Internationally, many countries continue to face challenges in ensuring inclusive school environments that support the engagement and educational success of newly arrived migrant students (OECD, 2019; Schachner et al., 2018). Early support in learning the language of instruction can improve learning outcomes and well-being; however, teachers feel they lack the necessary professional skills to support migrant students (Alisaari et al., 2022; Volknant & Licandro, 2024), or only seldom utilize co-teaching to develop this expertise (Taajamo et al., 2025; OECD, 2025). In culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms, versatile instruction and collaboration among teachers with varied professional backgrounds can enhance teaching effectiveness (Dooly & Llompart Esbert, 2025; Sing & Jeannin, 2018). Although co-teaching approaches have been commonly applied to teaching students with special needs (see e.g. Friend & Cook, 1993; Barron & Friend, 2024), their potential to support the engagement of newly arrived students remains largely unexplored. As robust experimental designs are still needed to examine co-teaching’s impact (see De Weerdt et al., 2025), in this presentation, a co-teaching intervention is carried out to examine co-teaching's effectiveness in supporting newly arrived students’ lesson engagement.

With increasing migration, newly arrived students face additional educational transitions, such as changing school levels or programs, which are critical points for student engagement and well-being (Singh et al., 2022). For migrant students, transitions propose simultaneous challenges with both building new social networks and learning the increasingly complex language of schooling. In Finland, these transition processes are particularly salient as a growing number of migrant students enter the education system through preparatory education (prep-ed) (Vipunen, 2025). In prep-ed, new arrival youth focus on learning the language of instruction during their first academic year, and from there, they gradually transition to lower secondary school (Finnish National Agency for Education, 2015). Supporting this transition requires providing lower secondary level subject teachers with resources for linguistically and culturally inclusive pedagogy. This support is essential for promoting positive engagement as they invite newly arrived students into their classrooms.

Students’ engagement at school emerges gradually, from one lesson to the next. Lesson engagement highlights a distinct contextual dimension of student engagement by capturing how engaged students are in specific learning situations (Pöysä, 2020). Similarly to the overall student engagement, lesson engagement can also be seen as a tripartite construct with affective, behavioral and cognitive aspects of engagement (see Appleton et al., 2008; Fredricks et al., 2004). Considering the highly malleable nature of lesson engagement, teacher collaboration has the potential to increase teaching efficacy (Sasson & Malkinson, 2021; Satterlee Vizenor & Matuska, 2018) thereby fostering increased lesson engagement among new arrivals. Previously, the lesson engagement of mainstream students has been connected to the subject being studied (e.g., Vasalampi et al., 2021), time of lesson (e.g. Martin et al., 2015), types of learning activities (Heemskerk & Malmberg, 2020), teachers’ emotions (Pöysä et al., 2025), classroom organization (Pöysä et al., 2019), and emotional support from teachers (Pöysä et al., 2018; Pöysä et al. 2019). Against this backdrop, co-teaching offers a promising instructional structure through which teachers can enhance these dimensions of instruction,yet its potential for supporting newly arrived students’ lesson engagement has remained unexplored. To address this gap, the present study conducts a co‑teaching intervention in which prep‑ed and subject teachers collaborate to deliver high‑quality instruction for newly arrived students. The study is guided by the following research question: How does students’ affective, cognitive, and behavioral lesson engagement vary by teachers’ quality of collaboration during lessons?

This study implements a quasi-experimental design, where a co-teaching intervention is carried out for lower-secondary level prep-ed and subject teachers from autumn 2025 to early spring 2026. First, subject teachers participate in a 2-hour research-based (e.g. Teemant, 2018) workshop focusing on co-teaching and providing high-quality instruction for culturally and linguistically diverse students led by the researchers. As the intervention period begins, one group of approximately 20 newly arrived 12–16-year-old students attend both regular (control) and co-taught (treatment) lessons. Students report their lesson engagement immediately after each lesson with the InSitu-instrument (Vasalampi et al., 2016). Answers to the questions are given on a four-point scale from not at all to very much. During the same lessons, researchers observe the teachers’ collaboration. Furthermore, information on students’ demographics, and teacher reports on student school absences and school readiness are gathered with a separate questionnaire. Translations of all the surveys will be provided to ensure participants’ understanding. Co-teaching practices are observed utilizing an adapted version of Rogers’ (2016) Classroom observation instrument for implementation of co-teaching practices (CTOI). The instrument’s conceptualization of co-teaching includes four dimensions: classroom interaction, classroom management, instructional strategies, and instructional roles. These dimensions have been reducted to include five observable items in each sub-category with a rating scale from 0–5. At least 20 percent of the lessons will be rated by two researchers who have been trained in the use of the instrument and who have independently demonstrated an adequate level of inter-rater agreement. These ratings will be applied in the analysis to account for the prep-ed and subject teachers’ quality of collaboration. For the analysis, Multilevel Latent Growth Curve Model (Muthén, 1997) is implemented to examine changes in lesson engagement over time. First, confirmatory factor analysis is applied for assessing the InSitu-survey’s accuracy within this sample. Then, the latent growth components, intercept and slope, are specified at level 2 to represent between-student differences in initial lesson engagement and rates of change. At level 1, between lessons, the quality of collaboration is included as a continuous time-varying predictor to assess experimental effects. Student background variables are incorporated as covariates to control for level 2 individual differences. With covariates of student background information accounted for, initial rates of lesson engagement and change based on the quality of teacher collaboration can be determined.

Preliminary analysis of student background information suggests the participants’ mean age of 14.33 years (SD=0.77). The group of students differ highly on their schooling history with the mean of 6.06 years and standard deviation of 3.24 years, but their teacher’s assessment of school readiness mean of 2.33 out of 4 (SD=0.84) indicates relatively satisfactory academic abilities. Regarding transitioning to lower secondary school, this group of students enter lessons taught by subject teachers with varying prior educational opportunities and knowledge. Descriptive analysis of preliminary level 2 data from 21 measure points, from two separate co-taught (but not rated) lessons, suggests relatively high lesson engagement in all three sub-categories. High affective (M=3.76, SD=0.92) and especially behavioural (M=3.90, SD=0.92) lesson engagement indicate students finding the lessons enjoyable and putting effort into fulfilling teachers’ behavioural expectations. Cognitive lesson engagement values (M=3.45, SD=0.89) indicate more difficulties with students being well-prepared for the lessons or working persistently to achieve learning goals. The three level 2 lesson engagement variables showed strong associations with one another (r=.62–.84). These tentative results illustrate the need to focus on individualized instructional support during the co-teaching intervention. The results of this study will allow for determining the effects of co-teaching on newly arrived students’ lesson engagement. These results can be utilized when planning support for the transition phase, as lower cognitive engagement underscores the need for scaffolding to build academic readiness and sustained effort. With the information from lesson observations, best practices for co-teaching new arrivals can be described. Taken together, these results provide emerging evidence on how co-teaching structures can enhance lesson engagement and equity during educational transitions. Analyzing the full dataset will enable us to more accurately trace engagement patterns over time and determine which instructional approaches most effectively promote new arrivals’ lesson engagement.

Appleton, J. J., Christenson, S. L., & Furlong, M. J. (2008). Student engagement with school: Critical conceptual and methodological issues of the construct. Psychology in the Schools, 45(5), 369–386. https://doi.org/10.1002/pits.20303 Barron, T., & Friend, M. (2024). Co-Teaching: Are We There Yet? Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 35(2), 193–218. https://doi.org/10.1080/10474412.2024.2422895 De Weerdt, D., Simons, M., Struyf, E., & Tack, H. (2025). Studying the Effectiveness of Team Teaching: A Systematic Review on the Conceptual and Methodological Credibility of Experimental Studies. Review of educational research, 95(5), 1053-1098. https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543241262807 Dooly, M., & Llompart Esbert, J. (2025). ‘I have felt happiness’. A detailed look at co-teacher development for plurilingual and inclusive teaching and learning. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2025.2529549 Muthén, B. (1997). 10. Latent variable modeling of longitudinal and multilevel data. Sociological methodology, 27(1), 453–480. OECD (2025). Results from TALIS 2024: The state of teaching. TALIS, OECD Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1787/90df6235-en Pöysä, S. (2020). Students' lesson engagement in lower secondary school: Association with overall engagement and contextual factors (Doctoral dissertation, University of Jyväskylä). JYX Digital Archive. https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-951-39-8382-6 Rogers, A. (2016). Development and validation of a classroom observation instrument for implementation of co-teaching practices (Doctoral dissertation, Liberty University). Liberty University DigitalCommons. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/doctoral/1221 Satterlee Vizenor, A., & Matuska, J. (2018). Actualizing characteristics of successful schools for young adolescents through co-teaching. Middle school journal, 49(3), 17-25. https://doi.org/10.1080/00940771.2018.1439666 Schachner, M. K., Juang, L., Moffitt, U., & van de Vijver, F. J. R. (2018). Schools as Acculturative and Developmental Contexts for Youth of Immigrant and Refugee Background. European psychologist, 23(1), 44–56. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000312 Singh, S. S., Proyer, M. & Jovanović, O. (2022). Perspectives on Transitions in Refugee Education: Ruptures, Passages, and Re-Orientations. Verlag Barbara Budrich. Teemant, A. (2018). Sociocultural Theory as Everyday Practice: The Challenge of K-12 Teacher Preparation for Multilingual and Multicultural Learners. In J. Lantolf, M. Poehner & M. Swain (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Development (pp. 529−550). New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315624747-33 Vasalampi, K., Muotka, J., Pöysä, S., Lerkkanen, M., Poikkeus, A., & Nurmi, J. (2016). Assessment of students' situation-specific classroom engagement by an InSitu Instrument. Learning and Individual Differences, 52, 46–52. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lindif.2016.10.009 Volknant, S., & Licandro, U. (2024). Preparing Teachers for Linguistically Diverse Classrooms—A Systematic Review on Interventions and Intersectional Perspectives. Education Sciences, 14(8), 846.