Co-teaching



Well we are with Dr. Marilyn Friend, and she is a CEC past president. Welcome. - Thank you. - So you specialize in co-teaching. Could you first let us know, what are some challenges in co-teaching?
Co-teaching has been around for 30 years now, and at the beginning it had such intuitive appeal. What could be challenging about a general ed teacher and a special ed teacher and making sure they ? And we've all learned over those years that it's really a lot more than that, and a number of challenges have arisen. For example, probably the first one and that makes or breaks many programs is administrative understanding, because if school administrators don't deeply understand what co-teaching and how it's done effectively, it's not . In addition there are very . The most common concern about co-teaching isn't really about what goes on in the classroom, it's about the need for . And while electronic options certainly are driving a new way to plan for co-teaching, many teachers still find that they have almost no planning time and that makes it very difficult to do this. Now, there are all kinds of other challenges, of course, professional development and making sure that classrooms are correctly, but if we could work with having administrators understand and if we could make sure teachers could work together away from the children, I think we'd be in much better shape.

Sure. So that all being said, what are some strategies for effective co-teaching?
And that's the companion, of course, to the first question. And when I think about co-teaching, I would say that there are a number of and the complexity is that those components are but they're also all always moving. The first one is that teachers need to have an understanding of their roles and responsibilities. General ed teachers are responsible for the . Special educators are responsible for the and the services that they need. That has to be in place. Second there are six fundamental co-teaching that most people know now. Unfortunately sometimes in a classroom, what teachers know and what's are not the same thing, and too often now co-teaching is one teach, one assist, which is inappropriate. A third piece is just classroom logistics. How do you have students in small groups with two teachers and move them efficiently? That also is an . And then the most important one is the instruction that goes on in that classroom because if students with don't receive , they're not getting what they're supposed to get. - So why is it important for teachers to be able to co-teach? - The promise of co-teaching is really about a dual goal. The first part of the goal is to provide students with disabilities meaningful access to the general curriculum in the preferred least restrictive environment, which is with their . The simultaneous goal is that they will receive while there, the specially designed instruction to which they are .

And so why is it overall better for the teachers and the students?
For the students, we know that while co-teaching, I think, should be implemented more with children with high needs, students with disabilities, nearly all of them, are capable of learning the same curriculum if they receive the right type of specialized instruction. And so for students, if co-teaching is implemented with fidelity, students have a great potential to really that are expected in today's schools, and to really have that success. For teachers this is a reflection of the real world in the 21st century. Most people now work on teams. We know the problems are too complex. No one person can possibly know all the answers, and so co-teaching is also where teachers put their heads together and it's a very supported feeling, and many teachers say that they're better teachers because they've . Wonderful. Thank you, Dr. Friend, so much for sharing with us the benefits and the challenges of co-teaching. - Glad to do so..