December 30, 2005
- I’m a special educator in a middle school; we have block scheduling. There aren’t enough special education teachers to have one on each team, and so I work with two teams. My principal told me that I should spend half a block for co-teaching, and he has assigned me to go to a total of eight classrooms on two seventh grade teams during the day. Is this reasonable? How much co-teaching can one person do?
Although in some situations it might be appropriate to have a special educator spend just half a block in a general education classroom, that decision should be made based on student numbers and needs, not scheduling expedience or the desire to put two adults in as many classrooms as possible. One common result of trying to infuse just a little assistance in many classrooms is that little or no positive effect results in any class. In some schools, half-blocks might be scheduled for science or social studies while full blocks occur in English/Language Arts and Math. In other schools, the former courses do not participate in co-teaching. Generally, experienced (in co-teaching) special educators can co-teach in up to four or five classrooms per day. If administrators expect more than that, some of the in-class services probably are not co-teaching. They are likely to more closely resemble the lower-level “help” that a paraprofessional might offer. Although this could be appropriate, if paraprofessionals are available and such a limited amount of support is needed, then paraprofessionals should be assigned to some of those classes.
- In a co-taught class, who should be responsible for classroom chores?
It depends. If teachers share a classroom fulltime (as occurs sometimes in New York and Florida at the elementary level, for example), then teachers should divide chores equitably. However, if a special educator co-teaches with several colleagues, the general education teachers generally do most of the chores with the special educators assisting as is reasonable given their schedules. What is important is for the teachers to discuss this issue.
Would you like to ask a question about co-teaching?
