Sudden Shift to Distance Learning: Analysis of the Didactic Choices Made by Italian Secondary School Teachers in the First COVID-19 Lockdown

Abstract Following China, the next severely affected country due to the COVID-19 epidemic was Italy. In consideration of the increasing number of infections, the government via the Ministerial Decree (DPCM) of March 2020 established various restrictive measures for the entire Italian territory, even involving the closure of schools. Hence, for the first time, the Italian school system had to adopt distance learning. The mixed methods research in this context involves a non-probabilistic sample of 6,384 secondary school teachers answering a questionnaire issued from 5 August to 1 September 2020, and 30 telephone interviews were conducted among those who had made themselves available during the compilation of the questionnaire to be contacted for the qualitative part of the research. Therefore, the answers collected in the report1 relay what happened in the second quarter of the school year from 2019 to 2020, the period of the first lockdown in Italy, through which we try to particularly understand the didactic activities implemented by teachers, the main decision maker of the choices, the assessment methods, the autonomy of teachers in managing distance learning and the teachers’ training needs.