Co-Teaching- A Tool for Collaboration in International Schools By Holly Bowen Reardon- Elementary and Middle School Principal International School Eastern Seaboard
“A learning-focused school accepts the responsibility to do everything possible to support children’s learning. Nothing is left to chance (Teachingtimes.com, 2019).” If learning is the primary focus of schools, then everyone in schools must be a learner. This includes teachers, parents, administrators and support staff as well as students. Sometimes, unfortunately, in international schools, teachers prefer to bring their experiences, personal perspectives, lessons and curriculum with them; a practice that makes it hard for our diverse population of teachers to collaborate. Usually our students also have vastly different experiences both in and out of school and addressing learning needs from such diversity as isolated teachers simply doesn’t work. At the International School of Eastern Seaboard (ISE), we wanted to shift this narrative and harness the gift of our diverse perspectives to learn from and with each other because in learning-focused schools, teachers take collective responsibility for student learning and wellbeing (Stuart et al., 2016). In larger international schools, collaborative teams are often formed with groups of teachers who teach the same grade level. This allows for teachers to work together to think about the content and approaches to teaching. When teachers are working in small international schools with only one classroom per grade level, they can feel extremely isolated and often long for others to collaborate with. In these situations, collaboration usually only happens on a shallow, thematic level with singlesubject teachers (eg Grade 5 is studying bird migration and the visual arts teacher agrees to make birdhouses) whose courses, unfortunately, have few overlaps with what is happening in the homeroom. While there are benefits to these approaches, we were looking for a more deliberate way for our teachers to intimately know our students and to be able to plan for and impact their learning in a very personalized way. One way that the schools in Reggio Emilia, Italy have been able to make a deliberate break from more traditional and isolated approaches to teaching is by working in co-teaching pairs. The teacher researchers in Reggio have found that co-teaching produces tremendous advantages both educationally and psychologically for the educators and the children. Co-teachers in Reggio feel a commitment to both their students 34 EARCOS Triannual Journal
and their colleagues to continually grow and develop as teachers. As teachers make predictions and try things out, they work together with co-teachers to analyze what happened and what might be the best next step for a particular child or group of children. (Edwards et al., 2012). This act alone encourages a deep level of reflection and requires teachers to position themselves as learners within the organization as well. At ISE, we believe that the work of teaching is too complex and too important to do in isolation. When teachers don’t collaborate to plan and review student progress, then the success of a student can depend upon the efficacy of a single teacher (Stuart et al., 2016). Co-teaching also alleviates the traditional model of what to teach and how to teach being determined exclusively by an individual teacher. We know that the effects of both effective teachers and ineffective teachers can be felt for years (Garmston & Wellman, 2016.) At worst, a bad teacher can damage a student’s confidence and self-esteem. On the other hand, students who are placed with highly effective teachers for three years in a row significantly outperform average students. We believe that we have a moral imperative to do better than to leave this to chance. We also understand that having conversations with colleagues that focus on understanding and knowing our students better impacts student learning but also impacts teacher growth and evolution. According to Stuart (2016, pg. 2) “the opportunity to learn from and with the teacher next door is huge. For teachers in international schools, the single biggest benefit of Professional Learning Communities is the unmatched professional growth that come with becoming vulnerable enough with colleagues and being willing to challenge every teaching, assessment and intervention method to better serve students.” Longing for deep and meaningful professional collaboration, we, in the Elementary School at ISE, decided to try a co-teaching approach to deprivatizing our classrooms. Teaching teams formed PODS of 2 grade levels (eg Grade 2 and Grade 3). In this model the teachers in both grade levels would get to know the students and would be able to support the planning for groups as well as individual student needs. PODS combine classes for their morning meetings and other times throughout the day when they are working on building community or addressing community issues. During these times all teachers and TAs are present and involved with students. During literacy and math times, groups are formed across the two grade levels and teachers work with different groups on targeted goals. Sometimes these flexible groups are formed to address specific grade level content, other times they may be based on interest (kids interested in the same topics for writing or reading, for example) or because we want to harness the expertise of students as they teach and learn from each other. For our social studies and science units, we created a rotating schedule. This means that we designated one set of units (what might have traditionally been the grade 2 units) as year A and the other set of units (what might have traditionally been the grade 3 units) as year B, rotating this schedule every year. This allows us to work together on planning the units and allows for greater flexibility for learning engagements
