March/April 1999
By Millicent Lawton
When Ronni Swan's principal at Starms Discovery Learning Center in Milwaukee asked her to
co-teach this school year with a special educator, Swan balked. A general education teacher, Swan had already had a bad experience trying to co-teach, and the memory made her leery. But the push on co-teaching was part of the multiage elementary school's mission to weave disabled students into all regular classes. So, Swan agreed reluctantly-and then worried.
As it happens, her pairing with teacher Paige Richards has worked so well it's made her a believer in
co-teaching. "I would never go back to just teaching regular ed [by myself]," Swan says firmly. "It's no fun. It's lonely." Swan also believes the students benefit academically from having two teachers present, each with different strengths. Swan's strong suit is language arts, while Richards' is science.
Richards, the special educator, also raves about co-teaching and being able to mix special ed and regular ed children together. "I feel like the benefits of inclusion far outweigh anything in a self-contained
[special education] classroom," she says. She cites in
particular the progress of one 10-year-old mentally
retarded boy she has taught for three years in an inclusion class at the school. When he started in the multiage class, the boy had poor social skills and couldn't stay on task. Now the boy can "tell you what he did over the weekend. He can tell you two or three things in a row, on a topic, and then switch to something else. That's a goal we had for his IEP (Individualized Education Plan)."
Growing Interest
Swan and Richards are just two of a growing number
of educators who are experimenting with cooperative teaching, or the practice of pairing a special educator with a regular educator in a single classroom. As
educators strive increasingly to include students with
disabilities in the classroom, the need for regular
educators to have greater expertise with students
with special needs-or to have greater support from
specialists-increases as well. "Collaboration is fast becoming one of the most popular service delivery
models," wrote researchers Peggy T. Reeve and Daniel P. Hallahan in a 1994 report. In the report, they tried to answer practical questions about co-teaching, while noting that interest from teachers was outpacing researchers' ability
to study the practice.
Co-teaching is also part of a larger trend among teachers who see the benefits of working with their colleagues in many ways. "Co-teaching is riding a wave of heightened interest in collaboration that benefits the teachers as well as the students," says Alan Gartner, a professor at
City University of New York and a co-director at the National Center on Educational Restructuring and Inclusion (NCERI).
The full-blown model of co-teaching-where
two teachers are paired full time-is still relatively rare. Elementary schools, in particular, are beginning to inch toward the idea by reshuffling the way special needs services are provided and pairing special needs teachers with regular teachers at least for part of the school day, says Gartner.
Some experts emphasize that they are primarily talking about using co-teaching in a classroom where the special education students are those with mild to moderate learning disabilities. This group should comprise only about 10 percent of the students in the class so as not to overwhelm the educators, says James McLeskey, a professor of curriculum
and instruction at Indiana University in Bloomington. He notes, though, that he has seen classes work where up to 25
percent of the students in one class were identified as disabled.
Setting Up the Partnership
What does co-teaching look like? Jeanne Bauwens, an education professor at Boise State University and an authority on
co-teaching, has identified three models of co-teaching that might be used during the course of a single period or day. In the complementary instruction approach, the classroom teacher is primarily responsible for teaching content, while the special needs teacher focuses on providing the students with "how-to" skills or strategies. In the team teaching model, one teacher delivers the curriculum content while
the other clarifies, paraphrases, adds information, or uses visual aids to try
to enhance understanding of a new
concept. A third variation, the supportive learning activities approach, has the special education teacher overseeing activities such as partner or group learning or peer
tutoring, while the general educator
delivers the curriculum.
What co-teaching should not mean, says Daniel J. Boudah, an assistant professor of educational psychology at Texas A&M University in College Station, is a chance for one of the pair to leave to get
a cup of coffee or to make photocopies. Teachers must also avoid relegating the special education teacher, especially, to a role of glorified aide.
One point of consensus among
those who practice, study, and advocate co-teaching is that teachers must agree to co-teach voluntarily, although ultimately schools must decide what is best for
students. Experts also warn against unrealistic expectations. "One is keenly aware that effective collaboration requires more than two educators with good intentions," write Reeve and Hallahan in response to one case study. "Professionals must judge models of collaboration by their effect." This means being careful to focus on how the students are learning, not just on how the collaboration is working.
Promises of Co-Teaching
The potential benefits of co-teaching can be many, according to qualitative research studies. Teachers can obtain personal
and professional support by working closely with a colleague and by their exposure to a wider range of students. Special education teachers can also get
a better sense of how their students are faring in regular classrooms.
Students in co-taught classrooms gain the attention of a second teacher, which can be especially helpful for those who may not have been formally identified as having special needs, but who may need additional help. Having a special education teacher in the classroom may also help identify a student's learning problems early or avoid unnecessary referrals to special education. Special
education students can receive a more enriched curriculum than they would in tutoring sessions with specialists only, argues Gartner. The other students can benefit from a variety of teaching and learning styles. Gartner remembers one situation in which two co-teachers
decided to teach sign language. "As it turns out, the sped teacher, Kim, couldn't learn it for anything. The kids had such fun seeing Kim stumble and they learned that learning is a process and falling
down is a process. The kids were willing to risk failure after seeing Kim fail and not be devastated."
Advocates argue that co-teaching is an approach that closely follows the intent of the 1997 reauthorization of the federal law governing special education practices. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act now requires that at least one regular education teacher participate in meetings that determine the IEP for each child with a disability, says Thomas Hehir, director of the Office of Special Education Programs at the U.S. Department of Education. The reauthorization also calls for IEPs to show how the disabled child
is going to benefit from the general education curriculum or have access to that curriculum, Hehir says.
Indeed, the federal special education law has been revised with an eye to encouraging collaborative teaching, says Hehir. The statute has been amended to allow special education teachers who are funded with federal money to work both with disabled and nondisabled students. "Under the new law there's much more flexibility," Hehir notes, "and that is to encourage co-teaching, to encourage teachers working together, and to benefit all kids in the classroom."
A recent report by the
National Research Council on preventing reading disabilities also underscores the particular need for consistency in instruction of reading. The 1998 report recommends that reading instruction delivered by
specialists be coherent with what is being taught in the regular classroom.
Too Good to Be True?
While in many ways co-teaching sounds like an ideal arrangement, the ideal can be difficult to achieve, say researchers. Finding time to plan and coordinate is one of the more persistent problems. Joint planning periods can be impossible to schedule if the principal balks at a schedule change. But the creative use
of substitutes or before- or after-school meetings can solve the planning time problem. One administrator's enthusiasm and support of co-teaching extended to substituting in the teacher's class in order to free the teacher for planning.
Practitioners and researchers alike argue that co-teaching need not be an expensive proposition. "If you try to staff a new program like co-teaching and still maintain your old system, then, yes, it's more expensive, because it's an add-on," says Sandy Cole, director of the Center on Education and Lifelong Learning at the Institute for the Study of Developmental Disabilities at Indiana University in Bloomington. But, she says, "If you
think about it and say how we can
reorganize our teaching practice and how we deliver services to kids and use our staff more effectively and more efficiently, then it doesn't cost any more money."
As a former administrator and
principal, Cole has overseen the introduction of co-teaching in both a high school and an elementary school. In neither
case, she says, did it cost more money.
At Bloomington High School North in Bloomington, IN, special education
students from self-contained classes were put in regular classes and, in effect, their teachers were mainstreamed, too. Between about 1991 and 1994, the school went from having 21 self-contained
special education classrooms to just four. Today, the school features co-teaching in each of its core academic subjects, with special educators co-teaching the class periods in which special education
students are scheduled.
At Southside Elementary School in Columbus, IN, the three special education teachers sorted themselves to work either in grades K-3, 4-5, or in part of grade 5 and all of grade 6 to reflect the distribution of special needs students. By limiting the grade levels they covered, the trio could spend more time in each class. The presence of multiage classrooms helped consolidate the educators' efforts.
More Evaluation Needed
So far, research on co-teaching has focused more on the process and less
on the effect on achievement for either special education or regular education students. That has led to criticism from prominent figures in the field.
"There's been a stampede to the conclusion that one very important way of implementing inclusion is co-teaching," says Doug Fuchs, a professor of special education at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. "We have no evidence that it promotes satisfactory student achievement," he cautions. Much of the existing descriptive research suggests that "co-teaching oftentimes involves teachers not working with one kid for sustained periods in a sustained manner, [but]
working with a kid fleetingly in the back of the room or with groups of kids." He argues, "Many kids need individualized services. I'm deeply skeptical that all
of those kids can get that in the general
education classroom. Co-teaching is
a risky enterprise."
A few quantitative studies are
beginning to point to positive academic benefits for students in co-taught classes. A 1996 review of research about co-teaching by Noell Reinhiller, an assistant professor of education at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, examined evidence from published studies about the effectiveness of the practice. Out of ten studies reviewed, two offered quantitative data related to student outcomes in which the results could be attributed directly to
the co-teaching arrangement.
However, a few studies on co-teaching's effectiveness have raised doubts. Two researchers, Janice M. Baker from Vanderbilt and Naomi Zigmond from the University of Pittsburgh, analyzed case studies of inclusion in five elementary schools in five states.
Co-teaching was a part of all five schools' inclusion models, but special
education teachers were typically in and out of several classrooms a day. The researchers found that special education students were not getting very much that was special. "We saw almost no specific, directed, individualized, intensive, remedial instruction of students who were clearly deficient academically and struggling with the schoolwork," the authors wrote.
Meanwhile, Boudah and his colleagues have drawn their own conclusions about engagement and performance of students with mild disabilities in co-taught secondary classrooms. In a 1997 study, they found that mildly disabled students and low-achieving students had a low
level of engagement in such activities as raising their hands, recalling prior
knowledge, or using a strategic skill.
And, while some strategic skills improved for both kinds of students, test and quiz scores decreased slightly for the mildly
disabled students and improved just slightly for the low-achieving students. Boudah says that educators should not discount the
possibility that some students with
disabilities should continue to attend "pullout" programs in which they receive more individualized, intensive instruction-even if they're in a co-taught class. "Kids with learning disabilities, in particular, need a lot of repetition," Boudah says.
The teachers in his study, Boudah notes, were new to co-teaching. More
positive results might not have turned up because they were still learning to work together, he says. Advocates of co-teaching agree that's a key point to keep in mind when assessing a relatively new practice in which co-teachers are still feeling their way. Or, as Cole puts it: "To collect the hard data about how well it's working, you have to have people willing to try it."
Millicent Lawton, formerly a reporter for
Education Week, is a freelance journalist
based in Wellesley, MA.
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