Valley High School: my first full-time teaching gig, my first true love. My colleagues and I were passionate about our low-income school where the free and reduced lunches and special education population were twice the size of those in neighboring districts. It was an uphill battle, but varied instruction and performance-based assessments finally began churning out the results we had worked for. Though try as we did, there was still a piece of the puzzle missing; our struggle to best serve students with learning and behavioral disabilities continued.
Searching for a way to meet the needs of all learners, we threw our hats in the co-teaching ring. It was a risky venture that meant the majority of our special needs students would be pushed into a regular classroom. Erin, special education, and I, Language Arts, were among the first to co-teach, a fairly new method on the scene in 2004. At that time, there wasn’t much research about the success or proper implementation of co-teaching, but our administration was supportive and we were excited to find a new way to reach more students, so we hit the ground running. Ultimately, teamwork made the dream work.
Click HERE or the graphic below for seven tips for co-teaching success, my latest on We Are Teachers!
Im not sure this gave any real strategies for co-teaching. The article seemed like it was more about praising the co-teaching team rather than informing the reader about best practices. How did you break down roles and responsibilities? How did you decided who was “lead” teaching and when? Who did the grading? Picked the lessons? What did the structure of the room look and feel like? What systems were put in place? Who owned the results, on paper? These are just a few of the questions I have.
Hi Jeanine!
This was a post for another site (you had to click the link to get to the “meat” of the article), and because they’d already had other posts regarding the things you mentioned, hey asked for more of a narrative article from me. To address some of your questions, though: we were an English and special edu duo who spent our collaborative time planning lessons. So, we both picked the lessons. I typically took the lead teacher role, but we were very much a team throughout. If I introduced the lesson, she headed up the activity, etc. If she wasn’t all that familiar with the content, I would teach the first few classes of the day and she would literally take notes and learn, then she would teach the last few classes of the day. She tended to graded the SPED students’ work to ensure we complied with their IEPs. We were both accountable for results, as we were an experiment of sorts in our building: “does team teaching work?” The room moved all the time. Desks were set up in traditional rows then moved for partner work then moved into pods for small group work then we’d be in the library. It seems like you’re hoping for a recipe, but much of our success came from being flexible and recognizing–sometimes in the moment–what our students needed, so we changed courses to make that work.