The Impact of COVID-19 on Teacher’s Psychological Well-Being and Attrition: A Qualitative Post-Pandemic Exploration
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the literature, teachers’ perceptions of teaching before, during, and after COVID-19 vary based on psychological factors, access to teaching materials and resources, induction programs, and leadership staff. Addressing the gaps in the literature, the aim of this study was to explore the perceptions of teachers who recently left the teaching profession before, during, and after COVID-19 (2020-2024) and the psychological factors that led them to leave the teaching profession. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with elementary and secondary teachers (n = 8) from multiple cities throughout Ontario, Canada with most participants from the Greater Toronto Area. The data were analyzed using a reflexive thematic analysis. Three themes emerged: 1) Teaching During COVID-19 (subthemes included classroom management, challenges related to delivering online teaching materials, COVID-19 protocols in the classroom, and student challenges during COVID-19); 2) Supports for Teachers (subthemes included supports for teachers, safety measures implementation, government support, training and induction program experiences); and 3) Psychological Impacts (subthemes included self-actualization through personal fulfilment, fear of instability during the pandemic, stress and burnout, leaving the teaching profession, and listening and support). The findings are interpreted through the lens of Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs and Weber’s (1936) social action theories and related to the existing literature. The limitations, implications, and directions for future research are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".