EFFECTIVE CO-TEACHING FOR STUDENTS WITH SPECIAL NEEDS

Effective Co-Teaching for Students with Special Needs

Effective Co-Teaching for Students with Special Needs

Co-teaching, or having two teachers in classroom has become the popular teaching structure to provide an inclusive environment for special education students while ensuring that they are in least restrictive environment as recommended by IEP team . In kind of co-teaching that often have the general education teacher and the special education teacher in classroom. "Professionals can also work in this environment to provide additional support.

While co-learning, teachers intend to share responsibility for teaching in the classroom co-teaching, special education teacher, providing differentiated specialized teaching for students with special needs. In other words, special education teacher can be described as the strategist, taking standard lesson and teaching in the different way so that students with special needs can access learning requirements, along with other students in classroom.

Planning is essential in co-teaching classroom. As part of middle and high school, it is best that special education teacher and general education teacher have same planning time or can arrange to meet before or after school. During planning of days before opening of school, teachers must meet, discuss and agree on rules of class, consequences of breaking rules, format and structure of classroom lessons. Teachers need not only to discuss next lessons and curriculum, but it is necessary to agree on who will teach what and what style of co-teaching is used. Here are some types of co-teaching. following co-teaching models were developed by Marilyn Friend. They were presented to teachers in my system during the pre-conference planning.

Parallel teaching is the style in which teachers are teaching at same time. Classroom can be divided in half and the teacher teaches half of room, while other teaches second half. Therefore, they teach same lesson at the time. This style is ideal for large classes because students benefit from being in the smaller group.

Team teaching is one of best ways of teaching in classroom co-taught. When team teaching, teachers share responsibility for teaching and can act as the tag team. For example, teachers delivered lesson together. Any teacher can raise issues or "go" at any time. Teachers should bounce ideas off each other and ask questions together in this style.

Teaching the drift model should be used occasionally, but should not be used exclusively by students begin to see teachers being uneven in classroom. In this model, the teacher teaches lesson, while second teacher moves around classroom and helps students who need special attention. This model is similar to one teaching, one observes that second teacher can observe students during class and while working and document those observations to learn better how to teach students.

Station or educational institution is often used in primary schools, but it certainly can be used in configuration of middle and high school. Students work at stations or centers and co-teachers can take responsibility to teach and explain instructions of their assigned stations. Students benefit by working in ...