Are you co-teaching in a general education classroom? Perhaps you’re an ESL teacher teaching collaboratively with a subject-area teacher. Or maybe you’re an academic subject teacher who has a specialist in teaching Multilingual Learners doing push-in instruction in your classroom.
Whatever your situation, this blog post offers suggestions based on my experience co-teaching in Grades 3 – 7 ELA, Math, and Science classes for how you can work together to provide the most effective instruction for your shared students.
Planning Time When Co-Teaching in a General Education Classroom
What makes co-teaching successful is for both teachers to be able to plan lessons together.
When you can do that, you can easily discuss the language and content objectives for students to ensure that Multilingual Learners will get both the linguistic knowledge and the academic information they need to be successful. You can also easily discuss how to adapt the lessons and provide the scaffolding supports that the English Learners need.
Unfortunately, though, shared planning time doesn’t always happen. If that’s your situation, here are some suggestions for how you can still co-plan lessons:
* Decide how often, when, and in what ways you will share teaching ideas with each other. Ideally, determine this before you start co-teaching and then periodically check in with each other to make sure the schedule still works for both of you.
* Meet before or after school to go over the next day’s lesson or debrief that day’s lesson. When I co-taught a 6th grade ELA class, almost every day I went down to that teacher’s room after school and talked with her about what we’d do the following day. We also talked about students we had concerns about and how we’d help them.
* Email or text lesson plans and/or activity ideas to each other at least a day before using them. That gives both of you time to familiarize yourselves with what the other teacher plans to do. I did this with a 3rd grade teacher when I pushed into her room to help her Multilingual Learners with their writing assignments.
* Get hold of the textbooks/materials your co-teacher is using and look through them so you know the content that will be taught. This is especially important if you’re not familiar with the academic subject. When I co-taught in 4th and 5th grade math classes, I read the chapters in the math books ahead of time so I was prepared to help the students who asked questions.
Providing Instruction When Co-Teaching in a General Education Classroom
Co-teaching in a gen ed classroom is successful when both educators function as teachers rather than one teacher and one paraprofessional. Often, however, the teacher who pushes in and visits a classroom is treated as a subordinate, not an equal, and that is not a true co-teaching situation.
Effective co-teaching means both educators are actually teaching the students. Based on my experience, there are various ways of doing this, which I’ll describe below.
* The visiting teacher who pushes in to the classroom (i.e. the specialist teacher) works with the students who fall under that teacher’s purview. For example, an ESL teacher works with Multilingual Learners and the classroom teacher (i.e. the teacher whose room is being used for instruction) works with the general education students. Or the Special Ed teacher works with students who have learning disabilities and the classroom teacher works with the other students. I co-taught in a 6th grade ELA class as the ESL teacher and there was also a Special Ed teacher in addition to the classroom teacher, and we divided the workload that way (depending on the lesson). I also did that when pushing into a 7th grade Science class where the science teacher presented material to the whole class and then students had activities to do to demonstrate their learning.
* The push-in teacher and the classroom teacher teach different parts of the day’s lesson to the whole class. For example, in that same 6th grade class, when the class began I taught the vocabulary portion to all the students and then classroom teacher facilitated the rest of the whole class activities. This allowed me to ensure that the Multilingual Learners comprehended the vocabulary they’d be using later on.
* When students are doing small group work, the push-in teacher can work with her/his target students while the other teacher works with the rest of the class — when my Multilingual Learners did small group work, I always prioritized helping the groups that included English Language Learners first. But that usually didn’t take up the entire class period so then I worked with other groups for the rest of the time, while also checking back in with the ELLs’ groups.
* When doing conferences, such as reading or writing conferences, both teachers can meet with a variety of students. That is, the push-in ESL teacher should not meet only with Multilingual Learners but also with other students. And instead of meeting with all the English Learners first and then with other students after that, I think it’s a good idea to mix them up. That way, students don’t get the idea that the push-in teacher is only responsible for one group of students and they won’t resist working with the specialist teacher, nor with the Multilingual Learners feel like they are being singled out. That also helped me because I got a better feel for what the gen ed students were capable of doing.
The advantage of splitting the workload in these ways, instead of having the push-in specialist teacher work only with her/his target students, was that all the students regarded me as just another teacher, not someone who was there to help only a select group of students. The Multilingual Learners didn’t feel like they were being singled out and didn’t resist working with me.
That also helped me because I got a better feel for what the gen ed students were capable of and expected to do. In fact, as the year went on, the gen ed students in that 6th grade ELA class asked me for help just as much as they asked their classroom teacher for help.
Assessing Learning When Co-Teaching in a General Education Classroom
Just as there are different way to co-teach in a shared classroom, there are different ways to assess students’ learning when two teachers work with the same group of students. I’ll explain what I did and why it did or didn’t work well.
* For actual tests, I modified the assessments which accompanied the textbooks that were used, typically by crossing out 1-2 multiple-choice answers and/or eliminating some of the writing tasks. This didn’t happen in every class in which I co-taught but whenever I was able to, I did that.
* For students’ reading and writing journals, I evaluated the content of the work, not the language used to express students’ ideas. When students had long essays to write, I was usually able to convince the other teacher to accept a shorter amount of writing.
* In the 6th grade ELA class, the classroom teacher and I jointly determined students’ grades. Whenever I did individual conferences with students, I shared my feedback with her afterwards – usually in conversations at the end of the day. When it was report card time, we met in person to discuss each Multilingual Learner’s performance and then agreed upon a grade, taking into consideration the fact that they were not fluent in English yet.
* In other classes, sometimes all I could do was offer my opinion and then hope the classroom teacher would take my feedback into consideration.
In Conclusion
The 6th grade ELA class was a true co-teaching situation. It worked well because the other teacher and I were friends and had an excellent professional relationship, which wasn’t always the case in the other classes I pushed into. But even if you are not so fortunate as to have a great teaching partner, you can still be an effective co-teacher who does more than just sit next to a Multilingual Learner in a classroom and explain what the other teacher is saying.
You can read another blog post I wrote about how to be a successful co-teacher HERE.
