Hello everyone! My name is Siling. I'm very happy to present our study
"Remote Co-Teaching in Rural Classrooms: Current Practices, Impacts and Challenges" today.
This project presents research from 2021 When I was a research intern at Lenovo Research.
First, I would like to start off by talking a little bit about the background of our study.
As we all know, educational inequality has been a matter of great concern globally.
In particular, the distribution of teacher quality, across advantaged and disadvantaged students has been revealed as the typical example of educational inequality.
Research shows that disadvantaged students typically have low-quality teachers,
as indicated by almost any measure of teacher quality, such as teachers experience and educational level.
Educational inequality exists also across and within countries.
In China, the clear urban-rural divide with resource and opportunity gaps has led to a significantly unequal distribution of high quality teachers between urban and rural areas.
Teacher quality has been also supported by past research as an important factor influencing student outcomes.
So it's of great importance to address the shortage of qualified teachers in rural China.
Therefore, China launched a remote co-teaching program in 2013 as an information and communication technology for education (ICT4E) program.
In the program, remote teachers from urban settings typically live-stream their classes.
Rural students watch and interact with the remote teachers via online software in their classrooms.
In the same time, a local teacher will be present in rural classrooms as well and assist when needed.
The co-teaching program aims to provide rural students with a quality education.
In addition, observing class demonstrations by expert urban teachers can also serve as an ongoing professional development opportunity for rural teachers.
Four kinds of such remote co-teaching program have existed. The first type is Class to Class program,
as shown in the upper left figure,
meaning the live streaming or pre-recorded videos of the urban classroom were directly transferred to the target rural classroom.
The second is called Class to Multiple Classes program.
The classes taught by the expert urban teachers were transferred to many rural customers across the country.
The third is called One Teacher to One Class program,
meaning a remote teacher teaches one rural classroom via online software
without remote students on the urban teachers' end.
The last is One Teacher to Multiple Classes program,
which is one urban teacher delivering the class to multiple rural classrooms all over the country.
As shown in the table, these programs varied in delivery format, live streaming versus pre-recorded and
the degree of adaptability of the teaching contents for local students
For high adaptability ones, the class contents were customized for the local classes.
And low adaptability means that the class contents were the same across all classes.
We found the number of low adaptability programs has decreased and
some of these programs have switched to high adaptability ones.
So the focus of the current study is on the high adaptability programs.
These are real pictures of remote co-teaching classes.
These are all examples of high adaptability classrooms,
notice they look somewhat different, but they are all able to achieve relatively high quality instruction.
To the best of our knowledge, there have not been any empirical studies investigating the current status of the program.
Therefore, the current study seeks to identify current practices, to understand the perceived impacts, and
to reveal some challenges of these programs.
We conclude with a discussion of the implications for future ICT4E programs.
To achieve the goals, we mainly conducted one-on-one in-depth semi-structured interviews with 21 participating teachers.
Next, I'll be talking about the key results of our study.
First, for the current practices, the patterns of practices vary by different types of the programs.
But, in general, remote teachers tend to assume more responsibilities before and during classes, such as preparing lessons and lecturing,
while local teachers engage with students more after the co-teaching class.
For the positive impacts, we found there are impacts brought by both remote and local teachers in the programs.
First, remote teachers benefit local students directly by improving their academic achievement and motivation.
For example, according to one teacher, with the remote teacher's class, the local students' grades were much higher.
Aditionally, as mentioned before, this program can serve as a professional training for local teachers,
since it showcases high quality teacher-student interactions between the remote teacher and local students.
While the program can be overly focused on the expert remote teachers,
the contributions of local teachers are showm in two ways.
Sometimes local students might need local teachers to provide additional guidance to process the knowledge taught by the urban teachers.
In other cases, local teachers would provide suggestions to remote teachers to design customized courses.
For instance, one local teacher told the remote teacher about the natural resources that could be used for classes.
Although we believe that the remote co-teaching program overall is a successful intervention using ICTs to improve rural education in China,
there are still areas for improvement.
Teachers faced various challenges.
First, most local teachers said the instruction of the co-teaching class was not clear.
For example, one teacher told us her school didn't let her know what to do exactly in the co-teaching classes.
Moreover, there's also a lack of essential training for both local and remote teachers
as well as a lack of rewards.
Teachers are also negatively impacted by the challenging nature of remote collaboration, such as high communication costs.
To overcome these challenges, we suggest some design implications.
First, we think adopting asynchronous communication tools can enable more flexibility in teachers' communication.
Other design implications that are less immediately achiveable but still potentially helpful are
incorporating augmented and alternativee communication to enhance participation and
utilizing the intelligent tutoring systems to promote adaptive instruction and learning.
To better understand the effects of the remote co-teaching program,
we suggest that the future reserarch focus on in-depth interviews with more diverse participant groups.
Moreover, follow-up surveys can also be conducted
to further confirm that proposed moderating and mediating effects of local teachers.
Last but not least, we are truly grateful for all the participant teachers' kind and honest sharing.
This is all of my presentation. Thank you very much!