Committing, engaging and negotiating: Stories of how teachers create shared spaces for co-teaching

Author(s):

Anna Rytivaara(presenting / submitting)Jonna Pulkkinen Catriona de Bruin

Conference:

ECER 2017

Network:

04. Inclusive Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

04 SES 08 B, Professional Collaboration in Inclusive Schools

Paper Session

Time:

2017-08-24

09:00-10:30

Room:

W6.16

Chair:

Carol-Ann O'Siorain

Contribution

For decades there has been considerable interest in collaborative teaching practices such as co-teaching. Since the international movement towards making schooling more inclusive for all, co-teaching been identified as one means of achieving this goal (UNESCO, 1994). While inclusion is generally understood as relating to the diverse learning needs of all students who may experience barriers in their learning (Deppeler, Forlin, Chambers, Sharma & Loreman, 2014; Florian & Spratt, 2013), research on co-teaching in relation to inclusion has tended to focus almost exclusively on students with disabilities and to define co-teaching as the pairing of an “expert” in general curriculum content with an “expert” in special educational practices for students with disabilities (Murawski & Swanston, 2001; Scruggs, Mastropieri & McDuffie, 2007; Shin, Lee & McKenna, 2016). This literature generally positions co-teaching as something that is done to others, and explores the effectiveness of co-teaching as an intervention for specific outcomes such as the school attendance or achievement of students with disabilities (Dieker & Murawski, 2003; Hattie, 2008; Solis, Vaughn, Swanson & Mcculley, 2012;), or the technical execution of co-teaching such as teacher preferences and frequency of engagement with specific models of practice (Saloviita & Takala, 2010; Takala, Pirttimaa & Törmänen, 2009).

By contrast, the wider literature on co-teaching focuses more on aspects of this practice as teacher professionalism. These works tend to explore the role of co-teaching in relation to teachers’ work, such as developing the skills of pre-service teachers (Kerin & Murphy, 2015; Roth & Tobin, 2001), or developing professional practices such as teacher reflection and professional learning (Gallo-Fox & Scantlebury, 2016; Rytivaara & Kershner, 2012). These approaches conceptualise co-teaching as teachers work that is done together to create a supportive environment for all, with benefits for all students and also the teachers themselves. While there exists some literature that considers the benefits of co-teaching for both students and teachers, such as that of Shaffer and Thomas-Brown (2015) these tend to remain focused on students with disabilities.

In this paper we thus seek to explore the practice of co-teaching in inclusive classrooms in Finland by considering teaching teams that include traditional pairings of special-regular teachers as well as others, and exploring how these were supportive for all. We use the Inclusive Pedagogical Approach in Action framework (IPAA) (Florian, 2014; Florian & Spratt, 2013) as a means of theorising our study, as the framework provides useful principles of good inclusive teaching practice for supporting all learners and for supporting effective teacher collaboration in the classroom. Our findings draw from a co-teaching study in which teachers worked together to better support the unique needs of all the students in their classrooms and to also support each other. The teaching teams comprised many pairings that included special education-regular education partnerships as well as others such early childhood and primary teams, and general education teams. Focussing on the nature and development of teacher partnerships we explore how successful co-teaching develops through teachers’ commitment and engagement in such collaborative professional practice. Our research questions are as follows: How do the teachers describe their co-teaching experiences? How do the teachers narrate the development of successful collaboration?

Method

Our study is part of a larger project which aims at developing different kind of support for all students. The Finnish basic education act seeks to provide all students with the support they need so that statements of special needs are needed less often. Co-teaching is one means of general support in a three-tiered support system of general, intensified and special support. Our project is funded by the Finnish national board of education. The participants were teachers from public schools who were recruited to take part in a nine-week intensive co-teaching exploration. The project funding made it possible to pay the teachers four hours of work a week for their co-planning and reporting, which was in addition to their regular working hours. The participants’ teaching experience varied from early-career teachers to those nearing retirement. The data for this paper comprise the interviews of the nine teacher teams of two or three teachers in pre-primary, in the first and second grade. The teachers were interviewed twice: once during the school visits in autumn and once later in the spring. We approach the interviews as teacher stories and analyse them accordingly (Clandinin & Connelly, 1996; Polkinghorne 1995; Riessmann 2008). We started the analysis by selecting the parts of the nine interviews where the teachers reflected on their mutual collaboration. Then we coded these stories in detail and organised the codes into themes. The commitment being the key element in successful collaboration, the data were organised into a larger story of the development of successful partnership between any two teachers regardless of their experience or training. These stories of partnership were then considered through the lens of the IPAA to understand whether and how these teachers decisions about their practice are consistent with an inclusive pedagogical approach.

Expected Outcomes

The findings show that teacher willingness to collaborate was a significant starting point for successful collaboration. The co-teaching experience played a major role in creating partnerships between the teachers, some of whom had not previously collaborated, or even known each other for long. The nine-week project supported teachers’ engagement in co-teaching, creating a temporal frame for getting to know each other. Successful co-teaching in the project was achieved by negotiating two fundamental characteristics: individual’s understanding of being a teacher; and an orientation toward co-teaching as either professional learning or student support. Where teachers shared these understandings, this strengthened the partnership, and resulted in a more unified approach in classroom practices such as classroom management The findings are presented through three examples drawn from the initial phase of the project. These examples illustrate that teachers’ orientation towards co-teaching exists on a continuum that runs between a rigid division of roles at one end, to creativity and improvisation in teaching roles at the other. At one end of this continuum, some teachers approached co-teaching as a series of lessons that comprised several parts, each of which was planned and allocated to a particular teacher. For example, during co-planning sessions these teachers decided lesson content and structure, and separated the planning of lesson sections accordingly. At the improvisatory end of the continuum, some teachers approached co-teaching as a more practical issue where things needed to get done and problems were solved creatively and collaboratively. Teachers between these extremes liked to plan their co-lessons very carefully; yet maintained some flexibility in the classroom roles. The teaching decisions demonstrating a more collaborative and creative manner were consistent with the principles of inclusive pedagogy. The implications of these findings for future research in inclusive pedagogy and teacher education are discussed.

References

Clandinin, D. J. & Connelly, F. M. (1996). Teachers' professional knowledge landscapes. Educational Researcher 25(3). Deppeler, J., Forlin, C., Chambers, D., Sharma, U., & Loreman, T. (2014). Conceptualising and measuring inclusive education. In T. Loreman & C. Forlin (Eds.), Measuring Inclusive Education (Vol. 3, pp. 3-17). UK: Emerald. Dieker, L. A., & Murawski, W. W. (2003). Co-teaching at the secondary level. The High School Journal, 86(4). Florian, L. (2014). What counts as evidence of inclusive education? European Journal of Special Needs Education, 29(3). Florian, L., & Spratt, J. (2013). Enacting inclusion: A framework for interrogating inclusive practice. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 28(2). Gallo-Fox, J., & Scantlebury, K. (2015). “It isn’t necessarily sunshine and daisies every time”: co-planning opportunities and challenges when student teaching. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 43(4). Hattie, J. (2008). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge. Kerin, M., & Murphy, C. (2015). Exploring the impact of co-teaching on pre-service music teachers. Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education, 43(4). Murawski, W. W., & Swanson, H. L. (2001). A meta-analysis of co-teaching research. Remedial and Special Education, 22(5). Polkinghorne, D. E. (1995). Narrative configuration in qualitative analysis. In J. A. Hatch, & R. Wisniewski (Eds.), Life history and narrative (pp. 5–23). London: Falmer. Riessman, C.K. (2008) Narrative Methods for the Human Sciences. Sage. Roth, W. M., & Tobin, K. (2001). Learning to teach science as practice. TATE, 17(6). Rytivaara, A., & Kershner, R. (2012). Co-teaching as a context for teachers' professional learning and joint knowledge construction. TATE, 28(7), 999-1008. Saloviita, T., & Takala, M. (2010). Frequency of co-teaching in different teacher categories. European Journal of Special Needs Education, 25(4). Scruggs, T. E., Mastropieri, M. A., & McDuffie, K. A. (2007). Co-teaching in inclusive classrooms: A metasynthesis of qualitative research. Exceptional Children, 73(4). Shaffer, L., & Thomas-Brown, K. (2015). Enhancing Teacher Competency through Co-Teaching and Embedded Professional Development. Journal of Education and Training Studies, 3(3). Shin, M., Lee, H., & McKenna, J. W. (2016). Special education and general education preservice teachers’ co-teaching experiences: A comparative synthesis of qualitative research. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 20(1). Solis, M., Vaughn, S., Swanson, E., & Mcculley, L. (2012). Collaborative models of instruction. Psychology in the Schools, 49(5). Takala, M., Pirttimaa, R., & Törmänen, M. (2009). Inclusive special education: the role of special education teachers in Finland. BJSE, 36(3). UNESCO. (1994). The Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action.

Author Information

Anna Rytivaara (presenting / submitting)

University of Tampere

Faculty of Education

University of Tampere

Jonna Pulkkinen

University of Jyvaskyla

Finnish Institute for Educational Research

University of Jyvaskyla

Catriona de Bruin

Monash University

Berwick

Search the ECER Programme

Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
Search for authors and in the respective field.
For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.