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How are the Co-Teaching Strategies similar?
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- Two or more co-teachers in the classroom.
- Capitalizes on specific strengths & expertise of co-teachers.
- Provides greater teacher/student ratio and brings additional 1-1 support for students in the classroom.
- All approaches have benefits and cautions associated with their use.
- Students are heterogeneously grouped by mixed abilities and interests.
- Shared responsibilities.
- Requires trust, communication, planning time, and coordination of effort.
(Note: The need for all of these elements increases as you move from supportive to parallel, parallel to complementary, and complementary to team teaching co-teaching.)
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How are the Co-Teaching Strategies different?
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Supportive Co-Teaching
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Parallel Co-Teaching
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Complementary
Co-Teaching
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Team Teaching
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- One co- teacher is in the lead role; others provide support. Who is in lead and who provides support may change during the lesson.
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- Co-teachers work with different groups of students in the same room. (There are numerous different options for arranging the groups.)
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- The co-teachers share responsibility for teaching the whole class. One takes a lead content role and the other facilitates access to the curriculum.
- One co- teacher teaches content; the other clarifies, paraphrases, simplifies, or records content.
- One co-teacher may pre-teach specific study or social skills and monitors students’ use of them; the other co- teacher teaches the academic content.
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- Both co- teachers are equally responsible for planning, instruction of content, assessment, and grade assignment.
- Requires the greatest amount of planning time, trust, communication, and coordination of effort.
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What are potential problems with co-teaching?
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Supportive Co-Teaching Cautions
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Parallel Co-Teaching Cautions
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Complementary Co-Teaching Cautions
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Team Teaching Cautions
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- Beware of the “Velcro effect, ” where a supportive co-teacher hovering over one or selected students, stigmatizing both students and the co-teacher.
- Beware of making the supportive co-teacher the “discipline police, ” materials copier, or in-class paper grader rather than an instructor.
- Beware of ineffective use of expertise of supportive co-teacher (e.g., special educator)
- Beware of resentment if the skills of the supportive co-teacher (e.g., special educator) are not being used or the lead (e.g., content teacher) co-teacher feels an unequal burden of responsibility.
- Beware of staying in the supportive role, due to lack of planning time.
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- Beware of creating a special class within the class and lowering student achievement by homogeneously grouping lower performing students together (Marzano, Pickering, & Pollack, 2001, p. 84).
- Beware that noise level can become uncomfortably high when numerous activities are occurring in the same room.
- Beware failing to adequately prepare other co-teachers to ensure they deliver instruction as intended, since you cannot monitor each other while you all are simultaneously co-teaching.
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- Beware of not monitoring the students who need it.
- Beware of too much teacher talk, repetition, and lack of student-student interaction.
- Beware of “typecasting” the co-teacher delivering content as the “expert” or “real” teacher.
- Beware of failing to plan for “role release, ” so all co-teachers get to teach the content
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