The study, published in SN Social Sciences by Alexander Kofi Eduful of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and colleagues in Ghana and Nigeria, surveyed 143 pre-tertiary teachers in the Ejisu municipality of the Ashanti Region. The researchers combined in-depth qualitative interviews with a quantitative survey analysed through structural equation modelling, a statistical technique that allows researchers to test how multiple psychological factors interact to shape an outcome. Their target was what education researchers call emergency remote teaching: the improvised, crisis-driven delivery of lessons through the internet and virtual learning platforms while teacher and students remain physically separated. Unlike carefully designed online education, emergency remote teaching is a stopgap, and the Ghanaian teachers in this study experienced it as exactly that.

From the interviews, the team identified three fundamental categories of teacher experience during the pandemic transition: pedagogical, social and emotional. The pedagogical challenges were the most visible. Teachers who had spent their careers mastering chalkboard instruction suddenly had to reimagine lesson pacing, classroom management and assessment for video calls and messaging apps. Concepts that had been easy to demonstrate in person became cumbersome to convey through a phone camera. Many teachers reported struggling to judge whether students were following along at all, since the instant feedback of raised hands and puzzled faces vanished when instruction moved online.

The social dimension of the loss proved equally significant. Teaching in Ghanaian schools, as in schools everywhere, is deeply relational. Teachers know their students’ families, notice when a child arrives hungry or distressed, and draw energy from the collective rhythm of a classroom. Emergency remote teaching severed those ties. Teachers described a sense of disconnection from colleagues as well as students, with the informal conversations in staff rooms and corridors that sustain professional identity suddenly gone. For educators in communities where the school often functions as a social anchor, the isolation was profound.

But it was the emotional category that emerged as the most prominent of the three. Teachers in the study described anxiety about their own competence, fear that their students were falling permanently behind, and stress arising from the blurred boundary between work and home when the classroom moved into the living room. Some spoke of feeling abandoned, expected to perform a professional transformation with minimal training and little institutional guidance. The emotional toll, the researchers found, was not a side effect of the pedagogical and social challenges but a central feature of the experience in its own right, shaping how teachers coped with everything else the pandemic threw at them.

The quantitative half of the study then asked a sharper question: what predicted whether a teacher’s experience of emergency remote teaching would tilt positive or negative? Using structural equation modelling on the survey data, the team tested the influence of two psychological factors drawn from established theory in educational technology research. The first was openness to change, a disposition reflecting how willingly an individual embraces new ways of working. The second was self-efficacy regarding technology integration, a concept rooted in Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, which captures a teacher’s belief in their own capacity to use digital tools effectively in instruction. Both factors, the analysis showed, exerted statistically significant effects on teachers’ experiences, influencing both the positive and negative dimensions of what they went through.

The finding on self-efficacy aligns with a growing international literature. Studies of teachers in the United States, Canada and Europe during the same period found that instructional self-efficacy was one of the strongest buffers against burnout during pandemic teaching, while low efficacy predicted stress and anxiety. The Ghanaian results extend that pattern to a context where the digital infrastructure was far more fragile. A teacher who believed they could figure out the technology, the study suggests, experienced the emergency as a challenge to be met; a teacher who doubted their technological competence experienced it as a threat, and the emotional consequences followed accordingly. Openness to change operated in a parallel way, with adaptable teachers reporting more manageable transitions than colleagues who felt the new mode of working had been imposed on them without consent.

These results carry practical weight well beyond Ejisu. The authors argue that the findings point to concrete levers for improving teachers’ experiences whenever online or remote delivery becomes necessary, whether in a future pandemic, a natural disaster or a deliberate expansion of digital learning. Professional development programmes, they suggest, should target technological self-efficacy directly, giving teachers sustained hands-on practice with virtual platforms rather than one-off orientation sessions. Schools and education ministries, meanwhile, could cultivate openness to change by involving teachers in decisions about digital tools rather than dictating them from above, and by building peer networks in which teachers can share strategies and reassurance. The emotional dimension, the study insists, deserves explicit attention in its own right, through counselling support and workload adjustments, rather than being treated as an invisible afterthought.

The Ghanaian context makes the findings especially consequential. School closures during COVID-19 affected learners across sub-Saharan Africa disproportionately, and researchers have documented ripple effects ranging from interrupted learning to increased risks for adolescent girls in rural communities. Ghana’s own statistical service has tracked the pandemic’s impact on households and jobs, while national education reports have highlighted persistent gaps in access to quality basic and secondary schooling. Within that landscape, pre-tertiary teachers are the professionals on whom any recovery depends, and the new study makes clear that their psychological readiness is not a luxury but a determinant of whether digital education can work at all. Prior Ghanaian research has already shown that teacher preparation programmes often leave graduates undertrained in educational technology; this study adds that even in-service confidence and adaptability can be measured, modelled and strengthened.

There are, of course, limits to what one municipal study can establish. The sample of 143 teachers in a single district cannot capture the full diversity of Ghana, and self-reported experiences collected after the fact are subject to recall bias. Yet the mixed-methods design gives the findings unusual depth, grounding the statistical pathways in the actual words of teachers who lived through the transition. As education systems worldwide continue to experiment with hybrid and digital models, the lesson from Ejisu is a universal one: screens and platforms are only part of the equation. What determined whether Ghana’s teachers sank or swam during the pandemic was whether they believed in their own capacity to adapt, and whether anyone attended to the fear, isolation and grief that came with teaching into a void. Any serious plan for the future of digital learning, the study suggests, must begin there.

Subject of Research: Pre-tertiary teachers' experiences of emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana

Article Title: Pre-tertiary teachers’ experiences of emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana: a mixed-methods study

Article References: Pre-tertiary teachers’ experiences of emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana: a mixed-methods study. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01797-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01797-8

Keywords: emergency remote teaching, COVID-19, Ghana, teachers, teacher self-efficacy, openness to change, structural equation modelling, mixed methods, online learning, Ejisu municipality, teacher wellbeing, educational technology