Before I joined CTEPS, I was at a breaking point. After working with the district for five years as a special education teacher and two years as a classroom teacher, I was just about done with teaching. Each day felt like a constant battle as I advocated for each and every student to receive the best education possible. Despite my efforts, I was still unable to utilize the full potential of the supports we have in place for our students. I left my special education position and became a classroom teacher with the goal of facilitating the kind of co-teaching I felt our students deserved. Even this felt like a failure. Two years passed and I didn’t have any special education students in my classroom. After each deliberate effort, I ended up back in special education without warning, and back to butting heads with other educators to provide meaningful co-teaching instruction for my students. 

How could I continue to sit by and watch the system systematically fail students, and teachers? I began one last search for a classroom teacher position with the district. I was fortunate to find one. While I was looking I also came across the Deeper Learning initiative with Action Research. When I obtained the new classroom position I immediately applied to be a part of the Action Research with a focus on Purposeful Co-Teaching. I knew I could make a difference and began to feel hopeful once again.

When the 2024-2025 school year started, I began to prepare for my purposeful co-teaching journey. At first, it felt like I had bitten off more than I could chew. I wanted to launch my co-teaching plan on a full scale, but that was not an attainable goal. Launching a full school co-teaching plan would have been a systematic overhaul, teachers would need training, master schedules would need to be changed, and most importantly teachers would have needed to buy in with a moment's notice. A smaller focus was needed. So, I narrowed my focus to one content area, reading. During my whole group reading block I had two co-teachers that overlapped for a 20 minute period. This was my time. I worked with my co-teachers to design mini lessons that dug deeper into the learning that was already happening. We divided the class into three heterogeneous groups and utilized a Station Teaching approach. The focus of my station was to dig deeper into the standard we were learning. My EL co-teacher’s station covered a deep dive into the language and grammar we were learning. My special education teacher’s station covered a deep dive into vocabulary and context clues. These stations allowed me to teach each lesson to my class and time for extended practice in  small groups. Not only did this approach meet the depth of each standard, it effectively provided the opportunity to add two hundred minutes a week of instruction for each student. 

As teachers we always need more time. And this is a way to add that time, for free. We have the human resources to meet the needs of all students. We need to make time for meaningful planning because purposeful co-teaching is the key for success to all teachers and students.