Co-Teaching

Many teachers are reluctant to mentor a student teacher because of this era of high-stakes testing and the newly revised PA teacher evaluation process.  A co-teaching approach still has the objective of providing student teachers with the modeling and guided practice to demonstrate their abilities to translate educational theory into actual practice with real students in real classroom settings.

Co-teaching is two or more people sharing responsibility for teaching all of the students assigned to a classroom.  For our purposes, the following six co-teaching approaches will be utilized during the student teacher’s placement.

Co-teaching Approaches

One Teach, One Observe.  One of the advantages in co-teaching is that more detailed observation of students engaged in the learning process can occur.  With this approach, for example, co-teachers can decide in advance what types of specific observational information to gather during instruction and can agree on a system for gathering the data.  Afterward, the teachers should analyze the information together.

One Teach, One Drift.  In a second approach to co-teaching, one person would keep primary responsibility for teaching while the other professional circulated through the room providing unobtrusive assistance to students as needed.

 Parallel Teaching.  On occasion, student learning would be greatly facilitated if they just had more supervision by the teacher or more opportunity to respond.  In parallel teaching, the teachers are both teaching the same information, but they divide the class group and do so simultaneously.

 Station Teaching.  In this co-teaching approach, teachers divide content and students.  Each teacher then teaches the content to one group and subsequently repeats the instruction for the other group.  If appropriate, a third “station” could require that students work independently.  

 Alternative Teaching.  In most class groups, occasions arise in which several students need specialized attention.  In alternative teaching, one teacher takes responsibility for the large group while the other works with a smaller group. 

Team Teaching.  In team teaching, both teachers are delivering the same instruction at the same time.  Some teachers refer to this as having “one brain in two bodies.”  Others call it “tag team teaching.”  Most co-teachers consider this approach the most complex but satisfying way to co-teach, but the approach that is most dependent on teachers’ styles.