Co-teaching experience

Here you have our co-teaching unit plan:

In a general overview, the assessment of the co-teaching activity is positive. Both of us felt comfortable teaching together and we understood each other perfectly.

One of the elements that helped to this mutual understanding was the roles settled before starting the lesson. Each of us knew really well what we had to do. Also, we tried to communicate among us all the time, before, during and after the activity. Before, to know a little bit the students and the class, during to be in the same track and after to improve the lesson.

Now that you have a general idea about how the experience went, we can go deeply and focus on the strong and weak points of the activity.

STRONG POINTS

On the one hand, as a good point there is the use of the language. We consider that both of us communicated our ideas efficiently, using lexicon and linguistic structures adapted to the English level of the learners. In relation to this aspect, we value very positively the constant conduct of large group discussions, which made it possible for each and every student to understand how to perform the tasks.

Moreover, another aspect to highlight is the topic that we choose. Students find a sense in what they were doing and that helped us to have more motivated and committed learners. For us that was very important because for the pupils was kind of strange situation, and we did not want to be there presenting an activity that had no meaning for them.

Thirdly and the last element is the dynamism of the activities. Students really thanked the presence of active and hands on activities. That helped us to be closer to them and be more familiar among us in quicker way.

WEAK POINTS

On the other hand, regarding the weak points there is the only one point that must be improved which is the timing.

We both believe that it was the weakest point of the sessions. In the first implementation, the running dictation to obtain the instructions required a higher cognitive demand than what was expected. As a consequence of that fact, we spend more time in the activity and there was a delay in the completion of the following tasks. Mainly, that is the reason why some children couldn’t finish.

At the time of implementing the session in the second school, however, we had this fact very present and we decided to adapt the timing omitting this specific activity. In this way, we directly carried out the large group discussion about the instructions and the process was lightened up.

CONCLUSION

To sum up, we would like to mention that the experience of implementing the same activity in two schools has allowed us to see different educational realities, which we consider very enriching for our future as teachers.

Likewise, we have realized that co-teaching is an effective alternative that allows to promote equality of opportunities in the education of children, since the attention to the different learning rhythms is enhanced. In this sense, it is necessary and essential that both teachers participate equally in the teaching and learning process just as we did, accompanying the students in their construction of knowledge.

In short, a competency and inclusive education promotes an integral development of the pupils as critical citizens and, at the same time, makes it possible for those children who have greater difficulties to learn naturally and normally, trusting in their own learning capabilities and possibilities in the same way just like their classmates do, mainly due to the constant teacher support. As a result, our students can better internalize what is being discussed and, therefore, a positive evolution in the learning process is favored.

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