Abstract
Teaching during the remote episodes of the Covid pandemic demonstrated that the majority of classroom teachers replicated classroom practices rather than adapting to a new system for learning. During the rapid shift online, professional development of teachers focused on upskilling rather than changing and challenging teaching practices. As a result, students were unmotivated and disengaged. The problem now exists that teachers are stuck with a lack of understanding of how to teach online with the likelihood of further external uncontrollable occurrences. Additionally, there is no roadmap forward on how to harness the benefits of learning online through the emerging flexible modalities of blended or hybrid teaching in schools. The current risk is that schools return to classroom based pedagogies and miss the opportunities that learning online brings. In this paper I draw from research and experience in the field of educational technologies, online and digital pedagogies, and teacher professional learning. I bring together these understandings to address this crucial stage in schooling offering a way forward. To do this, there is a need to pause in time, to reflect on what is known and what is important to consider to be able to move forward effectively. As such I firstly examine the rush to get online and the frenzied up-skilling of teachers so that we have a better understanding of what skills were developed. I then synthesises the literature to identify what pedagogical skills are needed to effectively teach online in a classroom context. Drawing extensively from theories and empirical studies over the last 30 years I then present a roadmap forward that offers professional development of a different kind identifying the need to change teachers’ practices from replicating the classroom or tooling them to teaching effectively online.