Co-Teaching Success

Entry #1: Co-Teaching- Share your thoughts about the co-teaching model? What impact does the upgrade of curriculum for the 21st century have on co-teaching? As a curriculum supervisor or leader, what challenges would you have supervising and evaluating a co-teaching team, and how might supervisors address these challenges?

The co-teaching model to help students with disabilities in the classroom is a potentially positive step in allowing students to learn. I don’t have a lot of experience with co-teaching, but I’ve seen it used successfully both in the school I work at and in a 5th grade classroom when my son shared a classroom with an autistic student. In both cases, the co-teacher was involved with the curriculum planning, but then worked on specific plans to adapt the lessons for the student. In the case of the autistic boy, occasionally that meant taking the student out of the class for physical movement or to do specialized activities. When the boy was in 3rd and 4th grade, the co-teacher spent most of her time with the student, but in 5th grade, there was a planned movement to teach the child to become more independent in preparation for entry into middle school. This strategy worked well and the student has done well in middle school. Another strategy that worked well with this student included identifying a few students in the class to serve as mentors. These mentors looked out for the boy and they all formed a close bond.

As a leader, I would look at how the teachers separated the duties in the class and then also how they collaborated together on where the class curriculum would be the same for all students and where it would be different. This is a case where watching them work in the classroom after they’ve shown me a lesson that they collaborated on would provide adequate knowledge that the model was working for the teachers, and more importantly, for the students.