Understanding Co-teaching Patterns and Their Influences on Student Engagement in Blended Synchronous Classroom: Through the Lens of Teaching Presence

Co-teaching is critical to improving the effectiveness of student engagement. However, in the blended synchronous teaching and learning, how online teacher and on-site teacher co-teach is still not clear. This study therefore from the perspective of teaching presence to shed light on the co-teaching patterns and their influences on student engagement in the blended synchronous classroom. The teaching presence framework is applied to outline the essential characteristics of co-teaching presence, and then supports using a lag sequential analysis approach to explore the co-teaching patterns in two representative classrooms (i.e., blended synchronous classroom with high-level co-teaching vs. blended synchronous classroom with low-level co-teaching). Additionally, the student engagement in the two levels of co-teaching classrooms was investigated by questionnaire and was compared. The obtained results highlighted that the contribution of co-teaching in the blended synchronous classroom is reflected in two aspects: the delivery and construction of knowledge, as well as the creation of a harmonious classroom climate. The result also showed that students in the high-level co-teaching classroom performed a higher cognitive engagement than the low-level co-teaching classroom did. Additional findings, implications, limitations, and research directions are discussed.