In 2021 distance learning continued to gain popularity due to the volatility of the learning environment. Teachers were caught up in "emergency remote teaching" (Hodges et al., 2020), which spontaneously shaped teaching practices during the pandemic. Although student-centered practices have been supported since the previous century [Cuban, 1983; Pedersen & Lui, 2003] and now they are supported on the country level, they could be avoided in real teachers’ practices. This article shows how teachers see best practices using technology in "ideal" interdisciplinary lesson plans, and how these practices relate to the student-centered or teacher-centered study approach.

The objective is to identify practices and technologies used by teachers in the classroom, analyze their prevalence, and find the technology-enhanced student-centered or teacher-centered lessons. 

Qualitative methods of analysis are used to understand which practices and technologies are popular among teachers whose lesson plans are investigated in the article. Research shows that group and individual work are more engaging practices than listening to lectures and watching videos (Shernoff et al., 2014), especially behaviorally and emotionally (Prata et al., 2019). This applies to the online format: group work also increases engagement in blended learning (Semiral & Bichelmeyer, 2021) and relates to the student-centered approach. 

Despite these facts, teachers remain insufficiently aware of effective study practices. The findings indicate that even when creating competitive online lessons, teachers design the learning process around themselves as teachers rather than around the student as an independent actor. Much of their student engagement techniques focus on maintaining frontal instruction, even when practices and technologies not formally intended for this purpose are used. 

Although videos are not always engaging, 20% of competitive lessons begin with watching and discussing videos. Some teachers were not aware of the possibility of group work in an online format at all. Other teachers could indicate group work, which in fact was not implemented in the lesson and could be formal without any engagement. The completion part of the lesson often involves formative assessment and reflection practices, and here again, frontal work prevails. In the context of technology, teachers use the interactive whiteboard, quiz resources, word clouds, reactions, and chat messages to engage students at this stage. 

From the perspective of the TPACK model, we see that even in competitive projects aimed at developing digital lessons, teachers demonstrate rather low technological knowledge and try rather transfer traditional practices into the online format without sufficient reflection and revision. In all 139 lessons, only two references to technology for the representation of subject content (which can be correlated with the TCK framework) were encountered. This situation seems to be related to the lack of both pedagogical and technological knowledge of teachers, which needs to be developed in order to work successfully in a distance learning format.

The results can be helpful for EdTech companies to develop digital platforms with exactly those practices used by teachers. At the educational policy level, highlighting teachers' practices in a distance format would be useful in shaping future educational policy, understanding how to improve teachers' qualifications and what technologies are worth training them to work with, and which practices are popular in their actual work.

This article is based on the texts of submissions for the second stage of the “Lesson for the Teacher” contest. The contest was held in 2020-21 for teachers of three subjects: history, social studies, and literature. According to the registration data, the number of teachers from 68 Russian regions took part in the contest. At the second stage of the competition, teachers in teams developed lesson plans for an interdisciplinary online lesson for grades 8-11 (ages 14-18) lasting 30 minutes. These were lessons which the participants supposedly would have given in the final round of competition had they been chosen for it. Of the 145 submissions, 139 were sampled. We excluded those with no description of the lesson or with such a superficial description that no concrete practices could be discerned. Of these 139 lessons, there were three lesson plans that had elements of a face-to-face lesson that were not applicable to distance learning (mentions of classroom design, the interactive panel in a physical classroom, etc.). These scenarios did not quite meet the requirements of the competition because they were not designed for online use, however, we did not exclude them from the analysis, because some practices applicable to the distance format were preserved in them. We used qualitative and quantitative content analysis. First, we coded all teaching practices and technologies and divided lesson plans by stages. Then the main categories were highlighted, based on which the re-coding was then conducted. Each stage contained at least three codings: part of the lesson (beginning, middle, and end), a form of work (group, individual, frontal), and use of technology (no, demonstration of material, Kahoot, etc.). If available, we also noted individual practices (survey, word cloud, etc.), as well as the materials used (text, video, audio, statistical data). This allowed us to apply methods of quantitative content analysis.

We expect to make a list of teachers’ practices using technologies that were used in lesson plans, and analyze how they relate to the student-centered and teacher-centered approach. For example, group work in Zoom was stated in 67 lessons, but not all mentioned a task for independent group work. Instead, there could have been individual work (the task did not involve any cooperation in the group, the participants were simply in the same virtual classroom), frontal work in a small group (the teacher in the room was expected to lead all work), or frontal work with formal division into groups (the teacher should divide students into groups, but they all stayed in one room, that is, there was no interaction separately in the groups that is exactly teacher-centered approach). Teachers continue to prefer frontal work, and in order to engage students behaviourally, they use synchronous questioning or chatting in Zoom. Nevertheless, most limit themselves to broadcasting materials such as images, text, video. The lack of sufficient experience in working and communicating in a digital environment can be a subject for discussion. They constrain teachers' ability to design appropriate online experiences for students. This is especially evident in the way they organize word processing or group work, where practices are sometimes directly carried over from the face-to-face classroom. If teachers don't work with online documents themselves or team up remotely, they may have no idea how to organize these experiences for students and engage them. It turns out that their pedagogical knowledge is constrained by their technological knowledge, which means that they can't imagine how to organize work in an online environment.

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