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Shared insights from university co-teaching.

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Abstract

Many educators across all levels of teaching and disciplines are exploring new ways of collaborating and effectively delivering instruction to diverse groups of students. In this article, we describe our experience with university co-teaching with special attention to using learning centers in an upper-level education course.

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Imagine having opportunities to reflect daily upon a shared teaching experience, learn and immediately implement new and effective instructional and assessment techniques, and gain greater insight into your discipline--all within an atmosphere of shared mutual trust and respect. Such opportunities are probably rare in higher education, yet these were some benefits of our recent encounter with university co-teaching. Here we share perceptions of our university co-teaching experience with special attention to the benefits for students and professors.

Co-teaching is an approach where two professionals deliver substantive instruction to a group of students within a single physical space (Cook & Friend, 1995). Often, co-teaching is a chosen vehicle to initiate or expand collaborative efforts among and between colleagues. Our collaboration involved co-teaching a three-week summer Inclusion Strategies course enrolling 30 secondary general education juniors and seniors. Although we brought to this voluntary experience different life experiences, teaching backgrounds, and university department affiliations (one from Special Education and one from Foundations of Education), we shared a passion for preparing successful general educators for their critical role in inclusion, a need for using our creativity in this course, familiarity with the co-teaching literature, and mutual professional respect. We believe these elements provided the structure for a successful and rewarding experience that allowed us to experiment and grow within a safe and supportive environment. We also maintain that our collaborative approach provided unique instructional benefits for our students as well as powerful professional benefits for ourselves.

Instructional Benefits for Students

Co-teaching can provide unique instructional benefits to students. We had different, yet complementary educational backgrounds, teaching experiences, instructional and assessment strengths, and areas of professional expertise. Ignoring this vast amount of life experience would defeat a critical purpose of co-teaching--to enrich the teaching-learning process for students and co-teachers. By pooling our resources, materials, experiences, and strengths, the classroom experience was richer than if the course had been taught independently, and students were exposed to different, and sometimes divergent examples, anecdotes and stories, and ways of thinking about inclusion as a result of this shared storehouse of experiences. Our approach to the course reflected Bess's (2000) premise that instructional roles are so diverse and require such different mixes of tasks, talents, and temperaments that some parts must be played by more than one person. Further, the co-teaching experience allowed us to implement approaches we might not...

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