Understanding K-3 Teachers' Literacy Instructional Practices During the Pandemic-Impacted 2020–2021 School Year

This instrumental case study is focused on understanding more about literacy instruction in K-3 classrooms during the pandemic-impacted 2020–2021 school year. The study aims to examine (a) how teachers described their literacy instruction before and during the COVID-19 pandemic; (b) the types of literacy instructional practices teachers implemented across in-person, virtual, and hybrid modalities; and (c) how teachers' implementation of these practices aligns with research on early grades literacy instruction. Data included classroom video of 25 teachers' literacy instruction, 162 classroom artifacts (e.g., student work samples), and statewide survey responses from 7110 teachers in spring 2020 and 5811 teachers in spring 2021. Teachers reported spending an average of 1 h less per week on literacy instruction in 2020–2021 as compared to a typical pre-pandemic school year. Despite these reported declines in instructional time, teachers in all modalities were observed implementing literacy instructional practices at comparable rates as they reported prior to the pandemic. However, teachers' implementations of these practices varied widely, with some teachers providing research-aligned literacy instruction while others did not. This range in quality was evident across modalities, including within the group of teachers providing in-person instruction. Results from this study challenge existing theories about instructional time and modality that have been posed to explain the pandemic's negative impacts on elementary students' literacy outcomes.