How might you and your co-teacher take advantage of your knowledge, skills and strengths to transform your class into one that meets the needs of diverse learners?

Cooperative teaching is one form of collaboration that we see in schools that are successfully including students with diverse learning needs in general education classes. These students might have needs for specialized education (including special education, Title I supports, bilingual education, enrichment, etc.). The analogy that we want to use to vividly describe how two teachers think about co-teaching is a photo album. Inside any photo album are numerous photos that recreate moments in time. While recording those moments, they also remind the viewer of events that occured, but were not captured in the photographs. We are inviting you to look at our photo album of co-teaching moments to help you recognize that there are many ways in which teachers can work together. Often, we find teachers limit the possible ways in which they define their responsibilities in a co-taught class. Issues like lack of content expertise or sharing turf constrain their imagination. Therefore, use this photo album of co-teaching possibilities to broaden your thinking about ways to expand your co-teaching roles and responsibilities.

We use three categories as a means of describing unique contributions and ways of working for co-teachers. The categories are used for explanation only. In reality, these ways of working blend together over a period, or week, or semester to create a moving picture of two teachers working together in a variety of ways. However, we will use the categories to describe different photos in our album.