Ukrainian education used to be part of the Soviet system and partly preserved its legacy with teacher-centered approaches and reproductive methods. Even after decades of independence, it was still knowledge-oriented and hardly connected with real-life experiences. It was evident that education did not prepare students for lifelong learning, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and other 21st-century skills; therefore, radical long-term reform was on the agenda and it started in 2016. The New Ukrainian School (NUS) Reform was planned at all levels for decades ahead and was driven by the idea that teachers were the primary agents of change.

Primary school was the first to welcome the change and to encounter challenges. New Primary Education standards came into use, requiring dramatic changes in approaches to teaching and learning with inquiry-based learning, cooperative and collaborative learning, and problem and project-based learning as its main drivers. In the Standards, we do not find the terms “playful pedagogies” and "learning through play." Still, they are implicitly communicated through the attention to their characteristics and the skills to develop: “the ability to express one's own opinion orally and in writing, critical and systematic thinking, creativity, initiative, the ability to logically justify a position, the ability to constructively manage emotions, assess risks, make decisions, solve problems, and cooperate with others” (Cabinet of Ministers, 2018, p. 3).

Achieving all the ambitious plans is impossible without “motivated teachers who enjoy the freedom of creativity and professional development” (Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine, 2017, p. 7). The scope of work with primary school teachers included many offline and online courses, exchanging ideas, and learning from Ukrainian and international partners. 

Learning Through Play at School is a partnership between the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) and the LEGO Foundation. The Ukraine Educational Research Association (UERA) implements the research study in-country. This study is part of the larger research project involving 30 Ukrainian teachers participating in a two-year professional learning program to support their understanding of playful learning and their implementation of playful pedagogies in the classroom. 

To be successful, professional learning programs designed to promote teacher change need to consider not only what teachers do but also how teachers’ existing beliefs may influence the process of professional learning. The relationship between teacher beliefs and teacher practice is undeniably complex and has been the subject of considerable attention in the research literature for several decades. Broadly speaking, teacher beliefs act as filters for interpreting new information and experiences, frames for defining problems or situations, and guides when deciding on what actions to take (Fives & Buehl, 2011). In relation to pedagogical reform initiatives, teacher beliefs have the potential to influence what the teacher chooses to focus on and how they interpret it, what they perceive is required of them, and their decision-making when it comes to taking action.  As part of a two-year professional development program focusing on playful learning at school, this study explored the initial beliefs held by participating teachers in relation to the reform agenda and the concept of playful learning at the start of the program and answered the research question: What are challenges and enablers in introducing Learning Through Play at Ukrainian School?

Understanding the contributing factors to (un)successful interventions is vital for designing/adapting a Teacher Professional Development Programme that develops teachers’ positive views, skills, and knowledge regarding playful pedagogies.

Given the potential influence of teacher beliefs on the implementation of playful learning during the program and beyond, the teachers were invited to take part in individual interviews at the beginning of the project to explore their thoughts about playful learning, their experiences of implementing playful learning at school, and their perspectives on the barriers and enablers to integrating playful learning in their classroom. Interviews. The aim was to capture the meanings that participants make of their experiences in their own words. A semi-structured format was chosen to ensure that major touch points were addressed within each interview (providing a degree of comparability across interviews), while remaining sufficiently open to allow the interviewer to personalise the interview by asking probing follow up questions based on the response given. Key questions from the interview protocol were: Can you describe a typical lesson in your classroom with first year students? (to understand whether playful learning approaches feature in a typical lesson) What do you think might be some of the challenges to implementing learning through play? What supports you to implement learning through play? If you had to describe what learning through play means to you at the moment, how would you describe it? How do you feel about participating in the study and what do you hope to achieve? The interviews were conducted in Ukrainian and, due to COVID-19 restrictions, they took place online. Participants. The participants in this study were 29 primary school teachers teaching Grade 1 students in Ukrainian schools. They represented a range of experience levels, with most having over 10 years of experience; all teachers were female. The teachers were spread across five regions of Ukraine (Kyiv, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Poltava, and Zaporizhzhia). There were six teachers from each region, except for Poltava where one teacher chose not to be interviewed but remained a part of the larger study. Interviews were audio recorded, transcribed in Ukrainian and then translated into English for analysis in NVivo. The analysis followed a general inductive approach as described by Thomas (2006), with research questions providing the focus for the initial analysis. Initial categories were formed based on responses to interview questions. From there, the search began for sub-categories, and new codes were formed to represent these sub-categories. Once a coding framework was established, reliability checking was undertaken to test the inter-coder reliability (ICR) of the framework.

The findings are concerned with answering the question |”What are challenges and enablers in introducing Learning Through Play at Ukrainian School?” Perceived challenges in implementing playful learning. When asked what challenges they faced in implementing LTP in their classroom, the teachers identified a number of potential barriers. In general, the challenges of Time, Children and Teacher knowledge, skill, confidence were identified across most/all of the schools and regions. The challenges of Accountability, Number of children, Physical environment and Parents were identified in only some regions/schools. Perceived enablers in implementing playful learning.While some teachers (n=5) felt unable to identify what would support them to implement playful learning due to a lack of experience with this approach, most were able to provide an insight into the following perceived enablers: being motivated and supported to do it, knowing how to implement it, and knowing what playful learning is. In the discussion part, we look into how these findings connect with the literature around implementing LTP at school and will see if the perceived barriers and enablers relate to system-level factors that are discussed in the opening sections.

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