TL;DR:
- Despite 28 years of teaching, the author had never experienced co-teaching until recently.
- Initial attempts at collaboration failed due to lack of planning and organization.
- A recent partnership with a special education assistant has led to positive changes in the classroom.
The Missed Opportunity of Co-Teaching
What if I told you that in my twenty-eight years of experience as a language teacher, never have I once had the chance to carry out a collaborative approach where two or more educators work together to plan, deliver, and assess instruction for a group of students, otherwise known as co-teaching? It’s commonly used in inclusive classrooms to meet the diverse needs of students.
I do, however, understand what I’ve missed out on: the range of benefits this model could bring to both me and my students—such as increased engagement, exposure to different teaching styles and viewpoints, and more effective differentiated instruction. Additionally, it would have provided a golden opportunity to demonstrate positive collaboration and teamwork by example.
On top of these benefits above, sharing the weight of behaviour management is more than a good thing: it opens doors for teachers to make learning more inclusive by accommodating students who may have special needs that require careful attention.
Having another teacher with you throughout a lesson is a godsend: they become your eyes and ears, offering a fresh perspective on the classroom. Click To TweetThe Challenges of Co-Teaching
What overwhelms many of us teachers—and may have unconsciously deterred me all these years—is that successful co-teaching requires a lot of effective communication and planning. Effective communication and planning are hurdles in themselves. If planning on your own already leaves you hard-pressed—working from lesson to lesson with little time to reflect, rethink, and reorganize—imagine trying to consistently find time to collaborate with another educator.
Early Attempts at Collaboration
Admittedly, I have made attempts to establish some sort of “partnership” with other teachers, even with teachers of other school subjects like Geography and History. In hindsight, it was daring to think we could cover the same topic in an English literature class and a history class, with one using a fictional narrative and the other using a non-fictional account.
At the time, my history colleague and I thought it a great idea to deal with the same topic in a parallel fashion because it would give each of us the chance to differentiate the content and design some study materials that students could identify with. As valid and interesting as the idea seemed, my teaching partner and I overlooked important aspects, such as how we would organize the content and the types of assessments needed to draw conclusions. Needless to say, nothing panned out in the end, and my idea of working side by side with an educator in the same teaching context went dashing to pieces.
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A New Opportunity for Co-Teaching
Teaching often presents new opportunities unexpectedly. Twenty-eight years later, I now have the chance to work with a special education teaching assistant. Although our teaching context doesn’t neatly fit into the six established models of co-teaching—team teaching, parallel teaching, station teaching, alternative teaching, one teaches while the other assists, and one teaches while the other observes—we’ve been able to implement phases that include discussing students’ needs, learning goals, and differentiation techniques; adopting more visual aids and simpler explanations; and adjusting assessment materials and grading criteria to accommodate diverse abilities over the past six months.
There is one more grand plus of being able to co-teach no matter the model or the format. Having another teacher with you throughout a lesson is a godsend: the teacher has become my eyes and ears, giving me a new perspective on what goes on in the classroom and what I need to do to make things prim and proper once more.
About Stephan Hughes
Stephan is a Trinidad and Tobago national pursuing his doctorate in Applied Linguistics at the Pontifical Catholic University in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He is an adjunct lecturer in postgraduate programs on English Language Teaching, Translation and Interpreting. He has taught English as a foreign and or second language in language centers, private schools and postgraduate programs. His interests include lifelong learning, language development, learning technologies and social media.
