Collaborative Teaching Models to Meet Student Needs

Unpopular opinion … co-teaching should be leveraged in classrooms across all grades. Not only are teachers able to rely on one another for planning and classroom responsibilities, it also enables educators to provide more tailored and differentiated support to students based on their learning needs. There are several co-teaching models that classroom teachers can leverage depending on the flexibility needed for the age of students, content, learning goals, and preferred activities. As you read the co-teaching models and explanations, reflect on how utilizing these different teaching structures could push your student learning and performance to the next level!

One Teach, One Support/Observe

One teacher leads the entirety of instruction, while the other teacher is supporting them. The other adult in the room could be a teacher’s assistant, novice teacher, or paraprofessional who is responsible for ensuring that students are actively engaged and participating in learning. The supporting teacher may be providing behavioral redirections to students, checking-in with students individually, and reinforcing the lead teachers directives. This model is ideal for larger classroom sizes, classrooms with several outlier behaviors, and younger learners.

One Teach, One Assist

This co-teaching model is very similar to that of the one teach, one support/observe model, except this model is more actively engaged. In this teaching structure, the other adult is more proactive in supporting individuals or groups of students, based on lesson goals and objectives. Teacher’s assistants and paraprofessionals are also perfect for this model.

Team Teaching

Team teaching is a great co-teaching model that can yield positive learning outcomes for students, but one that takes a lot of work and chemistry for the adults. This teaching structure requires the educators to meet frequently and get accustomed to each of their styles of teaching so that they can seamlessly teach together. When seeing this model in action, it may look like teachers dividing and conquering components of the lesson to deliver, or them almost completing each other’s sentences.

Station Teaching

I LOVE station teaching, as it is a way to work with students on a specific component within a lesson or discipline. Depending on the set up of the stations, it also allows students to engage in independent and/or group work. In my experience, we leveraged station teaching for reading. Where I would lead phonics instruction, my co-teacher would lead guided reading and comprehension, and students would engage in a rotation of independent computer work. I have also seen this teaching structure utilized on the high school level in a computer science course. In this instance, the stations included group work, independent work, and direct instruction from the teacher. It was great to see this model with one teacher, in this case.

Parallel Teaching

Parallel Teaching is great for larger classroom sizes and when engaging in complex or difficult content. Each teacher would take half of the class, each teaching the same content and material. The benefits of this teaching structure allows teachers to intentionally group students on common needs, which allows them to better differentiate and scaffold content material for students. This teaching structure might also be beneficial for classrooms where students are on different levels and have different access points.

Alternative Teaching

Alternative Teaching is one of the most common forms of co-teaching structures that I see inside classrooms across all grade levels. While one teacher leads instruction for the bulk of students, the other teacher may pull a small group of students to the side of the room to reteach or provide additional scaffolding to students. Often, we also see special education teachers in this role, when they are pushing into the classroom during an inclusion or ICT block.

I would love to learn more about your experiences with co-teaching, both as a teacher and administrator. When are times that co-teaching is most effective? When have you seen co-teaching fail? Comment below!

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