Co-teaching

Co-teaching or team teaching is the division of labor between educators to plan, organize, instruct and make assessments on the same group of students, generally in the a common classroom, and often with a strong focus on those teaching as a team complementing one another's particular skills or other strengths. This approach can be seen in several ways. Teacher candidates who are learning to become teachers are asked to co-teach with experienced associate teachers, whereby the classroom responsibilities are shared, and the teacher candidate can learn from the associate teacher. Regular classroom teachers and special education teachers can be paired in co-teaching relationships to benefit inclusion of students with special needs. To evaluate the effectiveness of co-teaching, partnerships can use the Magiera-Simmons Quality Indicator Model of Co-Teaching, which gives standard definitions for co-teaching skills through 25 quality indicators and a rating scale. Co-teaching is often evaluated on the amount of shared leadership is present, the amount of co-planning time, honest communication between the two educators, and how much respect and trust is present in the relationship. There are several models of co-teaching, identified by Friend and Cook (1996), including: One Teach, One Support: One teacher leads instruction, while the other provides support to students who need additional help or enrichment, gathers observation data, or provides classroom management. Parallel Teaching: Each teacher, or teacher and student teacher, plan jointly but each teaches the same information to different halves of the classroom at the same time. Alternative Teaching: One teacher manages most of the class while the other teacher works with a small group inside or outside of the classroom. The small group does not have to integrate with the current lesson. Station Teaching: Both teachers divide the instructional content, and each takes responsibility for planning and teaching part of it. In station teaching, the classroom is divided into various teaching centers.