Coaching Collaborative Teaching
Reflections on a Philadelphia Secondary
Co-Teaching Pilot Project
by Cozette Ferron
In the Spring of 2006, a sense of community and feeling of re-energized collaboration happened during a time of ongoing change in the School District of Philadelphia. The Office of Specialized Services (OSIS) was selected to participate in a Secondary Program Pilot for the Delivery of Special Education Services. I, in collaboration with another central office special education manager Kathryn Donahue, designed, implemented, monitored, and evaluated the Access to the Core/Secondary Co-Teaching Pilot.
We launched the Secondary Co-Teaching Pilot as a collaborative partnership between the School District of Philadelphia (SDP) and the Philadelphia Writing Project (PhilWP). The project’s goal was to establish a cohort of regular education/special education teacher pairs to implement researched-based instructional models aimed at improving academic performances among students with disabilities through the inclusive delivery of instructional practices. The SDP was implementing a rigorous, citywide standards-based Core Curriculum in regular and special education classrooms. Both regular and special education teachers reported a lack of resources and guidance to support struggling students with standards-based instruction in the content areas. Students in the regular education class were often not receiving the instructional support level of accommodations needed to master the content to which they were exposed. In the special education classes, many students with disabilities were not benefiting from the content knowledge and subject area expertise of regular education teachers.
As a result, graduating by the “IEP” became the norm and more students were dropping out due to a lack of sufficient credits to graduate. Current research and legislation recommended implementation of differentiated instruction and collaborative teaching in regular education classes for all regular and special education students. We created a program that addressed differentiated instruction as a foundational inclusive practice, purchase of appropriate supplemental materials and co-planning time between regular and special education teachers.
We actively recruited teacher teams (regular and special education teacher) in 22 school sites. Our school community was a true diverse population of teachers seeking ways to enhance and improve their instructional practices. Our schools ranged from the three new progressive schools that were newly opened (Science Leadership Academy, and Constitution High School), three charter schools –Imhotep, Hope Charter, and Germantown Settlement High School and 17 Comprehensive High Schools (Edison, Frankford, Lincoln, Fels, Washington, Fitzsimons, Rhodes, Paul Robeson, Bartram, Olney 704 & 705, University City, Carver, William Penn, Dobbins, Gratz, Strawberry Mansion, Elverson, HS for the Future, and Ben Franklin.
Phase I included the following: Three Saturday workshops in the spring (May-June 2006) provided by the Philadelphia Writing Project that created a sense of community and was successful in using writing as a critical tool for learning across the curriculum. The central office project managers facilitated three follow-up workshop modules in August 2006 – (team building: General and Special Educators, Effective Co-Teaching Strategies, and Co-Planning Curriculum Using State Standards).
Phase II involved on-site implementation of Support (Fall 2006-2007) and a Leadership Academy for Co-Teaching for principals in the summer 2007 for planning in the fall 2007 and beyond (cohort of 22 high school principals attended this training).
The result-oriented outcomes developed by the project provided evidence of the success of this innovative project. Video interviews with co-teachers and administrators were successfully used to introduce inclusive practices to educators, parents and community groups. The video from the participating sites was edited for a variety of uses, with the central goal of embedding video modeling into interactive and technology-based professional development. Ongoing videotaping of the program supported a model of sharing classroom best practices in co-teaching to a variety of audiences (administrators, teachers, parents, etc.). The video also included interviews illustrating the impact of inclusive practices, featuring administrators and co-teachers at three different sites: a magnet school, one charter school and one comprehensive school.
As an outgrowth of this project, classroom vignettes documented this inquiry-based approach of reflecting on instructional practices through looking at student work. Ongoing dialogue did occur between the co-teaching sites through collaborative professional communities. A website was developed to extend the cohort’s collegial community into a virtual environment where they could share best practices and continue their engagement in collegial support. Dialogue, expansion of the project and posting of more video and audio clips were to be the next steps in this project. When the school year ended, a new central administration came and changed the structure of central and regional staff. Many involved in the project were reorganized into the district’s new empowerment model. Although the Secondary Co-Teaching Pilot Project/Grant ended, it generated many possibilities of collaborative partnerships, in the midst of major changes in our School District.
As I reflect on the work of this innovative Secondary Co-Teaching Pilot program, there are days that I wonder if collaborative teamwork is still happening in the targeted pilot schools. I remember a national consultant, Lisa Dieker, in a two-day training on “Effective Strategies for Secondary Inclusion” sharing, “Change comes slowly, but it does not matter how slow the process is, as long as it does not stop!" Research indicates that it takes three to five years to adopt new and promising practices. In response to changes in our district with co-teaching, I have seen positive learning outcomes and a shared sense of success when students with disabilities are included in the general education classrooms. Lisa Dieker, in her book Demystifying Secondary Inclusion, states, “Teachers act differently but, more importantly, students who are different feel a sense of sameness by being given the opportunity to have the same teachers, sit at the same desks, and learn the same ‘good stuff’ as their non-disabled peers.” As we move forward, teachers and administrators require more training and collaborative team planning to truly demystify secondary inclusion across grade and subject levels in our schools.
Cozette Ferron is the Co-Director of Professional Development for the Philadelphia Writing Project and retired as a special education administrator with the School District of Philadelphia. Cozette became a PhilWP teacher consultant in 1992.
Cozette originally wrote this reflection for PhilWP’s Leadership Inquiry Seminar. Video reflections of the pilot are available in the PhilWP office.