The global Covid-19 pandemic has challenged school systems all over the world and still places uncertainty over schooling and practices required in the future. The sudden change to distance learning in the spring 2020 resulted in a large variation between schools in their distance learning practices also in Finland (Vainikainen et al., preprint). It seems that some schools were more able to quickly and uniformly adapt to the changes brought up by Covid-19 than others. Altogether, the pandemic seems to have increased the complexity of teaching, which may have challenged also teachers’ motivational beliefs related to competence in their professional community and teaching in their school (i.e., collective efficacy beliefs).

The pandemic is still challenging schoolwork. Rapid measures in the future are likely to be needed to meet changing schoolwork. Understanding of the factors likely buffering teacher stress and increasing teacher professional communities’ readiness to encounter unexpected situations in the future provides means to support schools. For example, it has been suggested that schools with cultures constructed on collaborative practices have strengthened the level of co-working and support between teachers during Covid-19, whereas schools that are less collaborative have struggled to conquer the challenges (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2020). One central factor for investigating teachers’ community level persistence and commitment towards educational goals in difficult situations is collective teacher efficacy that have been shown to be related with lower levels of teacher burnout and higher levels of teachers’ commitment towards the profession (Capone, Joshanloo & Sang-Ah Park, 2019; Donohoo, 2018; Lim & Eo, 2014).

Collective teacher efficacy (CTE) refers to shared perceptions of teachers in a school that the conjoint capabilities of the members of the school's professional community will have a positive effect on students’ learning (Goddard et al., 2015). It has been shown that CTE is positively related to student achievement, even after controlling for student prior achievement and the demographic features of the school (e.g. Goddard, Hoy & Hoy, 2000; Goddard et al., 2015; Moolenaar et al., 2012). CTE has also been associated with multiple positive consequences for teachers, including job satisfaction, commitment to the teaching profession and to students, and positive attitudes toward teaching students with special education needs and professional development (for review, Donohoo, 2018).

In this paper, we introduce a study that aims to gain a better understanding of the individual and school level associations between teachers’ collective efficacy beliefs, teachers’ work-related stress and their feelings of preparedness for school closures in the future. Based on prior literature, the following research hypotheses were set:

H1. There is school level variance in collective teacher efficacy, teachers’ work-related stress and teachers’ perceived readiness of the school to encounter school closures in the future.

H2. Collective teacher efficacy is negatively related to their work-related stress on both the individual and the teacher community (school) levels.

H3. Teacher collective efficacy is positively related to their perceptions of their school's readiness to encounter school closures in the future on both the individual and school (the teacher community) levels.

H4. Teacher work-related stress is negatively related to teachers’ perceptions of school’s readiness to encounter school closures in the future both on the individual and school (the teacher community) levels.

The data were collected with a nationwide electronic survey from comprehensive school teachers. Answers (N=5475) including at least two teachers from a school were included (320 removed) representing approximately 12% of teachers working in 860 schools (39%) in 223 municipalities (72%) in Finland. The teachers were working in primary schools (37.2%), lower secondary schools (21.4%) or combinations of the two (40.8%). The number of answers from a school varied (M=10.84, SD=8.06, min/max=2/39). The sample represented the teacher population in terms of gender (79.5% female, 18.3% male) and age (6.6% 20–29 years, 21.5% 30–39 years, 32.6% 40–49 years, 33.1% 50–59 years, 6.0% 60 years or more). The 12-item version of Collective Efficacy Scale was used to measure teachers’ assessment of both the competence related to the teaching (Group competence, 6 items) and the difficulty of the teaching task (Task analysis, 6 items) by considering the capability of the whole teacher community in organizing the courses of action required for students to reach learning goals set in the curriculum (Goddard 2002; Goddard et al., 2015; Tschannen-Moran et al., 1998). Teacher work-related stress was investigated with a three item scale developed to measure teachers’ stress, recovery from workload and ability to function. The item measuring stress (Elo, Leppänen & Jahkola, 2003) was reinforced with two other items to get a more nuanced picture of teachers' work-related strain. The scales used showed good to acceptable internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = .65-.84). Feeling of preparedness for future school closures was measured with a single item translated from an OECD paper (Bertling et al., 2020): “Overall, how prepared do you feel your school is for providing remote instruction if your school building is closed to students for an extended period in the future?” The pandemic situation was included as a dichotomous variable describing the distribution and seriousness of the pandemic in the region at the time of data collection. School type and school size were included as school-level controlled variables. Teacher gender and age were included on the individual level. The descriptive analyses were conducted with SPSS. The hierarchical structure of the data was taken into account by applying multilevel structural equation modeling with Mplus-software. Intraclass correlations (ICC) were estimated to evaluate the proportion of school level variance for each study variable (H1). The interrelations between study variables on both individual and school levels (H2-H4) were tested with a two-level model.

Descriptive statistics showed that teachers considered their colleagues as persistent and capable of creating meaningful learning experiences for every student in their school as they reported relatively high means for Group competence (M=5.38, SD=0.95, min/max=1/7). Teachers also perceived the teaching task positively as the results showed relatively high means for both positively (M=4.52, SD=1.03, min/max=1/7) and negatively worded (M=5.66, SD=1.08, min/max=1/7) Task analysis. Participating teachers showed mediocre Work-related stress (M=3.40, SD=0.92, min/max=1/5) and perceived their school well prepared for school closures in the future (M=2.94, SD=0.59, min/max=1/4). The correlations between the scales and variables were in line with prior studies (Goddard et al., 2015) and hypotheses set. The results confirmed H1 by showing that there was considerable variation between schools in collective teacher efficacy (ICC=0.12, SE=0.02, p<.001). The between-schools variance in teachers’ perceptions of school’s readiness to encounter school closures in the future was also relatively high (ICC=0.12, SE=0.03, p<.001). Teachers’ work-related stress showed to be slightly less dependent on school (ICC=0.07, SE=0.02, p<.001). The multilevel model showed a good fit with the data (χ²(50, N=4081) = 199.58, p<.001, CFI=.98, TLI=.97, RMSEA=.03, SRMR=.03). The model confirmed H2 by showing that collective teacher efficacy was negatively related with teachers’ work-related stress on the individual (βw=-.36) and the school level (βb=-.27). Stress in the professional community was also related with the Covid-19 situation of the region (i.e., accelerating) determined by the government (βb=.24). Collective efficacy beliefs were also positively related with how ready the teachers perceived their school to be for possible school closures in the future (H3, βw=.32, βb=.32). H4 was only partly confirmed as teachers’ who perceived less stress showed to evaluate their school better prepared for future school closures (βW=-.08), but the association was not statistically significant on the school level.

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