Abstract
Initial and continuing teacher education are increasingly making use of remote and blended modes of education. Conducted in the summer of 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, this rapid review brings together literature and evidence to inform planning for remote and blended teacher education during restrictions in face-to-face teaching activity. The review consists of three main parts: first, a descriptive framework of modes of remote and blended teacher education; second, an exploratory review of the affordances and limitations of remote and blended approaches connecting the literature on effective teacher education with reviews of remote and blended approaches; third, a rapid review of evidence on the efficacy of remote and blended approaches, including of a small number of studies comparing these to face-to-face equivalents. We conclude that remote and blended teacher education is likely to become an increasingly important part of the teacher education landscape and there are plausible theoretical reasons suggesting that it can be effective with suitable design. However, we find too few studies presenting robust evidence to enable firm conclusions to be drawn on the relative effectiveness of modes and approaches. The review provides a foundation for further research and practice in this area.
Highlights
While our treatment of these employed elements of systematic review approaches to minimize bias and increase transparency, the time and resource constraints did not allow a wholly systematic treatment. We have described these sections (Sections 3 and 4) as ‘exploratory’; our aim with these sections is to bring together, summarize and interpret a large range of literature on continuing professional development (CPD), teacher education and remote and blended modes of teacher education into a single account that addressed the immediate aim of informing current provision as well as providing a foundation for further research in this area
Our scoping work involved, first, initial location of key reviews of CPD and/or Teacher Education, its modality or both—sources were located through database searches and expert advice; second, developing a set of research questions that have been used to structure our main report
At the boundaries of this are: firstly, lectures, which can often include minimal dialogue and are more akin to video content on platforms and self-study programs; second, conferences, which typically combine numerous elements of which only some resemble a seminar or discussion group. When it comes to conference keynotes and presentations, where the information flow is one directional, these may be thought of as being more similar to static content and our content platform mode (5); when it comes to unstructured discussion between conference delegates, this can have the qualities of more informal professional learning communities; for conference question and answer or discussion-focused sessions/periods, we feel these have a great deal in common with seminars and workshops, sharing the characteristic of facilitated discussion that we have identified for this mode
Summary
Teacher education, including initial education and continuing professional development (CPD), is arguably the most direct, effective, and costeffective approach to school improvement (Fletcher-Wood and Zuccollo, 2020) [3]. We define initial teacher education as any training provided to pre-service teachers as part of qualification; we define continuing professional development as any support or training for in-service teachers. In both cases our focus is on efforts to improve teacher effectiveness. The key limitation of the exploratory review sections (Sections 3 and 4) is that, while systematic approaches were adopted, we relied heavily on our judgement and expertise in our selection of relevant literature and findings within it to summarize This brings in an inevitable degree of subjectivity and reduces transparency.
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