Alternative Forms of Laboratory Teaching during the Lockdown Period Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

his article deals with problematics of laboratory learning in the state of total lockdown of educational institutions which was caused by COVID-19 pandemic. Schools in the Czech Republic have been operating in a special regime for more than a year, when most students and pupils cannot directly participate in school teaching, which results in significant changes in the way teaching is organized. There is a significant application of various forms of e-learning and schools use the concept of blended learning, however, practical teaching in laboratories and workshops was particularly hard hit. When replacing student experimental work in laboratories, teaching with the help of virtual laboratories is the strongest. Due to the general irreplaceability of real physical experience of pupils, various combined forms of teaching are used, where only a part of pupils work in the school, so as to minimize the risk of spreading the infection, but these pupils take turns in laboratories. Furthermore, some teachers try to design students' home experiments, in the implementation of which the principles of design-based learning and project-based learning are strongly applied. In this article, substitute teaching of laboratories in subjects such as physics, chemistry or electrical engineering in schools is mapped and evaluated, special emphasis is placed on high schools with curriculum focused towards technics and engineering. It is in these schools that the approach to teaching known as design-based learning is very well applied and the students of some selected schools were able to work on home experiments. It was this form of substitute teaching that proved to be the most effective.