Effective Co-Teaching in the Virtual School Classroom (Grades 4-12)

Alignment to Learning Gap and Objective:

This lesson supports “Objective 1: Participants will be able to define co-teaching, name its benefits, and explain its characteristics.” Prior to this lesson, learners will have already completed a lesson that allowed them to reflect on their perceptions of co-teaching along with interpret some studies on the effectiveness of co-teaching. In this lesson, learners will learn the definition of co-teaching and reflect on it, learn about what co-teaching is and isn’t through a video or reading, and get into some specifics about how to make co-teaching visible through actions and language. This lesson addresses a learning gap, which is that many learners may not know how to establish a relationship at the beginning of the year with a co-teacher where they lay out roles, responsibilities, and a common understanding of the classroom culture that they would like to create. This learning gap could cause learners to have negative perceptions of co-teaching because they do not see parity or equity in their classrooms. This lesson addresses this learning gap by clarifying for learners what co-teaching is and isn’t (with a focus on parity) and gives them a space to work on building relationships and establishing responsibilities. This lesson also supports my objective by including aligned instruction and providing learners multiple opportunities to interact with the content.

Process

The learner will begin by determining which components of the definition of co-teaching have consistently applied to classrooms that they have taught in. This will help the learner interact with the definition in a metacognitive way and will allow them to associate their own experiences to the definition. It will also draw their attention to any areas in their previous classrooms where aspects of the definition were not present. Learners will then watch a video. I wanted to provide a visual means of accessing information through this video. Following the video, learners will be able to determine if a scenario demonstrates a good example of effective co-teaching, which aligns to the information covered in the video and the accordion information organizer. I chose this so that learners can go deeper and apply the characteristics to a real-life scenario, which will also appeal to adult learners who might see similarities in the scenario to classrooms that they have been in. I then provided tangible examples of how to make a co-teaching partnership visible, adding to the characteristics of effective co-teaching. I then provided space for co-teachers to collaborate. I wanted this to be a time where learners could reflect with their co-teaching partner in order to synthesize their learning. Finally, the lesson concludes with a sorting of characteristics into if they are good examples of effective co-teaching or bad examples. I made these more challenging and they are a cumulative assessment over everything covered in the lesson. Again, I wanted to appeal to adult learners by providing them with situations that they have most likely encountered in their careers.

I used Rise 360 as my authoring tool. I wanted to use an industry tool so that I could grow in my skills as an instructional designer. I originally wanted to use Storyline 360 because I was excited about the innovation and variety of interactivity with this tool. However, I do not have a PC, so that was barrier. This was my first time using Rise 360 and I really liked how sleek and intuitive it was. I was impressed by how easily I caught on to adding features. I especially like how quickly you could add audio or various interactive elements such as sorting tools, scenarios, or quizzes. I will definitely use this tool again.