations from other sectors, schools have existed in stable conditions and rarely found themselves in neсcesity of radical changes triggered from outside (for example, market fluctuations). The pandemic situation can be considered as a natural experiment because school teams were forced to cope with the situation of urgent transition by themselves, before the federal and regional educational authorities were ready to provide recommendations on how to arrange remote learning in schools. Thus, it seems to be a unique opportunity to study the variety of school teams’ practices of adaptation to external challenges and integration of the new into school practices.
The concept of coping strategies has been used to describe the response to external “shocks” of individuals and school teams. Based on the data of a massive survey in 100 of Russian schools (N = 6931), conducted at the moment of the transition to distance learning (March 2020), 6 profiles of the organizational environment were identified. The responses have made it possible to select schools with different organizational contexts and study how it influences the strategies chosen by the school. With the help of semi-structured in-depth interviews with principals and teachers at Russian schools (N = 43) there were identified and classified the practices that reveal the adaptation to shock innovations of various types at schools.
According to the results of the analysis, coping strategies are conceptualized as a system of dilemmas that need to be "resolved" by the leaders of the transformational process and by school teams:
(1) authoritative or multi-voice decision-making,
(2) uniformity or diversity of educational process practices,
(3) quality control of the educational process or "the opportunity to lower the bar,"
(4) focus on reducing the workload and caring for the well-being of the collective or considering the pandemic as "wartime,"
(5) openness to new tools or orientation to the use of acquaintances.
At the same time, the response to the challenges of the pandemic occurred to be related to the previous experience of introducing innovations at school, the intensity of the exchange of knowledge and practices within the organization and with the external environment as well as the current characteristics of the team. The discussion section considers how the identified coping strategies can be taken into account in the formation of future educational policy.