Collaborating and Co-Teaching in a High School Science Class

Science Vocabulary Word Wall

This article is about my interview with High School ENL teacher, Lauren Cirulli, from Nottingham High School in the Syracuse City School District. I asked her a variety of questions about her experiences with co-teaching during the 2015-16 school year.

Lauren is currently in her sixth year as an ENL teacher at Nottingham High School in the Syracuse City School District. During this time, some fantastic mentors have supported her and have helped her to grow as a teacher. For the past two years Lauren has been co-teaching with the same science teacher, Rebekah Farell. This year, she also picked up an environmental science co-teaching placement in addition to her stand-alone ENL classes.

Lauren and her science co-teacher have established roles in the classroom whereby Lauren works as a language specialist and her co-teacher, Rebekah, works as the content specialist. It is through this lens that they plan according to their roles. They often plan through email, text message, and by passing papers back and forth for suggestions throughout the week. It sounds complicated, but it is a system that has worked around their busy schedules to allow for an ongoing, two-way relationship. They also take advantage of the summer months to meet and set a foundation for the upcoming year. Lauren will often create word walls, break down vocabulary for students and chunk readings to enhance comprehension. Her co-teacher will take care of the notes, diagrams and anything that is specifically content driven. Together they work to encourage students to “translanguage” and are always looking at their curriculum through a multicultural lens while looking for ways to make the classroom more multilingual. This might include finding manipulatives to help their students learn new material. Translanguaging refers to the language practices of bilingual people, and Lauren received training on this technique through a CUNY/NYSED grant two years ago.

Co-teaching works in their classrooms based on a strict schedule and routine. Students come in each day to a “Do-It-Now” activity, which is subsequently signed for a future grade. At the beginning of each unit, teachers write both language and content objectives, and students are given a packet of notes. Throughout the unit, any material given to them has already been modified for them as ELLs. These modifications are done first by the content teacher and then again checked by Lauren to ensure students will have success with the material. For example, they may cross out difficult material and reword it in simpler language or include sentence starters, sentence stems or a word bank of definitions for ELLs. They tend to break up class with a bit of teacher talk and then add in student work. Every student is given a glossary in the beginning of the year to keep with their notes, and it can be used at all times. They also keep word-to-word translated glossaries on hand. In addition, they have recently been awarded a grant at Syracuse University to provide iPads in the classroom which assist with translanguaging. Students also have partners in the classroom to assist them in learning the material. While they work in groups, both teachers are then available to walk around the room to assist students when needed. The teachers ask the students to talk with each other first before asking us for assistance on activities.

The biggest challenge Lauren and her co-teachers have faced so far with co-teaching is based around time. There just doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day. They have worked on solving this through being in constant communication. Before Lauren leaves the classroom each day she discusses what worked or didn’t work and any issues that arose in the class. She also communicates with a type of “pass the papers” system in which the science teacher will give her material to modify, and they will send these papers to each other through the use of student interns. Lauren knows that a lot of people believe that time and common planning is always an issue with co-teaching, and she would love more time to plan face to face. Yet Lauren realized that sometimes she has to accept what is given to her and find ways to effectively communicate for the benefit of the students.

Lauren’s co-teaching success story isn’t just something that can be measured through an assessment, but her success story also relates to how comfortable the students feel coming to their science class daily. This can be seen when students who are no longer in that class come in after school for extra help or want to help assist their peers in the classroom during their study halls. Lauren also has students asking her and Rebekah to attend family, community, and school functions. They often attend these together to show their students that they are supported and an integral part of the school community. Lauren think co-teaching is an effective teaching strategy because it allows students access to both content and language in the classroom and provides them with more assistance when accessing information. At the high school level, she has seen students open up with their peers in the classroom and feel more confident in their speaking and learning. Lauren believes effective co-teaching can be done when a collaborative balance is found within the classroom between the educators.

It was interesting to hear about Lauren’s experiences with co-teaching this year and to learn that she is excited about her ELL/MLL students’ success at Nottingham High School as a result of teacher collaboration.

by Diane Garafalo, Consultant

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