Teachers’ research diaries – reflection and reconnection in times of social isolation

ABSTRACT In response to the spread of COVID-19 in early 2020, schools across the UK moved to virtual teaching arrangements for the majority of their learners. Some localized school closures occurred in England in February 2020, with a national lockdown following in March 2020. Although relaxed in June 2020, concerns about rising cases of the virus led to a second period of enforced school closure across the UK in January 2021. With no sign of the pandemic abating, we wanted to gain insights into teachers’ experiences at this unique time. We used a solicited diary method with teachers over a 4-month period to reflect on workload and wellbeing issues related to their changing teaching practices. The diaries were supplemented by a series of teacher interviews. In this paper, we carry out a critical reflection of diary use. We observe how diaries provide a structure for eliciting ideas in an ordered way, and which then become a resource for a teacher’s professional reflection. This process also appears to strengthen some of the social connections that were compromised during the social distancing periods of the pandemic, and which has benefits for teachers’ wellbeing.


Introduction
Between February 2020 and March 2021, schools across the UK moved to wholescale virtual teaching arrangements as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.Although some face-to-face teaching under socially distanced conditions continued throughout this period (e.g. for children of key workers), the three national lockdowns led to large scale changes to teaching and learning conditions which appeared to have a pronounced influence on teacher wellbeing.
Previous research studies into the effects of the pandemic have identified some key factors that have influenced teacher wellbeing.Education Support (2020) highlight specific concerns around managing socially distanced learning, fears about teachers' personal health risks, and worries about pupils' learning loss that have impacted negatively on teacher wellbeing.Kim and Asbury (2020) support these findings, suggesting that wellbeing was also adversely affected by uncertainty around school closures.In addition, diminished teacher and student relations that resulted from social distancing and remote teaching would also be likely to contribute to poor teacher wellbeing (Spilt et al. 2011).Therefore, when considering the impact of the pandemic on teacher wellbeing it seems important to consider not only the changes to teaching arrangements, but also changes to the relational aspects of teachers' practices.
The impact of socially distanced learning on wellbeing has also been found in international studies, suggesting that teachers' experiences in the UK are not unique.For example, Aperribai et al. (2020) highlight the damage of social distancing on the quality of teachers' interpersonal relations with students in Spain.Jakubowski and Sitko-Dominik (2021) report heightened levels of teacher stress and anxiety in Poland.They relate this to how social distancing negatively affected the quality of their social relationships alongside additional workload pressures such as learning to interact through new technologies.This final point coheres with observations from Australia which suggests that teachers' anxieties may be mitigated by their connections with other teachers (Brooks et al. 2022).
Taken together, the research evidence suggests that for teachers the pandemic was a challenging time of disconnection and changing relations which negatively impacted their wellbeing.This relational perspective suggests that it is important to gather information from teachers themselves if we want to understand which aspects of their experience affect their wellbeing.This also means that we need to think carefully about the characteristics of the research methods that we might employ in such a study.
Reflecting on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on research methods, Nind (2021) notes a developing interest in the use of expressive methods and a focus on participants' wellbeing.This development has interesting parallels with the growth in expressionist methods in the aftermath of the great flu pandemic of 1918-1920(Doležal 2009, Giesen 2019, Kambhampaty 2020), which sought to capture the subjective, emotional aspect of reality at that time (ArtLife 2020).This interest in subjective expression also coincided with a heightened interest in diary keeping (Moran 2015), which became a focus for social scientists who were 'more and more concerned with qualitative research of an individual's inner life' (Cucu-Oancea 2013, p. 233).Recognizing the established history of using diary methods for social research purposes, we wanted to consider the benefits of using them with teachers during unprecedented times and as they moved into another period of national lockdown in early 2021.
In the rest of this paper, we outline our project aims, decisions around our choice of diary methods and our approach to analysis.In discussing how the diary method allowed us as researchers to benefit from the pragmatic gains of gathering insight into teachers' professional practices and wellbeing during a period of social isolation, we reflect on how the diary process operates essentially as a socially situated reflective activity for the participants.

Project aim
The pandemic represented a special set of conditions that encompassed change and uncertainty for teachers (see Kim and Asbury 2020).Our project aim was to gain insight into teachers' experiences at this time, with particular emphasis on their wellbeing.Since we were interested in gaining insights into real-time practices that were developing in unprecedented conditions, we wanted to use a data gathering approach that was flexible enough to adapt to the changing context of the pandemic.This approach needed to have a longitudinal element since the consideration of time is a key variable in the study of development and change (Mercer 2008, Johnson andMercer 2019).Finally, our data gathering approach needed to be remote and qualitative, reflecting the need to conform to the social distancing requirements in place at the time of the project, as well as our interest in eliciting 'information about lived experiences' (Orb et al. 2001).

Methods
To gain insights into teachers' experiences during the pandemic we adopted a solicited diary method.According to Hewitt (2017, p. 347) 'a diary may be considered a systematic record with discrete entries arranged by order of date; a type of report and commentary upon events, experiences, thoughts and feelings'.Diarizing has an inherent longitudinal dimension, which factors the consideration of time into the study design in ways that cross-sectional studies do not (Calman et al. 2013).The capture of issues in transition, such as changes in day-to-day working practices during the pandemic, can also highlight important interactions and how some practice changes might contribute to wellbeing decline over time.The impact of choosing a longitudinal approach on issues of data quality, habituation, and trustworthiness are discussed below.
Diaries give the participant control over determining the data collection content which, it is argued, involves a complex interplay of perspectives (Binnewies and Sonnentag 2013).On one level reflection is an intra-personal process, including 'reflection in action', such as in-the-moment instances that include taken for granted practices, as well as post-hoc 'reflection on practice' (Ghaye 2010).Although diaries are a form of introspective reflective narration (Hyers 2018), a sociocultural perspective suggests that this reflection is likely to be socially situated.This means that reflection is an engagement between the participant's inner voice and that of non-present others (Bakhtin 1984) such as learners and teachers who they would normally interact with and which they bear in mind when formulating plans for action.It is also likely that the participants will be interpreting the researchers' purposes when selecting the information to share (Kaun 2010).The implication of this reactivity is discussed later.

Data collection
To prompt professional reflection, we asked teachers to complete six diary tasks at roughly twoweekly intervals during a 14-week period between January and May 2021.Each diary was expected to take no longer than 30 min per week.This expectation was made explicit to the teachers in the project information sheet that they were provided with at the outset of the project.We decided that a two-week diary period would not lead the teachers to overly rely on memory but would be long enough for the teachers to be able to develop a sense of perspective.
The prompts for the six diary tasks had some common themes (e.g.'Were there differences in the quality of your interactions with your students in the different classes?If yes, what factors do you think may have contributed to this'; 'Did you teach all the content, and teach it in the way that you had planned over these weeks?If not, why not?').There was also space for teachers' open reflection on issues they felt to be important.We were also able to include additional prompts to capture changes in the teaching context, particularly in response to sudden policy changes (e.g.'Have any changes to assessment practices had an impact on the record keeping that you need to complete?').The ability to alter prompts during the course of the project was facilitated by our use of an online platform to collect our data.We used the Recollective platform (https://recollective.com)as a shared space where we could set up tasks that would be available to the teachers on set dates.
In addition to the diary data collection, we carried out a total of 30 preand post-study virtual interviews with the participants.Initial semi-structured interviews gathered information about the teachers' professional contexts prior to joining the study.The post-study interviews asked the teachers about aspects of their diary submissions, allowing them to elaborate more on some themes, and letting us check our interpretations and support analytical confidence.

Participant recruitment
We wanted to involve a diverse set of teachers.We restricted our study to England to avoid difficulties of analysis presented by differences in national policy responses to the pandemic across the various nations of the UK.This allowed us to consider the experiences of the teachers according to a single timeline of events.We wanted to focus on a relatively small sample of teachers as we were aware that a qualitative longitudinal approach could potentially generate a large amount of data.We decided to involve 16 teachers in our sample as this allowed us to include teachers from different school types and sizes, such as large comprehensive and small independent schools.This also allowed us to include teachers from different subject areas, and from a range of localities and regions.Unfortunately, one teacher dropped out following the teacher screening phase when it was too late to bring in a replacement participant.
We also wanted to include teachers from subject areas that we anticipated would be particularly impacted by the pandemic.We used a purposive sampling approach to allow us to focus on teachers of students in Year 11 and/or 13 1 who were due to take externally assessed examinations.Purposive sampling is a widely used approach in qualitative research as it supports the 'identification and selection of information-rich cases related to the phenomenon of interest' (Palinkas et al. 2015, p. 533).We focused on teachers of English, Drama, PE, Science or Geography because these subjects would be particularly prone to the effects of moves towards remote learning or disruption to examined assessment due to restricted opportunities for practical or group learning.
To find relevant participants we sent out information through our social media channels and via online teacher communities.Teachers were invited to respond and to include some demographic details, such as subjects taught, school type and region.We received 49 expressions of interest and then selected 16 teachers who helped us to satisfy our aim of constructing a relatively balanced sample.The demographics of the study teachers are shown in Table 1.We had a relatively even split of teachers across the subjects taught, except for PE where we only had two teachers.There was a relatively even split between teachers working in the north and the south of England, and most worked in state comprehensive schools/colleges and in suburban schools.

Issues affecting method choice
Our choice of a solicited diary method was influenced by some of the pragmatic benefits of the approach.Diaries minimize the respondent burden traditionally associated with interview-based methods as respondents can capture their thoughts and feelings in their own way, in their own time, and wherever they feel most comfortable (Bartlett 2012).The intuitive nature of diary methods also means that they are relevant to a range of contexts (Plowman 2010, Fletcher and Wilson 2013, ten Hoeve et al. 2018), so long as the diary users are given clear instructions (Bytheway 2012).We provided guidance to the teachers in our study on the format and expectations of the diary submission process.We also provided the teachers with a series of prompts for each diary.Importantly, the prompts included spaces for the teachers to engage in open reflection on issues of interest or importance to them at that time.
Online data gathering also had the benefit of reducing the need for data transcription.We were able to transfer our diary submissions along with their metadata, such as each diarist's school type and subject area variables, into MAXQDA qualitative data analysis software (VERBI Software 2021) where we coded each diary entry as part of our content analysis.This analysis involved assigning a pre-defined set of codes that related to our research interests of practice change and wellbeing to the data.These time efficiency benefits of diaries need to be balanced against the amount of participant commitment required to make the research happen.As Waddington (2013) notes, diaries require relatively little of the researchers' time, with the onus being on the participant to gather relevant data.
Participant dropout is a concern for many longitudinal research projects (see Gustavson et al. 2012), so we needed to consider how to reduce the potential risk of losing participants during the course of the project.We decided that it was important to pay the teachers a small amount to thank them for the time that they devoted to the project.We also allowed teachers some flexibility in their submission schedules.When a teacher missed a submission date, we prompted them with a series of polite emails offering an extension to their submission period.We felt this was important as we would never know if they were encountering difficult personal circumstances and we felt it was most important to maintain ongoing interaction where a break in communication occurred.Taken together, we felt that these flexibilities and the respectful recognition of the participants' efforts mitigated the potential risks of participant dropout.

Validity and reactivity concerns
The pragmatic benefits of using diary methods need to be set against potential validity concerns.
Although diary data may be less socially censored than information elicited through other research methods (Cucu-Oancea 2013), it is possible that there exists unidentifiable participant sanitization.This means that it is advisable for researchers to use supplementary sources of data, such as interviews, when interpreting diary data (Bytheway 2012).To mitigate self-censorship it is also important for researchers to build trust with participants (Baker 2021b), to create an environment of emotional candour and personal disclosure (Burford 2021).Aware that the development of trust between researchers and participants in virtual communications can be difficult (James 2017), we hoped that our pre-study interviews would provide an opportunity where we could listen with respect as the teachers took time to describe their professional experiences during the pandemic.
Reactivity is an issue that can affect the validity of diary data.It describes how a research agenda can influence what a diarist decides to document and there are concerns that reactivity can lead to diarists misrepresenting their experience and downplaying the role of emotion in their decision making (Baker 2021a, p. 104).This can be a particular issue where diaries focus on event-based data suggested by a researcher.In such cases, the researcher steers the agenda and data collection does not rely on the diarist organically capturing their experiences for their own consumption.Reactivity is an important validity problem because trustworthiness is an indicator of qualitative data quality (Lincoln and Guba 1985), so qualitative researchers need to incorporate strategies to ensure the trustworthiness of their findings (Noble and Smith 2015).Habituation, describing the development of rapport and trust between participants and researchers (Baker 2021a, p. 108), can reduce participants' reactive behaviour.Our pre-study interviews were an important part of our trust-building strategy which we hoped would help us to mitigate the potential effects of researcher bias on the data gathering and analytical process.These interviews provided an opportunity for the participants to share details of their professional and personal contexts which contributed to the process of habituation.
Time-based submission can enhance validity through allowing the participants to decide what things are important to capture within a submission period.The use of generic prompts can also encourage the capture of everyday experiences (Waddington 2013), elicit otherwise taken for granted elements (Baker 2021b), and capture participants' interpretations of events (Cucu-Oancea 2013).We sought to capitalize on this affordance by inviting the teachers to reflect on taken for granted practices around everyday events.To do this we included a repeated prompt Is there anything that what went particularly well during these weeks?.

Ethical considerations
We had an ethical responsibility to ensure that the potentially sensitive nature of the personal data being collected in the online diaries was held securely, anonymized, and only visible to the project team.This information was included in the consent forms that the teachers completed prior to data collection.It was also of paramount importance that we considered participant wellbeing.We needed to plan how we would support participants if they disclosed that they were suffering from severe wellbeing issues.We collated resources from organizations who we could direct participants to if they felt that they needed additional support.We also stipulated in the consent forms that the teachers could withdraw from the project at any time without explanation.
Online research methods also entail some important ethical and sample bias considerations (Kaun 2010).Online data gathering may exclude some voices due to lack of access to technology (Khalid and Pedersen 2016) or through distrust of online research agendas (Pratap et al. 2019).Although we can assume that technological access would not be a barrier for our teachers, it is possible that advertising for participants through online teacher forums may have represented a form of digital exclusion, as teachers not on these platforms would not be aware of the research.
In the next section, we outline the key themes that emerged from our reflections on how the diary method elicited information from our participating teachers.We also reflect on how the elicited insights impacted the participants.

Diary elicitation: three key themes
As we carried out our content analysis of the teachers' diary submissions, we were able to critically reflect on the affordances of the diary as a data elicitation tool.To do this we looked across the data from the 90 diaries and 30 interviews to consider (1) the nature of the documenting process that the teachers were carrying out; (2) how diarizing acted as a structuring mechanism for teachers to externalize thoughts; and (3) the potentially transformational impact of the diarizing process on the participants.

Documenting events and emotions
At its most simple, we found that diarizing was a process of focused documentation, with the teachers responding to either externally provided prompts or reacting to stimuli in their professional or private contexts.This documentation involved the recording of events or emotions that could later be collated, aggregated, and made sense of.The prompted time-based recording of events over a two-week period afforded teachers the opportunity to capture sometimes taken for granted episodes, such as background disruptions to teaching caused by students from other classes 'loitering' outside of teaching spaces or serendipitous, snatched conversations with colleagues.This was important since these things may seemingly have had little significance at the time of recording or could have been overlooked as the pace of change continued to develop during the pandemic.As a result, the capture of these sometimes 'small' things allows the significance of these events to develop meaning when they are seen in the context of other, later actions.In the excerpts below the teachers' experiences following the easing of lockdown allow us to make sense of the increased, and perhaps otherwise hidden workload around managing a safe working and learning environment during the pandemic.When preparing high quality lessons where teachers had heightened concerns regarding students' mental wellbeing, the additional physical and monitoring work relating to mask wearing and social distancing can be recognized as significant.
We are encouraged to separate pupils not wearing masks in lessons from others for their own safety.This is very difficult in some rooms.I have moved cupboards and changed seating plans to aid with this.(Science Teacher, Diary 3) The only thing that has really made a difference [to work] is having to try to enforce or at least encourage mask wearing and allocation of test kits.We issued these today and I have since found one open and broken and another put in a bin.(English Teacher, Diary 6) As well as tangible events, the teachers were also able to document their feelings and emotions.This often-transient aspect of experience is easily lost if it is not captured, tied to related actions, and brought together to form a coherent picture of which elements of work linked with specific emotions at particular times.In the extracts below teachers describe their negative experiences of dealing with assessment in the summer term of schooling in 2021.
My additional workload has made me seriously consider leaving the teaching profession over the Easter period.(Science Teacher, Diary 5) My workload has been significantly higher this fortnight due to the planning, preparation and marking of the Teacher Assessed Grade exam papers.(PE Teacher, Diary 6) The process of documenting events unleashed attendant emotions that allowed the teachers and researchers to gain a deeper insight into the experience of working during the pandemic.This has important possibilities as it allows teachers to reflect on the emotional weight of some taken for granted and perhaps otherwise overlooked aspects of their practice, and this could be useful for self-monitoring their wellbeing.
Teachers' judicious control over the selection of events also enabled elements of a counter-narrative to emerge.The return to face-to-face teaching arrangements might have been considered by some as a default return to well-established and familiar practices.The diary data suggested that the easing of lockdown rules represented a new set of practices that had an additional workload which, in turn, had implications for teachers' emotions and wellbeing.This included adapting resources for in-person teaching, adjusting to new assessment arrangements, and supporting students' mental wellbeing.
We are now going into overdrive for the preparations needed for students to return.Adapting the work (schemes of learning) again for their return.(Drama Teacher, Diary 2) Once back in school, the biggest contributor to my workload has been coursework preparation.This is always a stressful time of year due to coursework deadlines approaching, but it's been intensified this year by the fact that it's harder to chase pupils for work as they can very easily avoid you and you don't want to push too hard in case you exacerbate mental health strains.(English Teacher, Diary 2) The pastoral [workload] side of things, students coming into school before form and having just supportive conversations with students, have been huge.(Geography Teacher, Diary 3)

A structuring mechanism for externalizing thought
Diarizing provided a structure that the teachers could use to externalize their thoughts.Our analysis suggests that this structuring involved three elements: it provided an ambiguous space in which satisfying the goals of the audience also benefited the writer; it was a tool that focused attention; and it allowed the participants to make use of an implicit ordering framework to consider their experiences.We outline these three elements in more detail below.

An ambiguous space where both the audience and the writers benefit
In order to submit their diary entries, the teachers needed to have a sense of what the researchers wanted from them when they externalized their ideas.This implicit goal focused on the researcher as the audience and beneficiary of the diary submission.In the post-diary interviews, some of the teachers explicitly acknowledged that they were writing for the researchers as their audience.In some cases, the teachers apologized to the researcher for having to read the diary entry, or acknowledged that the quality of their submitted text was not always high quality.
[The diary] gave you a place to just have your moan.So I'm sorry for that.You have to read them.Saturday night rant about how bad everything is.I imagine it's quite depressing for you! … I didn't expect it to necessarily be so, [but] that was a good thing as well and [to] be able to kind of collect your ideas and sometimes gave me the chance to synthesize ideas.(English Teacher, Interview 2) Obviously I proofread what I write, or I hope it looks like I did.But it's actually having a chance to look back and go actually, yeah, you know, think about that.(Geography Teacher, Interview 2) The extracts also demonstrate that the teachers themselves were benefiting from the reflection that the externalizing process involved.Both teachers acknowledge that collecting and looking back over their own ideas had a positive effect.In this way, satisfying the researchers' information needs led the teachers to, perhaps unintentionally, engage in reflection, which was a collateral benefit of the activity.In this way, the diary space appears to be one of creative ambiguity that allows the writer to have a dual engagement with their text, seeing it from the perspective of the audience as well as from their own perspective.This dual engagement comes about because the needs of the audience are the primary focus for the diary writing process, rendering it a socially situated activity.This is acknowledged by some teachers in their diary submissions, where they point to the way that they had to meet the expectations of the researchers in their diary entries.
Reflection of any kind is always useful, of course (personally and professionally) and it has been helpful to have that 'forced' upon me.I have had to schedule time to think and be reflective: always a good thing.(English Teacher, Diary 6) These data show how diaries positively harnessed aspects of reactivity to spur reflection.The socially-situated nature of the diary prompts, bringing teachers' and researchers' perspectives into contact, allowed reflection 'in action' and 'on practice' (Ghaye 2010).This reflection appeared to be important as it allowed the teachers to take stock of their actions and to enjoy aspects of professional satisfaction, which they may otherwise have ignored.
In addition to the reflective benefits attached to diarizing, the teachers also expressed a sense that it presented wellbeing benefits.
[The diary has] been like a really helpful therapy over the last couple of months.(English Teacher, Interview 2) A number of other teachers specifically mentioned how diarizing gave them a sense of relief through sharing emotions and from having the opportunity to reflect on their experiences.I've really enjoyed sort of taking part in the project.The conversations we've had and also just sitting.It's quite cathartic, actually.Just to sort of take a step back, reflect and take it from there.(Geography Teacher, Interview 2) I would say I found it quite cathartic, which is quite interesting, [it] was definitely a good thing in terms of being in this [project].(English Teacher, Interview 2) These observations around the mental health benefits of diarizing mirror those found in research studies of participants' diary use in stressful contexts (Baikie and Wilhelm 2005, Fletcher and Wilson 2013, Kelly 2022).Instead of being perceived as extra work, or as an additional burden to teachers, it is possible that diarizing may be seen as an activity that supports teachers' wellbeing.This wellbeing may be a consequence of sharing perspectives with others (Kelly 2022, p. 12), or it may relate to the cognitive processing attached to diarizing, where developing a coherent diary narrative helps participants to reorganize and structure memories to create more adaptive internal schemas (Baikie and Wilhelm 2005, p. 341).

A tool for focusing writers' attention
The diary prompts focused the attention of the teacher on particular things that were of interest to the researchers.It was common for the teachers to mention how they noticed specific things in their daily experiences.
I have also noticed that some of my students have struggled to readapt to the school environmentespecially true for those students who find social interactions challenging or experience unkindness from their peers.(English Teacher, Diary 3) [Students'] lack of confidence to answer a question and risk getting the question incorrect in front of their peers so close to the exams I feel is definitely something I have noticed.(Geography Teacher,Diary 6) In this sense, the diary could be seen as a catalyst for the teachers to attach increased salience to things that may have otherwise remained unnoticed.'Noticing' could also be seen as a first requirement if a person is to engage in evaluation.Focusing and noticing elicits thoughts and ideas that can become a resource for memory, allowing them to be used in conjunction with other noticed things to construct broader reflections.We found that teachers were able to bring together the things they had noticed, sometimes as memories, to give them insights into their teaching practices.The longitudinal nature of diary-keeping makes it possible to reflect on a narrative that develops over time.This also contributes to the veracity of the data since it is possible to evaluate whether elements of the narrative are stable across time, potentially making them more trustworthy.Diaries allow teachers and researchers to see professional practice as being more than a series of disconnected episodes.
A framework for 'ordering experiences' It was common for the teachers to use the diary entries to make explicit the structural connections between ideas and events, reflecting the holistic ontology of their experiences.At their most simple, these structural connections consisted of making links between events and emotions.
I did manage to cover all content as planned.This continued to surprise me in the online context.These lessons seemed to go much better than I had expected.During Lockdown 1 there was something of a feeling (particularly for English and Drama) that online teaching was not very productive, and that it was certainly much less useful than normal teaching in-School.Perhaps by this third Lockdown stage we have all (staff and students) become more used to working this way, and it was a surprise to cover so much and in such a meaningful way.(English and Drama Teacher, Diary 3) At a more advanced level, these links were more explicitly comparative in nature.The diaries allowed the teachers to evaluate their level of professional satisfaction by making sense of current events in relation to past experience.
More manageable [workload] than usualas these few weeks are normally in the lead up to coursework deadline where I have to finalise scores, and complete paperwork which is a big job.(PE Teacher, Diary 3) Overall, I am finding online teaching to be more of a struggle than at the start of the pandemic.Teaching a full timetable online severely restricts the amount of physical movement I am able to do, and I am finding motivating myself to get work done a struggle, where before my enthusiasm for teaching was boundless.(English Teacher, Diary 1) The ability to capture the links and relations between events is a positive affordance of diary methods and points to the potential validity of the method.These linkages reflect the complex interconnections that comprise people's lived experiences and sentiments.As researchers we found diarizing to be a useful tool as it allowed us to identify patterns across teachers' experiences that helped to identify how workload commonly affected wellbeing issues (see earlier references to additional assessment workload and considerations about leaving the profession).For the teachers themselves, these insights allowed reflection on perhaps taken for granted aspects of work.

The transformational impact of diarizing on the teachers
The act of diarizing appeared to impact the teachers at two levels: it encouraged them to externalize personal insights and it had the potential to act as 'feedforward' and to inform their future actions.

Illuminating insights
In line with some prior observations of diary method use, we also found that diaries provided a 'window to the personal' (Baker 2021b, p. 12).At the most obvious level, many of the teachers shared how the diarizing process encouraged them to reflect on and make sense of their professional practice.
[The diaries] give me the chance to realize who might be disadvantaged or who you might be letting down, and so that was definitely a good thing.(English Teacher, Interview 2) I've actually enjoyed the reflective time I've spent doing the diary, because without that you don't think about things and it's a treadmill and you're just going on to the next thing and actually it's been great to take a step back and think hold on, you know this is quite positive and this worked but that didn't.(English Teacher, Interview 2) Sometimes the teachers shared information about activities that were taking place in their professional contexts that they were uncomfortable with.These insights had an emotional dimension as they positioned their own values in relation to those of others within their workplace.
For students, whilst their wellbeing is often discussed, I am not sure the actions taken [by the school] are matching those conversations.(PE Teacher, Diary 4) Over the last week alone, I have had several outstanding students who have confided in me regarding mental health difficulties they are experiencing as a result of the pandemic.I find it all the harder to accept the way in which our school piles work on to both teachers and students without much seeming thought being given to these issues.(English Teacher, Diary 2) One member of [the Senior Management] is particularly keen on introducing new initiatives with exciting if meaningless buzz-names; given the current situation and level of exhaustion, this demonstrates (in my opinion) a significant lack of empathy or understanding as to the impact this whole situation has had on physical and mental health.(Drama Teacher, Diary 3) Diarizing allowed the teachers to externalize their ideas, with their self-reflection considering the important values that underpinned professional practice.Self-reflection that involves values allows teachers and researchers to recognize that professionalism involves more than procedural knowledge.It also gives insight into teacher dissatisfaction where their personal values come into conflict with those of their working environment.

Informing future actions
Teachers suggested that the elicited information had feedforward potential, with their past reflections informing future activity.This observation has obvious overlaps with the 'illuminating insights' section above, which outlined how teachers' reflections could result in self-critique, or critiques of practices that they had observed in their professional context.
I wrote quite a lot on [wellbeing], and I felt myself writing quite a lot on that because, you know, as a Union Representative as well, it gives me a chance to take some things forward and some evidence that I've got.(Geography Teacher, Interview 2) It's definitely benefited me that reflection time, you know some of the questions that you asked.Just really makes you think about what you're doing in your practice and going forward in it.But it's helped me going forward anyway.To think all the time in those kinds of terms about, you know what exactly is happening?Who am I reaching?(Drama Teacher, Interview 2) These data cohere with earlier observations about how diaries, as socially-situated activities, can harness reactivity to spur reflection.The data also highlight the capacity for reflection to inform further action.Ghaye (2010) notes that reflection involves projection, and it is, therefore, possible to see how diarizing could have a role in supporting teacher professional development through spurring reflection 'in-action' and 'on-practice'.

Discussion
We noted at the start of this paper how there were some interesting parallels between the period of the COVID-19 pandemic and the growth in expressionism and diary use in the aftermath of the great flu pandemic a century earlier.There appear to be some noteworthy characteristics that make diaries particularly pertinent to contemporary conditions.The COVID-19 pandemic period is one of profound change, with many of the usual markers of routine life removed.Some observers note that the recent pandemic has left people with an unclear sense of passing time (Grondin et al. 2020).It has also been a period of social dislocation (Aperribai et al. 2020, Jakubowski and Sitko-Dominik 2021, Brooks et al. 2022), with the increased shift to virtual interaction leaving some people feeling that they have lost opportunities for serendipitous informal interaction with professional colleagues (Tsakiris 2021).
In this changed context, our analysis suggests that the effectiveness of diaries relates to how they provide a framework for collating experiential information that affords chronological and social reconnection.Chronological reconnection describes how diarizing links events and time, which supports the building of retrospective meaning.This resonates with literature on professional reflection which observes that 'describing what we do is a starting point in exploring the issue of being a professional' (Ghaye 2010, p. 90).Documenting experiences makes them visible and makes inspection and critique possible.Importantly, diarizing also allows teachers to see change, as diaries encourage the teacher to 'notice' things through the juxtaposition of events, experiences and emotions (Burford 2021).The collation of what might appear to be relatively minor events, such as management actions related to mask wearing on a particular day, is the first step in a process of reflection.Once collated, teachers can come to see their significance once they are placed in a broader context of other events.
In terms of chronological reconnection, it is possible that diaries can reinforce the links between time and events which make teachers more able to notice change.Diarizing enables this process because it encourages teachers to notice things, which they link and compare in context.In this way, the diary is a tool that provides the teachers with a fixed format for collating information about their experiences that are taking place in a sometimes rapidly changing and unpredictable context.
It is possible that professional reflection (Ghaye 2010) has an important role in social reconnection, and that this might be particularly pertinent in times of social isolation.For teachers working remotely, the creation of an environment that encourages internal dialogue through diary-prompted reactivity may help them to retain connections with the wider professional community.According to a Bakhtinian perspective, this internal dialogue is populated by the voices of other professionals who the teacher will have encountered both directly and indirectly in the past.This internal dialogue is therefore seen as a connection with the remote community of practice that the teacher will have experienced in their professional formation and will help to ensure that they have reference points that can inform their ongoing decision making.
Professional reflection through diarizing might also have wellbeing benefits for the diarist.The capture of events and their attendant emotions which then become shared with others appeared to have a cathartic impact on the teachers.This impact has been observed elsewhere and may be linked to a process of 'unburdening' (Kelly 2022) or to a process of establishing a structure to memories (Baikie and Wilhelm 2005).In this way, the wellbeing aspect of diarizing may relate to how it can liberate teachers from some of the challenges to reflection that link to recording in-the-moment practices.By attending to and collating aspects of what would otherwise have been 'taken for granted' elements of practice, teachers can place these elements into the broader context of experience.This post-hoc process allows teachers to link events and emotions, which is counter to some forms of positivist thinking that seek to separate reason from emotion, and that can limit reflective practice (Ghaye 2010, p. 155).
Another potentially positive affordance of the diary method is that it enables dialogue between the researcher and the teacher (Kaun 2010), which is another form of social connection.The longitudinal character of diary study enables researchers and diarists to reflect on past diary submissions and for this to affect their future thinking.This affordance, drawing on the diarist's documenting activity, creates resources for the diarists' reflection and for the researchers to provide further prompts to encourage extended thinking.This facility opens up considerations about the validity of the diary method and the interpretations drawn from it.Longitudinal qualitative interaction has the potential to develop symmetrical relationships between participants and researchers.This symmetry means that the responsibility for establishing the meaning around textual data is shared between the participants and researchers.It is argued that this form of interaction, relying less on the researchers imposing meaning on participants' words, provides a more valid representation of the participants' experiences (see Buschle et al. 2022).
This dimension of social interaction also presents a challenge for analysis.Baker (2021a) and Bolger et al. (2003) highlight the importance of mitigating reactivity, for example, through establishing longitudinal interactions between researchers and participants that encourage habituation.Such dialogic interactions may make it challenging for analysis to disentangle the different perspectives within the data.There is an inevitable concern that the reactivity implicit in dialogue, with participants being influenced by prior contributions, can make it difficult to decide who 'owns' a particular perspective.Whether this is considered to be a threat to validity depends on the researcher's perspective and conceptualization of the role of context, experience, and development.
We argue that it is vital that researchers consider their perspective before choosing to use a solicited diary approach.Social interaction between the researcher and the participant is only a threat to validity if the researcher adopts a cognitivist perspectivewhich assumes that the diary method gathers an account of experience that resides 'in the mind' of the participant, with any interaction adding 'noise' to the analysis.This contrasts with a sociocultural perspective (see Bakhtin 1984), where development is considered to be interactional and intimately linked to the context in which it takes place.This sociocultural perspective would perceive the interaction between diarist and researcher as enhancing validity as the participants come to a clearer understanding of each other's perspectives through their ongoing interaction.

Conclusion
Solicited diaries offer great potential for researchers and participants.For researchers, solicited diaries have a number of benefits that relate to the flexibility and intuitiveness of the method, as well as affordances connected with the quality of the data that can be gathered using the method.The solicited diary method can gather data that allows rich insights into the experiences of research participants, and it appears that these insights relate to the socially situated and longitudinal nature of the diary process.Solicited diaries can harness participant reactivity through the interplay of researcher prompts and participant response.This is important because it explains how the implicit social conventions around solicited diarizing produce focused outcomes that are useful to research.Rather than being seen as a form of introspective reflective narration, we see this reflection as an engagement between the participant's inner voice and that of non-present others, such as the researchers, other teachers, and students.
Our analysis suggests that diaries can help participants to document events and give a structure for them to externalize their thoughts.Importantly, this documentation is a resource for further reflection, which can include contextually important emotional dimensions.In line with theory around the reflection process, this activity also involves projection that has the potential to influence future practice.Solicited diaries also have the potential to positively influence participant wellbeing, allowing them to share their perspectives with others and experience a sense of relief.At a professional level.Solicited diaries allow teachers insights into otherwise taken for granted features of their own work that they can use to evaluate their practice.The diary provides a mechanism for connecting events to each other, and to their chronology.They also have the potential to anchor the teachers to their professional community through their inferred consideration of others.This aspect may have been particularly important during the pandemic, which was a time of teacher uncertainty, changing practices, and social isolation.

I
have to remind myself to keep going, think positively, I praise any effort a bit more, (I've noticed that), I drink more water and have to make sure I have things ready.(Drama Teacher, Diary 1) It was quite useful to reflect on my week or fortnight and having a chance to look back and think about wellbeing.(Geography Teacher, Interview 2)
*One teacher taught both English and Drama.