March/April 1999
By Millicent Lawton
Special education teacher Greg Philippsen was a bit reluctant 10 years ago when an administrator at Bloomington High School North in Bloomington, IN, suggested he co-teach with math teacher Andy Strawn. It was not because he had any bad feelings about Strawn, he emphasizes, but because he felt comfortable with the existing system of teaching special education students in the school.
At the time, he was doing solely "pull-out" and resource room work, assisting special education students individually and in small groups to reinforce concepts taught in the mainstream classroom. The head of student services, Sandy Cole, was in charge of special education and was working with a small group of teachers to figure out how to include students with disabilities in regular education. After studying co-teaching for about six months, they decided they wanted to pursue it. Strawn and Philippsen were one of the first two pairs of teachers she asked to inaugurate the practice at the school.
Philippsen now teaches one resource room period, co-teaches two regular math courses-and has changed his point of view. "The self-contained [special education] program assumes a ceiling on what the kids can do," Philippsen says. With the support of two teachers in the mainstream classroom, he says, "There's no ceiling."
There are 34 students in the Algebra I course that Philippsen and Strawn co-teach two or three times a week in an 85-minute block of time. About 14 are identified as having disabilities, primarily learning impairments and emotional handicaps. Philippsen says the students with disabilities in the co-taught class are achieving "levels of math I never would have thought possible."
Strawn, who is in his 29th year of teaching, says he is also a believer in co-teaching-at least with Philippsen, who is a 21-year teaching veteran. "I wouldn't trade it for anything," Strawn says. He says the ongoing professional development is a huge plus. "The greatest thing about it is I've been able to learn from somebody else who's a really good teacher," Strawn says. He credits some of that feeling of symbiosis to the year he and Philippsen spent talking about and planning their upcoming partnership before they ever stood together in front of students.
The benefits of co-teaching are manifold for the
students and for smooth classroom management, Strawn says. If someone appears at the classroom door, the teacher who's not talking to the class can attend to what would have been an interruption, while the other keeps teaching. And, one of them can kneel down next to a student needing help "without stopping [the class] or shining a spotlight" on them, Strawn says. Students find it harder to act up in the presence of two teachers, and the emotionally handicapped students get positive
reinforcement from peers not to act up, the pair say.
The special education students do not get short-changed under co-teaching, Philippsen says. "I think that was one of my initial concerns, but now, with two teachers in the classroom, all the students get so much attention to academics, to behavior," he says. "I don't see any student with special needs going unnoticed." In addition, he says, each of the inclusion students has a resource room period during the day when they
can get additional help.
Regular education students have benefited, too, the teachers say. "I'm dead sure every kid is getting more attention," Strawn says. Because of some of the strategies the teachers use classwide to help everyone learn math better, the regular education students benefit, too.
There may not be a lot of research into co-teaching's effectiveness, Strawn acknowledges, but he believes that "in every way kids are being helped-and more important, teachers are being helped." He said that's "a benefit that doesn't show up on any numerical measures, but you feel it every morning."
Please go to our Research Feature page for an extensive interview with Greg Philippsen and Andy Strawn.
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