Three years ago, Juan arrived from the streets of Honduras to enroll at Field Elementary School in Littleton, Colorado. He spoke no English, had never attended school, and had no idea how to function in a classroom. Juan had trouble walking in a line of students and sitting still in the classroom, and he could not identify one letter name or sound. However, Juan did bring a wealth of experiences and a rich culture to share with his peers.
Andrea Scott, an English language development (ELD) teacher at Field Elementary, remembers how she initially felt about Juan being placed in a regular classroom when he entered his 4th grade year:
In the beginning, I balked. I argued about where Juan should be during the 4th grade reading lessons. Juan was reading at a kindergarten level! He couldn’t decode 4th grade texts and did not have enough English to participate in classroom discussions. I wanted to pull him out and rescue him.
In the past, students like Juan received language instruction in a pullout model, at times segregated from native-speaking peers. The emphasis was on basic interpersonal communicative skills and foundational reading skill instruction. This method of instruction seemed to serve students well, but the demographics at Field Elementary School have changed significantly in the last few years. Today, 61 percent of its population is Hispanic, 42 percent of students are English language learners (ELLs), and 81 percent qualify for free and reduced-price lunch.
This changing demographic contributed to a drop to “Improvement” status on the Colorado State Performance Framework. This was disheartening for Field, a school in a district that has been “Accredited with Distinction” for five years in a row. As the only school in the district on “Improvement” status, the Field Elementary community felt defeated and isolated.
But we didn’t stay discouraged for long. Instead, we became invested in the idea that by changing what we could control—our instructional practices—we could improve outcomes for our ELLs. District and building leadership, including teacher leaders, redesigned the instructional model at Field to include these priorities:
- Access to classroom instruction for every ELL 100 percent of the day.
- Co-teaching partnerships in which English language development (ELD) teachers and classroom teachers shared equal responsibility for all aspects of the instructional cycle.
- Specialized daily language instruction for ELLs integrated into reading and math.
With these ends in mind, the leadership team dove into the work of strategic planning. Co-teaching quickly revealed itself as the most effective, efficient way to maximize teacher and student growth.
The Co-Teaching Ideal
Co-teaching brings two educators with differing areas of expertise together to serve students for part or all of their school day. During the co-planning phase, each teacher typically has a specific role. For example, the ELD teacher might contribute knowledge and skills regarding language learners by identifying vocabulary barriers in the lesson, determining needed language scaffolds, and planning for meaningful speaking and listening opportunities. The classroom teacher’s role might be to determine the learning target, pacing of content, and alignment to standards.
As they co-teach the lesson, both teachers are actively engaged. As the lesson progresses, partners might decide, on the basis of formative assessment, to transition from the whole group to small groups, with each teacher taking responsibility for one or two groups. In effective co-teaching, the sense that all students are “our students” pervades every aspect of the instructional cycle.
Unfortunately, examples of poor co-teaching abound. Simply placing two educators together in a classroom does not result in effective co-teaching. When districts have tried this, many found that the classroom teacher ends up in charge while the ELD teacher is drastically underused, holding up the wall in the back waiting to help out or becoming a “kid whisperer” for the ELLs. To avoid this kind of situation, we needed to provide systematic, long-term professional learning activities for our co-teachers.
Our Learning Plan
To implement our new co-teaching plan, we designed professional learning activities organized in an I do, we do, you do, or gradual release, framework.
I Do
In the I do phase, we brought in experts to provide high-quality workshops on the basics of co-teaching. Facilitators modeled effective co-teaching and showed videos (such as the one at https://youtu.be/xOI5sPJFoDA) for co-teachers to analyze. After viewing videos and modeled examples, teachers commented, “Oh, that’s what it’s supposed to look like!” and “Now we have a clearer picture of what we’re trying to do.” These models were indispensable in developing a positive vision.
Because partners attended together, they could share expertise right from the start. When watching videos, ELD teachers were able to point out language barriers and scaffolds in the model lessons, while classroom teachers were able to draw attention to large-group management issues and content-driven strategies.
Partners also discussed their roles and responsibilities, how they would design lesson plans together, and which grouping practices might work best. We provided some guidance, while recognizing that each partnership might have unique features.
We Do
The we do phase, which spanned a two-year period, involved a variety of activities for co-teachers. Every co-teaching pair received extensive coaching from district ELD leadership, customized to meet team members’ specific needs. For instance, some ELD teachers needed to boost their strategies for academic vocabulary instruction, and some classroom teachers needed additional ideas for differentiation.
This phase also included side-by-side teaching, in which the coach would intervene during an observed lesson to demonstrate a language development strategy or participation structure.
You Do
As co-teachers became more confident, they were ready to embrace the you do phase. Initially, this phase focused on structured reflection. Partners were encouraged to examine their practices honestly and deeply and to communicate with each other about areas for growth. Reflections included questions like these:
- Do we have clearly defined roles that capitalize on our areas of expertise?
- Are there times when one of us is underused?
- How engaged are the students? Are we providing enough rigor?
- Are we maximizing our ELLs’ language development?
Co-teachers then began to visit one another’s classrooms and provide their peers with constructive feedback. These observations were especially powerful for one ELD teacher. After watching her colleagues, she realized that she needed to raise her expectations for ELLs’ participation in whole-group activities. Her next planning session with her co-teacher was rich with discussion about participation structures that would increase engagement. The very next week, she used a strategy called Blanket the Table. Each student had four scraps of paper. As a team, students brainstormed ideas and drew or wrote them on the scraps, covering their table as much as possible in the time provided and ensuring that every ELL contributed at least one idea.
Refining the Work
As the co-teaching initiative continued, two needs became vividly clear. First, partners needed more guidance in clarifying their new roles. Second, repeated coaching and practice was necessary to guarantee that lesson planning was truly scaffolded and differentiated for ELLs.
Role Clarification
Because ELD teachers were now delivering instruction to an entire classroom and not just a small group of ELLs, we needed to define their roles more clearly. Some classroom teachers struggled with sharing instructional time, releasing control, and seeing the value of their co-teacher. Some ELD teachers struggled with teaching a large group of students and integrating effective language instruction into their teaching. We had to get clear on what students needed.
Because of the significant level of poverty at Field Elementary, we knew that students had likely been exposed to less oral conversation in the home than students from wealthier backgrounds and thus had a significant gap in their vocabulary size. Whether students were native English speakers or not, the ELD teachers could help; they had a valuable set of skills they used to provide explicit instruction in the language of reading, writing, and mathematics to decrease this gap. Once this role was explicitly defined and the rationale clear, teachers were able to move forward in implementing co-teaching.
Now, observers in a Field Elementary co-taught classroom will see each teacher using his or her particular areas of expertise. Mrs. Oliver, an ELD teacher, might lead the class in a game to review important terms in their fractions unit. While she is leading, the classroom teacher might develop students’ content knowledge by jumping in with practice problems. As the game progresses, Mrs. Oliver will point out cognates or draw simple illustrations on the board to help students understand the meaning of numerator, denominator, half, quarter, whole, and so on. Mrs. Oliver’s role is distinctly that of language acquisition specialist, while her co-teaching partner is the content specialist.
Lesson Planning
When it became clear that ELD teachers needed to take the lead on the language components of instruction, the co-planning process shifted. We redesigned lesson plan forms to include prompts related to learning targets, academic language instruction, and participation structures.
For a 5th grade reading comprehension lesson with a target of “I can sequence key events from a story,” ELD teacher Andrea Scott identified crucial academic vocabulary words—sequence, main idea, plot, character—as well as vocabulary from the text students would read. She then taught students this new vocabulary with visuals, gestures, oral rehearsal, and kid-friendly synonyms. Classroom teacher Sally Moore, knowing students more thoroughly than Scott did, composed the student teams. Moore also printed sentence strips for these student teams to put in order and developed a computerized version of the exercise that was similar to a task from the PARCC test. The partners decided to use a Twister spinner to choose which teams would share their sequences, ensuring that everyone, including the ELLs, would be expected to share and justify their decisions.
Changing Lives
After just one year of implementing this model, Field Elementary School’s median student growth percentile moved from a rating of “Approaching” to “Exceeds,” the highest rating possible in Colorado. Teacher and principal surveys reported tremendous support for the model. Classroom teacher Sally Moore shared,
This is my 10th year at Field, and I finally feel like we’re reaching our ELL population, mostly because of the co-teaching model. My co-teacher brings scaffolds to the classroom that help all students be successful. I only wish we co-taught all day together!
Thanks to the rapid success at Field Elementary, co-teaching has now expanded to a districtwide model. Littleton Public Schools received the English Language Proficiency Act Excellence Award from the state education department in 2014, recognizing it as one of the top 10 ELD programs in Colorado.
A year later, ELD teacher Andrea Scott notes how school has changed for Juan:
It happened. In a classroom shared-reading lesson, Juan was called on to share his group’s thinking. I was worried that he was going to be silent and point to a friend for help. But this time and every time after that, he spoke up. I was floored by his knowledge, his poise, and his sincere comprehension of the 4th grade-level text. The scaffolds we had provided worked! He was doing the thinking of a 4th grader. That’s when it hit me; he had been a 4th grade thinker all along. He deserved to be doing this work alongside his classmates. By taking him away from the classroom as I had initially wanted, I would have starved him of these rich discussions and robbed him of grade-level content. This was the moment I realized co-teaching was where my work and energy needed to be focused as an ELD professional.
Because the Field Elementary staff invested in improving instructional practices and partnered together to engage in complicated work, ELLs like Juan now have a brighter future. And the practice of two teachers like Andrea and Sally is forever changed.
Copyright © 2016 Anne Beninghof and Mandy Leensvaart
