Coteaching provides a clinical field experience that strengthens student teachers' growth competence, flattens the hierarchy of the coteaching triad (student teacher, cooperating teacher, university field instructor (UFT)), and expands opportunities for coteachers to explicate their thinking and decision-making. Heretofore coteaching models in preservice teacher education have not restructured evaluation of the implemented teaching from an assessment of student teacher’s expertise to a focus on the contribution of all participants to pupil learning. The paper introduces the concept of coevaluation to structure formal and informal discussions of how pedagogical practice impacts pupil learning during the student teaching.

Research Questions

When does coevaluation take place in a coteaching model? What are the characteristics of coevaluation? In what ways to student teachers, cooperating teachers, and UFT’s participate in coevaluation conversations? 

In a traditional approach to student teaching clinical educators and university instructors are placed in positions of power using panoptic surveillance to assess and to judge a teacher candidate’s pedagogical skills. In such models, the UFT’s emphasis is on the teacher candidate’s growth by supporting the candidate and the clinical educator (See Figure 1). Coteaching has the three stakeholders collectively assuming coresponsibility for teaching and pupil learning. This role re-structuring shifts stakeholders’ metacognitive work within the clinical field experience from a focus on teacher candidate learning toward a shared focus on pupil learning and the evaluation of the teaching to support that learning (Authors, 2015).  These evaluative discussion is also professional development for clinical educators.

Coteaching foregrounds the importance of frequent collaborative, professional discussions and recognizes clinical educators’ subject area knowledge and knowledge about teaching.  While the use of coteaching in preparing teacher candidates is well established, the next phase is to restructure coteaching’s evaluation practices, experiences, and instruments. In the initial phase of coteaching, clinical educators have ‘abandoned’ the panoptic surveillance of teacher candidates in favor of working ‘at the elbow’ of another (Roth & Tobin, 2002), and articulating the important facets of teaching and discussing how to improve and to optimize pupils’ learning.  However, teacher education programs have failed to address evaluating coteaching and have continued to use traditional evaluation criteria.  The disconnect regarding teaching evaluation arises because clinical educators’ role in teacher education changes when they are engaged in a coteaching model. As coteachers they share the responsibility of planning, implementing and evaluating the curriculum with the teacher candidates, but heretofore the roles have not been re-structured to include the evaluation of coteaching, their role as coteachers and the practice of coteaching. Additionally, the field experience instructors’ role is restructured to optimize pupil learning and abandon the panoptic view in teaching evaluation to become another instructional resource.

This research is focused on restructuring teacher candidates’ evaluation from a ‘surveillance’ model through disrupting the boundaries between teacher candidates, clinical educators and university instructors by arranging that all stakeholders shared responsibility in evaluating the assessment of teacher candidates (and by inference) clinical teachers’ pedagogical choices in curriculum, enactment of that curriculum and pupil assessment.   

Coevaluation is one facet in developing teacher candidates’ and clinical educators’ adaptive teaching practices by discussions that focus on teachers providing rationale and justification for their teaching decisions. Coevaluations are a form of cogenerative dialogue. Cogenerative dialogues (cogens) are a structure for participants to engage in reflective practice on teaching and learning.  Initially, cogens consisted of pupils and their teacher(s) focusing on how to improve science teaching and learning (Authors, 2013). Cogens that are implemented in conjunction with coteaching and are open discussions where all participants’ opinions and voices have equal value (Martin, 2009). These discussions can become formal evaluation of coteaching implementation.

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