I worked for 5 years as an "assistant language teacher" (ALT) in Japan. The idea is that you have the normal teacher teaching the class and an ALT who assists.

I worked for 5 years as an "assistant language teacher" (ALT) in Japan. The idea is that you have the normal teacher teaching the class and an ALT who assists. At its worst you end up with the teacher lecturing and the ALT reading things out of the textbook. However at its best you have this awesome tag-team where one person is guiding the class and the other is spotting confused faces and fixing problems before they get big. The main problem with this approach is that teachers are generally not used to working cooperatively. They have their "way" and they don't like to deviate from that "way". As odd as it sounds teachers also don't like being observed in the classroom. Teaching is incredibly difficult (by far the most difficult job I've ever attempted to do). The constraints you usually have to work with also mean that failure in at least some forms is inevitable (or to put it another way -- failure is the norm and you take your successes where you can get them). Because of this teachers are often incredibly defensive about how they approach tasks and decisions that they make. As much as I hate it, it is completely usual in my experience that teachers obfuscate what's going on in the classroom. Having other teachers present is really challenging for most teachers that I've encountered. I honestly believe that team teaching is the way to go, but there are a lot of hurdles that you need to deal with before you can get there. The technology is not really the stumbling block. It's much more the social dynamic and the need for realistic and sensitive teacher evaluation methods. With some students you can literally just lock them in a room and they will learn the material. With other students, it doesn't matter how good the teacher is, they will just refuse to learn (for a huge variety of reasons -- medical, physical, psychological, etc... things that no teacher is realistically able to cope with). Quite a few teachers have realised that they can game the system by simply filtering the students by how easy they are to teach. And because teaching is a very stable job with a reasonable income, you are always going to get a fair number of people who are more interested in gaming the system than teaching stuff. And as is usual in large organisations, people who are good at gaming the system and have no interest in the technical side of the job tend to rise to the top of the decision making ranks. It's quite a difficult problem to solve.