Chapter 7: Co-Teaching Models

Co-teaching involves two or more professionals “delivering substantive instruction to a diverse, or blended, group of students in a single physical space” (Friend & Cook, 1991). Certainly, the increased diversity in schools, to include students who are English learners (ELs) or have learning disabilities (LD) or both, meets the criteria of a diverse and blended group of students in an inclusive classroom. Student diversity is not the issue in the definition; the key phrase is that educators were expected to be jointly “delivering substantive instruction.” For many schools and for many years, this was not occurring, and educators bemoaned a lack of professional development in co-teaching specifically (Pancsofar & Petroff, 2013). Administrators not familiar with best practices and research on co-teaching appeared to think it was sufficient to merely assign two teachers to the same classroom (Beninghof & Leensvaart, 2016). In response to this situation, Murawski (2010) refined the definition of co-teaching by adding that those educators needed to “co-plan, co-instruct, and co-assess” for true co-teaching to be occurring. More recently, others have added “co-reflection” to encourage co-teachers to review their practices and engage in a continuous improvement model (Honigsfeld & ove, 2015). Reflection and evaluation can occur at the team level, in communities of practice, or at the school level in professional learning communities (Murawski & Lochner, 2018).