“The most important single factor for the quality of education and thus for the efficiency and quality of the pupils’ learning is the quality of the teachers’ training.”

(Qvortrup, 2008)

A key European Commission priority for teacher education to achieve high quality in teacher education is to establish and maintain

“close links between teacher education institutions and schools (with a two-way flow of expertise and knowledge on learning and teaching) “

 (European Commission, 2014)

This session addresses the above EC priority, and presents 15-years’ work on coteaching research and practice, in which teacher education institutes and schools share expertise in optimizing the learning environment for preservice and inservice teachers. The work addresses the ECER 2016 theme: “Leading Education: The Distinct Contributions of Educational Research and Researchers”in that coteaching research is interdisciplinary, spanning sociological, psychological and philosophical perspectives, links theory and practice and promotes innovative practice in schools and universities. Papers in this session discuss coteaching in primary, secondary and tertiary education.The papers consider coteaching from a sociocultural theoretical framework, embracing neo-Vygotskian learning theory and communities of practice.

Extensive research has documented the effectiveness of coteaching as a way to enhance the experience of pre-service and in-service teachers, as well as highlighting areas of contradiction and how these have informed more recent developments in coteaching. Coteachers collaborate on all aspects of instruction: they plan teach and evaluate lessons together. Coteaching encourages teachers to learn from one another before, during and after enacting their planned curriculum. It differs from traditional pre-service teaching in that it fosters equity between the coteaching preservice and inservice partners by promoting mutual learning. Evidence shows that coteaching has a positive impact on pupils’ achievement, interest and engagement in school, and on teachers, pre-service teachers and teacher educators in terms of enhancing professional development and deepening reflection on practice. Research indicates that reasons for the positive impact of coteaching centre on the opportunities it affords to expand the agency of all participants to improve their contribution to both teaching and learning.

The first paper presents and critiques a model for supporting coteaching from the early stages to ‘mature’ coteaching, based on a neo-Vygotskian framework for social transformation. The stages move from coteaching as participation to coteaching as shared contribution, in which the coteaching synergy creates new practice via shared expertise. Initial findings identified constraints within the participation phase, based partly on differing philosophies of music education.

The second paper explores a specific aspect of copractice in primary and secondary-level classrooms, whereby coteachers utilise ‘huddles’ - short, focused meetings during the lesson, to discuss a necessary shift or adaptation to planned instruction. Findings highlight the importance of huddling to re-direct instruction, and provide support to preservice teachers by suggesting alternative pedagogical strategies, examples and analogies to explain concepts, or to monitor classroom management.

The third paper analyses the Vygotskian concept of the ‘ideal’ and applies it in all phases of coteaching. Coteachers co-construct their ideas of ideal practice in terms of pupil learning in planning, and test this in classroom practice. They reflect on how far their coteaching realised ideal practice. Findings showed that envisaging the ideal took their coteaching to higher levels than using more pragmatic approaches to coteaching.

The fourth paper presents a study of coteaching between teachers of different subject areas, namely music and drama, to address issues of separation between these areas in a third-level aesthetic methods course. Initial findings using grounded theory approaches identified three key patterns in the data: creativity as a problem solver, synergies in subjects parallels and differences as resources for joint learning. 

Qvortrup, L. (2008). The First Global Education Forum. Teacher Education Quarterly, 01, 2. European Commission (2014). Initial teacher education in Europe: an overview of policy issues. Brussels: EC.