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The aim of this article was to examine primary school teachers' perceptions about their sense of belonging in co-teaching. We were particularly interested in investigating the factors which enhance or hinder teachers' sense of belonging in their co-teaching relationships. The data were collected using the method of empathy-based stories (MEBS) consisting of frame stories with a variation in whether a co-teaching situation was experienced as positive or negative.Qualitative analysis of the stories revealed that teachers' sense of belonging was constructed through three dimensions: 1) teachers' work practices, 2) mutual relationship, and 3) individual characteristics. The findings contribute to the literature by demonstrating that a sense of belonging in co-teaching is a multidimensional phenomenon that is built in a close collegial relationship between teachers. The study adds a new micro-level perspective on how teachers' sense of belonging is constructed between two co-teachers.

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Teacher-student relationships are vital for student learning, yet they can be experienced as a burden by teachers and cause teacher attrition. This paper is based on the stories of six teachers who gave accounts of relationships with students that, counterintuitively, were both problematic and positive. Narrative analysis was applied to these accounts in order to disentangle the complexities of teaching and better understand what factors led the teachers to find the challenge of difficult teacher-student relationships ultimately rewarding.

Teachers are facing increasingly diverse classrooms globally. To support all students efficiently, teachers need to know their students. Drawing from the literature of teacher learning and inclusive education, we explored how teachers learn to know their students in a co-teaching context. Analysis of interviews and diaries of five co-teaching teams showed that teachers learned about their students in a co-taught classroom by observing students and by obtaining knowledge from and co-constructing knowledge with their co-teaching partner. Moreover, teachers' learning led to shared responsibility for the student and a better understanding of student diversity. Thus, sharing knowledge of students can lighten teachers' workload in inclusive settings and benefit both teachers and students.

This article concerns issues of classroom management in heterogeneous classrooms. Although research in the field of learning styles has yielded mixed results, there is a call for information about how they could be used to individualize instruction, especially in primary schools. This article is part of an ethnographic study aiming to examine teacher collaboration in a primary school and it draws strongly on field notes and on interviews with teachers. The intention was to discover how the two teachers in the classroom studied categorized pupils according to the learning styles model they had invented, and how the resulting groups were used for the purposes of classroom management. The study revealed that, first, learning styles seem to work as a grouping method and, second, that flexible grouping can diminish problematic situations traditionally related to heterogeneous classrooms.

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