Negotiating Co-Teaching Identities in Multilingual High School Classrooms

Abstract

School districts in the U.S. are increasingly calling on content area and English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers to work together to plan and deliver instruction in classrooms with linguistically diverse students. Such programming presumes, however, that collaborative teaching dynamics are unproblematic. The aim of this article is to examine ESL and content area coteaching dyads at an urban high school in the U.S. southeast. Data were drawn from a year-long qualitative study of these classrooms and were analyzed using sociocultural perspectives on learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Lave, 1998). Findings highlight structural factors that inhibit the development of positive co-teaching relationships, including top-down decision-making, inadequate training for co-teaching, and lack of time for co-planning. Positive relationships were formed on the basis of shared personal and pedagogical visions, flexibility and adaptability. In addition to recommendations for school-level changes, implications of this study center on the need to prepare teacher candidates for collaborative teaching through cross-disciplinary coursework that includes opportunities to practice and reflect on co-teaching.

Learning to co-teach: understanding the co- in a mentored co-teaching activity

“…Thus, Tobin (2002, 2005) maintain that co-teaching should not be reduced to team teaching symmetrically, in which two teachers lead the lesson side by side (King, 2022). Instead, co-teaching requires teachers (not just two teachers in the same classroom) to come together to engage in co-planning and co-debriefing to co-reflect and dialectically think about their mediation (or lack thereof) jointly, as well as in tandem with their Learning to co-teach students' learning (D avila et al, 2017;Friend et al, 2010). When teaching-residents and mentorteachers start practicing co-teaching dialectically (Baxter and Scharp, 2015), they become deliberately conscious of dialecticism and use it as a pathway or tool to resolve tensions, come to consensus or agree to disagree: they open themselves up to new co-learning possibilities.…”

“…In the teacher education literature, some co-teaching studies view co-teachers as collaborators in ICT classrooms (D avila et al, 2017;Friend et al, 2010;Honigsfeld and Dove, 2019;Rytivaara et al, 2023), which undermines the dialectical nature of co-teaching and co-learning. To theorize and better understand the co-in co-teaching, this study was designed to analyze narratives from teaching-residents and mentor-teachers in an urban teacher residency program as they reflect on their co-teaching philosophy and the relationships they have built.…”

“…Thus, Roth and Tobin (2002, 2005) maintain that co-teaching should not be reduced to team teaching symmetrically, in which two teachers lead the lesson side by side (King, 2022). Instead, co-teaching requires teachers (not just two teachers in the same classroom) to come together to engage in co-planning and co-debriefing to co-reflect and dialectically think about their mediation (or lack thereof) jointly, as well as in tandem with their students' learning (Dávila et al. , 2017; Friend et al.…”

“…Co-teaching models are common strategies adopted by co-teachers in integrated co-teaching (ICT) classrooms. Co-teaching activities have been studied extensively for high need and teacher shortage areas, such as special education (Gurgur and Uzuner, 2011;Jortveit and Kova c, 2021) and teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) (D avila et al, 2017;Friend et al, 2010;Rytivaara et al, 2023). Co-teaching also is becoming more prevalent in schools generally to promote teacher collaboration (Honigsfeld and Dove, 2019).…”

“If You’re Gonna be Inclusive, You have to be Inclusive on all Levels”: Ableism in Teacher Collaboration

“…Katherine's testimony reveals issues that have long been documented in the co-teaching literature, namely the logistical hurdles that arise in implementing special education and language services; although Katherine is a language support teacher, special education teachers often experience similar struggles. Teachers don't have enough time to collaborate, plan, and reflect together (D avila, Kolano, & Coffey, 2017); they oftentimes aren't given enough guidance and professional development on co-teaching and collaboration (Friend, Cook, Hurley-Chamberlain, & Shamberger, 2010); specialist teachers are often pulled in many different directions and classrooms, leading to the aforementioned logistical difficulties (Kangas, 2018), and specialist teachers are often marginalized compared to general education teachers in terms of communication and classroom status (Hersi, Horan, & Lewis, 2016).…”