Teacher World

I am here to tell you that I love co-teaching! Now that the intervention specialist and I are more aware of what we should be doing and we are trying correct approaches to co-teaching, we firmly believe that it is the best way to service most special education students, and I am so glad to be involved in this experience.

Since participating in the class taught by Marilyn Friend, we have been experimenting with different techniques. My team teacher, co-teacher, paraprofessional, and I blocked off the whole morning one day last week to set up six stations, three in each classroom, to do a variety of math and reading activities that would reinforce and/or review concepts we have been teaching. Students circulated in groups that were strategically planned to provide a heterogeneous mixture and a blending of the two classrooms. The activities were fun but content aligned. The students loved it and expressed their desire to do this again. So we just finished stations with activities to reinforce the differences between homophones, homonyms, and homographs. Again, the activity level was high, kids were physically and mentally involved in each station, and the day was a success.

The intervention specialist and I have also been utilizing parallel teaching. The benefits I see to this technique are numerous. It is advantageous to the students to work in smaller groups allowing us to better determine understanding of the concepts we are covering. There is better opportunity for students to get their questions answered. The movement from group to group provides a break between activities which many of our students really need. The intervention specialist and I have learned that we need to watch our volume when we teach. There are times I find myself listening to what my co-teacher is saying rather than to my students, and she admitted the same to me. So this is something we will continue to work on. 

We have a long way to go, but this is so exciting! We sense it, and so do the kids. We are on the right road, and working hard to make up for lost time. And my fervent hope is that I will be able to do this again next year. Now that we know what we are doing, you’d better believe we will do whatever it takes to get it right!

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According to Marilyn Friend, co-teaching is like a marriage. To make it work, the general education teacher and intervention specialist must be committed to the job they do and committed to doing it together. They must be as united in their efforts to be successful in the classroom as a couple is united in their efforts to be successful in their marriage. But the question is: how does that happen in situations where the two parties involved do not have a good working relationship?

I have been extremely fortunate in that I am not only friends with the intervention specialist I work with, but we agree philosophically about how to educate children and love the job we do. So our relationship is a marriage now, but that took time to achieve. It was not an immediate thing but grew over time as we learned how to best work together to accomplish our goals. And, as a result, I feel that we have been successful, even if we haven’t always followed the co-teaching model.

But what happens to those teams who have to work together when they have no relationship at all or, worse yet, do not get along? It is a challenge to share a classroom and your space with someone. How does that work if there is no comfort level or even tension between the two sharing that space? I suppose this is when we must be bigger than our petty differences and do what is best for our students. We are always going to be placed in situations in our work place where we don’t get along with a co-worker, but usually this is easily rectified by using the simple technique of avoidance. That is not an option when you are co-teaching. It is hard to avoid someone who will be in your room most of the day, and needs your total cooperation.

I wish I had answers and could tell you how to accomplish this minor miracle, but I don’t. I do know that Marilyn Friend is right though. It must be done. So, have at it! You can do this because you need to for the sake of your students. And, who knows, in the process you just might find you have more that links you together than the things that pull you apart. Good luck!

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In previous blogs, I have told you that I have been co-teaching for a year and a half but have never had the opportunity to be trained by Marilyn Friend, the co-teaching guru. Well, that changed recently when I had the privilege of attending a two-day class with her which was both informative and exciting.

Okay, true confession! We thought we were co-teaching, but we most definitely were not! Oh, there were brief periods of time when we came close, but after taking this course, we realize that we have a long way to go.

One of the biggest mistakes we unwittingly have made is not blending our classroom in such a way that there is no “my kids, your kids”. Our grouping has most frequently been the traditional pulling of SPED students to work on skill building and reinforcement. Only occasionally has our grouping been heterogeneous. We thought we were providing instruction in a way that would be most helpful to these students, but the research proving otherwise is quite compelling, so this is a mistake we will work diligently to rectify.

We are also reevaluating the approaches we use in delivering instruction. We learned about the various co-teaching approaches: one teach, one observe; station teaching; parallel teaching; alternative teaching; teaming; and one teach, one assist. We were asked to evaluate which techniques we use and to what extent. Again, I must confess, we have missed the mark. Our approach has been pretty traditional, relying primarily on the general education teacher to do the teaching with the intervention specialist assisting. Occasionally we did some parallel teaching, but not often. We are working now to balance our instruction and intervention allowing for a better balance between our team members. And we are also collaborating as a team to utilize a variety of teaching approaches increasing our opportunities to gather important data to determine the effectiveness of our instruction and to provide proof of student progress.

My only regret is that we didn’t have the opportunity to take this course before our first year of co-teaching. I regret the lost opportunity to do so much more with last year’s students and look forward to working more productively for the remainder of this year. And if given the chance to co-teach again next year, which is my hope, we will set the right tone from the start, and I have no doubt that it will be a better experience for all those involved. That’s one of the joys of teaching; it is never stagnant. It is always changing as we strive to deliver effective instruction to optimize the opportunity to turn out successful learners. And that’s just what we plan to do.

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This is a shout out to all of you who are involved in a co-teaching classroom. This is my second year working in a co-teaching classroom, and I must confess that we were virtually untrained when we entered into this partnership, and remain pretty much untrained today. We have gleaned some information on our own and are working through this experience using a combination of trial and error and best practices. But we could really use the expertise of other teachers who have had experience in co-teaching. If you could answer any of the following questions, it would be very helpful for us as we try to fine-tune our strategies:

* Is your classroom heterogeneous in nature? Do you have a good balance of gifted, regular education, and SPED students?
* How do you avoid having your classroom misused for the placement of countless at-risk students who might do better in a classroom with two teachers?
* Who does the planning? Is it a team effort, is it done by the regular education teacher with input from the SPED teacher, or is it a combination of several approaches that change periodically?
* How is instruction shared between the two teachers? Are there any techniques you have found particularly successful?
* How is intervention done? Does grouping change regularly with both the SPED and regular education teacher taking equal responsibility of all children?
* Who does the grading? Is your regular education teacher in charge of their students and the SPED teacher in charge of theirs? Or is this a shared responsibility with no real delineation between the two groups of students?
* Since the regular education teacher has not been trained in special education, how does your SPED teacher help the regular education teacher to adequately meet the needs of IEP students?
* How much pull-out do you do? How does the SPED teacher find time to meet the IEP goals as well as the regular classroom goals?
* In what areas have you been successful, and in which areas do you feel you need to make improvements?
* What overall advice would you give that would encourage us to continue in a co-teaching classroom?

When I need help with teaching issues, I am going to go to the experts. And that’s you. So thank you in advance for your expert advice. I suspect that I am not the only one who has questions about this approach to working with the SPED population, so I am sure you will be helping others out here, too.

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For the second year in a row, I have been working in a co-teaching classroom, and, while I love the premise behind this innovative approach to teaching SPED children, I contest that something may be getting lost in translation. Is the purpose to improve the motivation and job performance of the SPED student, or is it to overload these classrooms to such an extent that success is difficult, if not downright unattainable?

I team teach with another colleague, and both of our classes have a 25% SPED population. Now, that alone is a significant challenge, but there seems to be a misconception that our classrooms should be used for those other at-risk students who might benefit from small group and one-on-one instruction, too. Unfortunately, as a result, our classrooms are so overloaded with students who did not pass last year’s OAT tests for math and reading that we feel that we have been set up for failure. How do we provide services to our IEP students, even with an intervention specialist or paraprofessional in our room, when so many of our regular education students require the same degree of intervention and additional instruction as our SPED students? Making matters even worse is the fact that between the two of us, we do not have even one gifted child. Zero, zip, nadda! Does this sound like a formula for success?

I think the premise behind co-teaching is awesome. I saw its benefits last year when we had a more heterogeneous grouping of children, and we were very successful. And that is the key: there needs to be a range of students from gifted to SPED students to make this teaching strategy work. That means that teachers need to alter their view of the co-teaching classroom. They cannot make promises to parents of every struggling regular education student that they will place them in the co-teaching classroom where their needs will more adequately be met. Because, frankly, when the number of students who require extra services far exceeds those who do not, everyone in that classroom suffers, including the teachers who can never do enough to keep up with the wide variety of demands in their classroom.

If co-teaching is worth doing, and I believe it is, it’s worth doing right!

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I find it difficult to the point of ridiculous to pinpoint any one surefire way to evaluate a teacher’s excellence in order to decide who receives or does not receive merit pay, and I am a teacher. How then, do we leave this colossal decision in the hands of government officials who are distinctly removed from the classroom and have little or no firsthand knowledge of the many qualities involved in being an excellent teacher? It is frightening!

It seems to me that any reliable evaluation designed to fairly determine who receives merit pay would require following every teacher around throughout their day, both at school  and at home. If you are not a teacher or have never lived with a teacher, you have no concept of the number of hours that are dedicated outside of the school day to planning, preparing, and grading. Who will evaluate that?

Who will evaluate what kind of relationship you have with your children, the counseling you do with your students in your classroom and with parents at conference time, the hours you spend on committees, the modifications you make to your curriculum to accommodate children on IEPs, the phone calls you make to parents to praise their child or try to solve a problem their child is having in school, the children’s assignment books you check and initial daily, and the ones whose book bags you help pack at the end of the day? Who is going to see and evaluate these things? Who is going to evaluate the love you give each child in your classroom, even the ones who are hard to love, and how does that factor into an evaluation? Who will take note of the countless times you worked through your prep time at recess to intervene with students who were struggling with a concept you taught that day, or your reward system you utilize to encourage them to do their best? And who is going to observe your lessons frequently enough to evaluate the strategies you teach your children to be successful, the mnemonics you teach them to remember concepts, how you engage and motivate them, your knowledge of the subject matter and the variety of  techniques you use to pass that knowledge on to them?

It boggles my mind how this evaluation nightmare can be resolved! But the bottom line is this: I did not get into teaching because of the big salary (clearly), and I couldn’t work any harder than I already do for a bigger pay out. My reward is more intrinsic, and I’m okay with that. So I guess I just don’t place much value in merit pay, but I sure would take umbrage with someone who tried to tell me I don’t deserve it.

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This year I volunteered to work with Resource Room children in a co-teaching classroom. I have taught the LD tutored students for years and was looking forward to a change. And what a change it has been! In many ways, I love it and it has taught me both patience and new teaching strategies. But it can also be very frustrating, and we find ourselves questioning whether some of the students would be better serviced in a traditional resource room.

First, the positives: A co-teaching classroom is ideal for those students who need less academic support and perform better when challenged by their peers. Their desire to be in a regular education classroom creates a strong work ethic, and they are extremely successful as a result. It is these students who have made significant growth in our classroom this year. It has been such a pleasure to see their growth and self confidence as the year has progressed. We are hopeful that the OAT tests will reflect their academic progress this year.

I also have had the honor of working with an excellent special education teacher who has taught me so much about how these children process or have difficulty processing information. The techniques she has taught me, her unbelievable patience, and her love for these children has helped me to see them through new eyes. There is an innocence and playfulness in many of them that we often don’t see in our traditional I-need-to-be-cool regular education students. It is refreshing, and I have appreciated their candid nature.

Now, the negative: One of the most pressing concerns of co-teaching is that it drives down test scores on state achievement tests in co-teaching homerooms, and this is a major consideration for teachers. We all know that our test scores are publically scrutinized, and there is no disclaimer that explains the wide range of academic potential in our classrooms. This simple fact is a huge deterrent for many teachers who work hard for good test scores.

Another legitimate concern of co-teaching is that it is not always the best model for reaching the needs of the special education student. We have at least two students this year who we feel would have made more progress in a traditional resource room setting. In retrospect, we wish that option had been available to these students.

I would love to hear from other teachers who have had the opportunity to be involved in a co-teaching classroom. What worked? What didn’t? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the co-teaching model? Let’s do what teachers do best and learn from each other.

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