The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a sudden breakdown of habitual ways of working in education, from the school system as a whole to each individual school, teacher, student, and family. Although different education systems across the world experienced the transition differently, the national transitions to remote teaching occured at approximately the same timeframe and proceeded very rapidly (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020).  The transition speed was expressed in months or even weeks, while previous transformation on a similar scale would take years (Davis, 2019; Mckinsey, 2017). Studies describing the transition to distance learning in different countries have revealed common characteristics:  the unexpectedness of the situation and the presence of challenges that exceeded the capabilities of educational organizations, leading to large-scale educational losses (Yildiz & Demir, 2020; Masten & Motti-Stefanidi, 2020). Due to national system convergence, the investigation of effective school response becomes a global issue.

Education institutions are among the most stable organizational structures, especially compared to companies in various sectors of the economy. Schools are not subject to market fluctuations and rarely face situations where they must undergo radical change in response to external challenges (Christensen et al., 2011). In this sense, the situation of emergency transition to distance-learning offers a unique opportunity to study the ways in which education institutions resist external pressures or “shocks,” as well as to identify strategies of adaptation that are most characteristic of school teams.

In organizational psychology, the concept of “coping strategies” is used to analyze the reaction of an organization to an external shock. In general terms, a coping strategy is any response to external life circumstances that allows for avoiding or controlling emotional stress (Rasskazova et al., 2013). A common direction for studies in this field involves looking at individuals and the psychological specificities that allow them to successfully navigate stress, as well as their interactions with various aspects of organizations, communities, etc. However, the concept of coping strategies is also used to describe ways in which whole organizations or even countries deal with shocks (Azzi-huck et. al, 2020). Looking at the organizational strategies in the process of overcoming the negative consequences of organizational change (Callan, 1993) we take into account the role of individuals in the process of organizational transformation, but also treating individuals as members of a collective, defined by organizational and individual factors, and responsible for the transformation process. 

The goal of this paper is to describe the spectrum of school teams’ practices in adapting to the pandemic based on the example of Russian schools, as well as to elaborate the theoretical framework for the investigation of shock transformation in schools.

The method chosen for collecting data was the semi-structured interview. Blocks of interview questions touched on aspects that resonated with the theoretical model of coping strategies by Callan (1993): Communication/Leadership, Learning and unlearning, Re-classification of the task, Stress and conflicts events. Empirical data for this study was gathered in April 2021. The choice of the region was made due to the availability of data on the technological preparedness of schools at the moment of transition to distance-learning (Khavenson, et al., 2020). This allowed us to gather data both in schools that were well prepared for distance-learning and those that were more inclined to resist digital innovations. A “high technological profile” was ascribed to schools where employees expressed positive attitudes to technologies. Schools with a “medium technological profile” are those where, on one hand, there is a relatively large proportion of employees with positive attitudes to technology, but, on the other hand, an equally strong tendency towards negative attitudes to technology. The “low technological profile” group contains schools where the majority of teaching staff are mistrustful of technologies and skeptical of their effectiveness. 12 schools were chosen for participation in the study, with representatives from each of these types. The selection of informants at each school was done in the following way: the principal (or vice principal) of each school participated, along with several teachers. We requested for a teacher to be invited who easily adapted to distance learning, as well as a teacher who had a lot of difficulty in the transition. 43 interviews were conducted with an average time of 40 minutes. The open coding phase of the interview analysis resulted in primary-level codes (N=184), revealing the whole spectrum of practices of overcoming the crisis situation and disseminating new solutions. Using thematic coding, the texts of the teacher and administrator interviews were marked with codes (more than 1000 citations correlated with the second level codes).

According to the results of our analysis, the framework of organizational coping strategies fits the situation of the urgent transition to distance learning. The report also deepenes the Callan’s framework with the conceptualization of the school response to pandemic as a system of dilemmas that need to be "resolved" by the leaders of the transformational process and by school teams: (1) authoritative or multi-voice decision-making, (2) high quality control or "the opportunity to lower the bar," (3) focus on reducing the workload and caring for the well-being of the collective or considering the pandemic as "wartime," (4) openness to new tools or orientation to the use of acquaintances, (5) methodological support focused on helping with technical issues or developing a digital culture, (6) replacing “lagging” team members or supporting them to integrate into a new work format, (7) optimizing workload or inaction. This study shows that some schools’ strategies are characterized by spontaneity and limited action, covering only a narrow circle of employees and children. Other schools managed to combine the situational adaptation with the consistency, that is, to make measures to overcome difficulties meaningful, consistent with each other and with the general strategy of the school. At the same time, the response to the challenges of the pandemic occurred to be related to the previous experience of introducing innovations at school and the organization’s innovation potential. Schools with high innovative potential relatively easily have passed the situation of the urgent transition to a new format of education, therefore the "benchmark" for these schools is higher. In this case a successful strategy for responding to the challenges of a pandemic consists not only in minimizing educational losses in the context of a pandemic, but also in maximizing positive effects in the long term.

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