Teaching Interrupted: How COVID-19 Turned Thoughts into Practice

The Community College Anatomy and Physiology Education Research (CAPER) project is a 2-year grant that provides a variety of professional development opportunities to community college instructors of Anatomy and Physiology in the United States. Instructors who participate in the CAPER project also take part in a larger research study that uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to track the instructors’ progress with adapting new teaching methods into their classrooms. When the COVID-19 pandemic caused global disruption to daily life, there were two cohorts of community college instructors participating in the CAPER project. While the immediate impact of the pandemic on community college instructors was not the subject of the original research project, the data from 12 in-depth interviews conducted in the midst of the pandemic revealed rich insights into teacher beliefs and attitudes, adaptation methods, and online learning as an opportunity for change during a global pandemic. This subset of the data also speaks to the importance of the CAPER project for professional development, as community college instructors in the CAPER program used their new skills to integrate active learning techniques in the online learning environment. In this article, we analyze community college instructors’ adaptations to online learning through the lens of conceptual change theory.