The Power of Co-Teaching

A co-taught classroom can be one of the most powerful tools you have to truly reach all of your students. I was fortunate to work with the same co-teacher for seven years. Throughout that time, we learned each other's idiosyncrasies and personalities, and ended up becoming not only teaching partners, but wonderful friends. We reached a point in our co-teaching relationship where we could finish each other's sentences.

When I found out that my co-teacher was leaving the division, I was extremely nervous about starting all over. It was like a relationship had ended and I was back in the dating game. Luckily, my new co-teacher and I have a lot of similarities, and we have developed a strong partnership in the classroom in just three short months. This became even more evident to me yesterday.

Our inclusion class is challenging this year. We have a large class of students who have a plethora of needs. My co-teacher and I meet almost daily, despite the fact that she is also working with two other teachers as well. We problem-solve, research ideas, and try new strategies all the time.

When we received scores from our first benchmark, it became clear that we needed to do more. We were not reaching a handful of our students.

We have been trying to implement station teaching as much as possible, but stations are only effective when they are being done for the right reasons. Sometimes I think we make up things to do in stations for the sake of saying we are using stations. My co-teacher and I sat down and carefully planned our learning objectives and what would best suit our students. We talked, planned, researched, emailed, texted, changed our minds a few times, and then formulated a plan.

The result was probably one of the very best teaching moments of my (only ten-year) teaching career. Had someone walked into our classroom, they would have seen all students engaged, learning, and working on their individual levels.

We had a carefully planned schedule for each student. Each student visited three stations for 20 minutes during the class period. In the independent reading station, students read self-chosen books on their independent reading levels. This is an everyday occurrence in our class, but they were doing it in a smaller group instead of everyone at once. In another station, my co-teacher taught a mini-lesson on summarizing and then guided the students as they practiced the strategy. In a third station, students completed word work and studied vocabulary words using interactive materials on the iPads. Finally, I met with a group at the guided reading station, where students read a story and we worked on retelling while reteaching story elements.

At the end of the period, we could not have been happier.  Our normally rambunctious class had been quietly engaged for the entire time - reading, writing, and learning. We were able to work with struggling learners on a more individualized basis. I heard students read and measured their comprehension through the conversations we had about a text. We were able to deliver immediate strategy instruction, which we hope can only benefit our students.

It is difficult to describe just how great it felt to feel like we finally accomplished what we have been working so hard to figure out. But I think we have finally taken the first steps to creating a classroom structure that will benefit every student and allow them to grow as readers and writers with the right support. In addition, we used one of the most important tools we have - the power of two.