A phenomenological study of synchronous teaching during COVID-19: A case of an international school in Malaysia

To curb the COVID-19 outbreak Malaysian Government enforced movement control. As a result many private schools with an ongoing term shifted to remote teaching. This phenomenological case study explored some issues which were faced by parents and learners of primary level students during synchronous teaching. Observation was carried out for a period of 13 days on 2 primary school students of a private international school of Malaysia. Observation was followed by interviews with the same participants, where their views and reflections regarding synchronous teaching were recorded. This data was further supplemented with brief interviews with parents, whose children were also in the primary level of the same school. Nvivo 12 was used for analysis. Following Saldana’s coding (2016), elemental coding methods were used, employing structural, descriptive, and in vivo coding. 62 nodes emerged during the first cycle coding process which were placed under 10 categories in the final analysis process. Results showed that parents’ continuous supervision and guidance was needed in addition to the teacher’s mentoring and direction when teaching online. Furthermore, data showed that one of the problems in remote teaching is lack of developing social skills of the learners as they cannot interact with their classmates in ‘real-time’. Synchronous teaching increases learners’ screen time which was not liked by parents. Interviews revealed that students also preferred in-class, face-to-face learning over synchronous learning. Though importance of remote teaching in this hour of crisis cannot be denied, this study concludes that implementing 100% online teaching for primary students is still at its rudimentary phase of effectiveness. This research holds high significance in opening up new perspective for educators and policy makers on how to effectively plan for online teaching in future