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.

Individualizing the Curriculum with Electives

Entry #2: Individualizing the Curriculum- Select one model or individualized program from Chapter 15 of the Glatthorn text that you think would work best. Explain your choice and reasons supporting it. What, if anything, would need to change in your school or district to adapt it, and how as a curricular leader would you make those changes?

This is actually a really hard blog post to write because in my town, many of the ideas identified as individualizing the curriculum are already embedded somewhere or were tried (such as open classrooms) and failed.

Encouraging students to explore their particular passions is a challenge in most schools with a large diverse population and shrinking school budgets. While large swaths of the country have eliminated elective courses, Greenwich has a rich tradition of offering amazing opportunities that engage a wide variety of students. The Greenwich High School catalog resembles a small college and includes eclectic (and popular) offerings across the subjects, especially in the arts. Being the only high school with a population of 2700 students provides a broad base of support for the extensive offerings. The courses are not a mish-mash of items, but a guided discovery for advancement by students that include four levels of electronic music (including honors), 19 different musical performing groups, three levels of cooking including a honors in Culinary Skills, transportation and energy technology in Engineering and more.

I believe that part of the support comes from the international nature of the residents who want their children to have exposure to a wide range of subjects and encourage this. I went to Greenwich High Schools and my favorite class, was on East Asian history. I guess the course China Today that my son took last semester would be its replacement. While I know that large areas of the country don’t have the type of elective offerings that Greenwich does, my experience with it is absolutely lacking. But I support elective offerings in schools as long as its supported by the community and there should be some sort of procedure in place to allow the expansion of courses, but the process should vet ideas and test their appropriateness. As a curricular leader, I’d support a rich load of elective courses, especially at the middle school where students want to begin to explore new options. But adding new courses takes collaboration and consideration as to the unintended consequences (what gets cut out if a student take the elective etc.). Before adding a course, would the topic be best served as an after-school club? These and other questions about staffing, space, and budget need to be discussed.