Over on On Special Ed, Christina Samuels had a post entitled “Differentiated Learning” that discussed plans by some schools to employ co-teaching. Because Peggy and I studied co-teaching a few years ago and because we are privy to a Current Practice Alert on the subject, we created a comment on Christina’s blog entry, hoping to advance the discussion of this popular approach to serving students with disabilities.
In essence, we urged caution about adopting co-teaching. We predicated our reservations on the Alert by Naomi Zigmond and Kathleen Magiera in which they examined the research on co-teaching. Professor Zigmond and Magiera concluded that educators should use caution in employing co-teaching.
Rather than reiterating the content, we’ll just point to the entry differentiated instruction and the comments on it.
I listened to Naomi Zigmond about 2 years ago at San Diego State on the topic of co-teaching. I feel that districts that are forcing co-teaching on teachers are outright wrong! I need some more information on this design that is more critical of its implementation. Thank you.
Francois, thanks for reading TE and dropping a comment.
I’m glad you got to hear Professor Zigmond a couple of years ago. She’s got the data and she makes sense of those data. She’s likely to be talking at a conference in your neighborhood next fall; there is a meeting of the Division for Learning Disabilities in San Diego in October 2009 (watch TeachingLD for updated information about the meeting (it should begin appearing there under the “conferences” link in a couple of months).
Also, make sure that you go to the section of TeachingLD about the DLD-DR Alerts. The brief, teacher-friendly documents that you find there provide clear statements of the research on current topics in education. One of those Alerts is about co-teaching, and the copyright permits you to pass it along to others.
My district has been implementing co-teaching classes for the past three years. Having the special education students in the general education classroom more often has definitely shown improvements in our assessment scores. However, I’m afraid that our teachers were thrown into the co-teaching model without any training, and our implementation isn’t nearly as effective as it could be. Our special education teachers are too often viewed as simply a para in the room to help the students, and there is very little “co-teaching” occurring. We are planning lots of professional development activities for general and special educators alike for next year in the hope of moving our co-teaching classes into a more effective realm. Any suggestions for training activities or things to do with our teachers to increase their understanding of co-teaching?