Collaborative Teaching

When I mention the word Collaborative Teaching and describe my teaching space that I share with 3 other teachers I am immediately told that i"t is exactly as it was 10+ years ago! ""Open Plan Classrooms are back!" or "I was taught in one of those." "The wall will be back up in a few years time." 

Collaborative teaching can be defined as “two or more people sharing responsibility for educating some or all of the students in a classroom” (Villa, Thousand and Nevin, 2008, p. 5). They suggest that it “involves the distribution of responsibility among people for planning, instruction and evaluation for a classroom of students (p. 5). As we move into modern open learning spaces teachers are once again examining how teaching collaboratively can impact on student learning and outcomes. I feel there is a little resistance towards collaborative practice, at times from the history of open-plan.

Villa, Thousand & Nevin (2008),  report four different models of co-teaching, (developed by the National Centre for Educational Restructuring and Inclusion, 1995). These are supportive, parallel, complementary and team teaching. 

Supportive teaching describes the situation when one teacher takes the lead instructional role and the other moves around the learners to provide support on a one-to-one basis as required. 

Parallel teaching is when two or more teachers are working with different groups of learners simultaneously in different parts of the classroom.

Complementary teaching is when “when co-teachers do something to enhance the instruction provided by the other co-teacher(s). For example, one co-teacher might paraphrase the other's statements or model note-taking skills on a transparency” (Nevin, Thousand, & Villa, 2007).

Team teaching by comparison is when two or more teachers do what teachers do for a class, to plan, teach, assess and take responsibility for all the students in the room, taking an equal share of responsibility, leadership and accountability.