Co-Teaching Ideas

Administrative Support

For collaboration to be successful, the administration must develop and fully support a culture of collaboration. Teachers need sufficient time to develop relationships, set goals, and receive training.

An Understanding of Each Other's Work

The EL teacher needs to understand the mainstream standards, curricula, and assessment systems. The classroom teacher must understand how to diagnose learners' gaps, determine strengths, and address differences through culturally responsive and linguistically appropriate teaching strategies.

In addition to learning about the instructional and pedagogical components of each other's contexts, teachers should also seek to understand the more emotional and affective sides of each other's teaching, including personal preferences, feelings about various aspects of teaching, and relationships to students. Collaboration involves creating an equal partnership with respect and appreciation for the strengths each teacher brings to the equation, including personal, pedagogical, and discipline-specific qualities and skills.

Flexibility in Desires and Preferences

An important component in making a collaborative relationship work is always to keep the students' best interests in mind and to be flexible about personal desires and preferences.

Creating a working relationship and building trust take time, and both parties need to remain understanding, respectful, and flexible.

Models of Collaboration

Successful collaborations operate along a continuum that ranges from co-planning of instruction at one end to the full partnership of co-teaching at the other. The table below shows collaborative teaching activities that take place in the ESL classroom, outside class, and in the mainstream classroom.

Co-Planning

For some teachers, the first step to a collaborative model is co-planning, in which the ESL teacher and the classroom teacher identify language objectives in the content materials to teach in the classroom as well as vocabulary and concepts form the mainstream course to introduce and reinforce in a resource room. In addition, the ESL teacher can share culturally responsive teaching strategies and ways to differentiate instruction for all students.

Co-teaching

Co-teaching--the actual sharing of physical teaching space--may take various forms. In one scenario, one teacher does the instruction while the other observes the students. Information gathering during this observation provides feedback to the instructor and facilitates planning.

In another model, one person teaches while the other circulates around the room making sure students are on task as well as monitoring students' understanding, providing guidance, giving feedback, and asking developmentally appropriate questions.

In a third model, station teaching, requires some modification to the classroom. The teachers create stations to allow small-group instruction and independent learning. Teachers can work directly at one of the stations or circulate.

Parallel Teaching

In parallel teaching, the classroom is divided into two areas, and each teacher instructs half the students at a time. The content of the lesson is essentially the same, though the teacher may modify the linguistics demands for one group of students. The teachers alternate, presenting different aspects of the lesson. Students or teachers may change places at various points in the lesson.

Barriers and Pitfalls

Some efforts at collaboration fail because teachers start out with a plan that is too ambitious and therefore not sustainable. Frequently, collaboration fails because teachers do not receive professional development concerning how to implement collaborative models. Here are some common errors:

• The teachers spend too little time setting common expectations and getting to know each other.

• The school allocates too few resources for staff development or training in how to implement collaborative models.

• The school makes little adjustment to the existing workload, and the teachers end up with too many responsibilities.

• The school provides inadequate time for co-planning.

No Matter the Model, Some Ingredients are Essential

The essential ingredients of successful collaboration remain the same regardless of the level of commitment: a shared vision with common goals, clearly defined roles and responsibilities for students, the classroom teacher, and the EL teacher. Clear communication, common planning time, and administrative support.