Coteaching for Content Understanding: A Schoolwide Model

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Coteaching for Content Understanding: A SchoolwideModelCatherine Cobb Morocco & Cynthia Mata AguilarVersion of record first published: 10 Nov 2009.

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Coteaching forContent Understanding:

A Schoolwide Model

Catherine Cobb Morocco and Cynthia Mata AguilarEducation Development Center, Inc.

This article describes a promising form of professional collaboration:coteaching between a content area teacher and a special education teacher. Inan investigation of a schoolwide coteaching model in an urban middle schoolthat places students with disabilities in heterogeneous classrooms, research-ers interviewed key school leaders and made detailed observations ofcoteaching. The study found that although content teachers conduct more ofthe instruction and special education teachers provide more individualizedassistance, both use a full range of instructional roles. Essential to the successof coteaching partnerships were collaborative school structures, equal statusrules for teachers, a commitment to all students’ learning, and strong contentknowledge.

A persistent theme of school reform literature over the past 20 years hasbeen the need for teachers to shift from working as isolated practitioners toworking as colleagues. Teachers need to coordinate different kinds of ex-pertise if students are to learn rigorous academic content that reflects cur-riculum reforms and higher standards (Morocco & Solomon, 1999). In-structional content can be considered rigorous or authentic when itrequires students to engage in constructing knowledge, focuses on infor-mation and concepts identified as important in a subject area, and engagesthem in issues relevant beyond school (Louis, Marks, & Kruse, 1996;Newmann & Wehlage, 1995). Given the diversity of student backgrounds

JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONSULTATION, 13(4), 315–347Copyright © 2002, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Correspondence should be addressed to Catherine Cobb Morocco or Cynthia MataAguilar, Education Development Center, Inc., 55 Chapel Street, Newton, MA 02458–1060. E-mail: [email protected] or [email protected]

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and academic needs in our schools, as well as the movement to include stu-dents with disabilities in the general education curriculum and classroom,teachers need one another’s professional support more than ever.

One of the most promising and intricate forms of collaboration in sup-port of diverse learners to emerge in recent years is cooperative teachingbetween a content teacher and a special education teacher. Coteaching is de-fined as “a restructuring of teaching procedures in which two or more edu-cators possessing distinct sets of skills work in a coordinated fashion tojointly teach academically and behaviorally heterogeneous groups of stu-dents in an integrated educational setting” (Bauwens & Hourcade, 1995, p.46). Coteaching is of particular interest to schools that aspire to become ex-emplary in providing all students the academic support they need to besuccessful.

In their study of coteaching in high schools, Rice and Zigmond (2000)listed three criteria for a professional coteaching relationship: (a) two qual-ified teachers, one of whom is a special education teacher, share the sameclassroom and students; (b) the teachers share responsibility for planningand teaching an academically diverse class that includes both studentswith disabilities and typically achieving students; and (c) both teachers de-liver substantive instruction. Table 1 summarizes several possible class-room coteaching structures identified in the research literature. In all ofthese structures, teachers have differentiated roles yet equal status in theeyes of students and other teachers, and both teachers contribute directlyto students’ intellectual participation and progress. The “alternate leadingand supporting” structure looks the most like the traditional hierarchicalmodel in which the content teacher takes the lead in substantive instruc-tion, and the special education teacher helps by managing instruction andbehavior and serving as an assistant. Yet, in this arrangement, the twoteachers shift between those roles. Each of these structures may reflect con-siderable variation in practice, and experienced coteachers tend to shiftamong them even within the same lesson, depending on the demands ofthe content and students’ individual learning needs.

Coteaching research has only begun to study the impact of coteachingstructures on students’ academic learning (Bauwens, Hourcade, & Friend,1989; Cook & Friend, 1995; Dieker, 2001; Fennick, 2001; Fennick & Liddy,2001; Rice & Zigmond, 2000; Vaughn, Schumm, & Arguelles, 1997;Zigmond & Magiera, 2001). In a comprehensive study of inclusion in 18 el-ementary and 7 middle schools, Walther-Thomas (1997) found that thelower student–teacher ratio that resulted from the presence of coteachersin normal-sized classrooms led to strong academic progress and enhancedstudent self-confidence. A meta-analysis of six coteaching studies

316 COBB MOROCCO AND MATA AGUILAR

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(Murawski & Swanson, 2001) found that coteaching was a moderately ef-fective procedure for influencing student outcomes and that it had thegreatest impact on achievement in the areas of reading and language arts.

Although current research points to the promise of coteaching for en-hancing student learning, it provides limited information about whetherthe classroom coteaching structures such as those in Table 1 tend to takeplace individually or appear together in classrooms, and what kind of or-ganizational support coteaching requires. Most current research focuseson individual classrooms rather than schoolwide models. The research re-flects current practice, because coteaching tends to be implemented piece-meal by a few innovative teachers rather than as a whole-school practice(Murawski & Swanson, 2001; Walther-Thomas, 1997).

Schoolwide models are likely to embrace a broader concept ofcoteaching that links classroom teaching arrangements with a wider arrayof instructional roles beyond the classroom. The reference to planning inRice and Zigmond’s (2000) second criterion points to the presence of otherdimensions of coteaching besides in-class teaching. Collaborative prac-tices that are associated with effective coteaching and extend beyond the

COTEACHING FOR CONTENT UNDERSTANDING 317

TABLE 1Professional Coteaching Structures

Structure Definition

Alternate leading andsupporting

One teacher provides the main instruction and the other monitorsand assists; then the teachers change roles. At any one time, thelead teacher may be the content or special education teacher.

Station teacher Teachers set up tasks in different parts of the room and serve asthe teacher/facilitator at different stations, each of which is rele-vant to the lesson. Heterogeneous groups of students may ro-tate among the stations.

Parallel teaching Coteachers plan a lesson together and then divide the class intotwo heterogeneous groups. They teach the same material, butmay use different approaches.

Flexible grouping Teachers divide students into subgroups based on their skill levelor need for re-teaching. One group may work independently.

Alternate teaching One teacher teaches the large group, while the other teaches orre-teaches content or skills to a small group. Teachers may re-group students and may alternate roles in teaching the largeand small groups.

Team teaching Two teachers provide instruction to the entire class. They hand offthe instructional lead to one another across and within activitiesand may intervene during the other’s conversation turn to ex-plain or elaborate the content to students.

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immediate classroom include assessing student work (Allen, Blythe, &Powell, 1996; DiGisi, 1999), curriculum planning and design (Swiderek,1997; Tanner, 1996; Walther-Thomas, Bryant, & Land, 1996), and monitor-ing students’ progress (Coben, Thomas, Sattler, & Morsink, 1997; Hobbs &Westling, 1998; Janney, Snell, Beers, & Raynes, 1995).

Collaborative practices associated with coteaching require organizationalsupport. Walther-Thomas (1997) identified two organizational structures thatpromote schoolwide coteaching—interdisciplinary teaming andheterogeneous grouping. Interdisciplinary teams, particularly at the middleschool level, share a group of students and ideally take responsibility for thecurriculum, instruction, and evaluation for their group (Alexander & George,1981; Arhar, 1992; Legters, 1999; Zorfass, 1999). If coteaching is to result inpositive academic learning, other organizational supports for coteaching mayneed to include the following:

• Consistent, protected meeting time for coteachers to coordinate theirclassroom work (Bauwens, Hourcade, & Friend, 1989).

• Practices that enable the coteaching pair to get to know their studentswell and thus anticipate their academic support needs—for example, advi-sories (i.e., a mentoring relationship between a teacher and a small numberof students; Little & Dacus, 1999) and “looping” (i.e., students staying in ateam over two years or more; MacIver & Epstein, 1991).

• Schoolwide commitment to a rigorous academic curriculum(Jorgensen, 1995; Redditt, 1991).

• Active participation of parents in students’ academic learning (Field,LeRoy, & Rivera, 1994; Lipsky, 1994; Redditt, 1991).

One limitation of current research is that it mainly provides informa-tion about coteaching in elementary grades. Zigmond (2001) found that“except for a single study by Boudah, Schumaker, and Deshler (1997),which showed a slight decrease in test and quiz scores for students withdisabilities in cotaught classrooms, there has been virtually no study ofcoteaching at the secondary school level, despite its widespread adop-tion” (p. 71). Boudah et al. (1997) pointed out the need for coteaching re-search at the secondary level, where an older student population,increasing curriculum demands, and resource and scheduling con-straints directly impact programs. The absence of research on coteachingis echoed in the middle grades and is surprising given the thrust towardboth teacher and student collaboration in the middle-grades reformmovement (Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, 1989) and theextensive literature on the benefits of interdisciplinary teaming and clus-


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tering (Gable, Hendrickson, & Rogan, 1996; Gable & Manning, 1997;Howell, 1991; White & White, 1992). Further, we need to know whetherthis collaborative practice is effective in the large and increasingly cultur-ally diverse middle schools in both urban and suburban communities inour country.

Another limitation is that we have little knowledge of what thesecoteaching arrangements look like in action or how teachers negotiate thedemands of the subject matter and their students’ needs. To understandand implement schoolwide coteaching, teachers and administrators needto know how the collaboration works “on the ground.” We need to under-stand the extent to which the special education and content teachers differ-entiate their roles, and whether coteaching pairs across a schooldifferentiate their roles in the same ways. Weiss and Brigham (2000) calledfor data that provide microlevel examples of the roles played by the twoteachers and the interplay of those roles during teaching. Given the IDEA1997 mandate to include students with disabilities in the standards-basedgeneral education curriculum and, to the extent appropriate, in general ed-ucation classrooms, we need to better understand how collaboratingteachers can engage students with disabilities in rigorous content that re-quires higher level thinking.

PURPOSE OF THE ANALYSIS

This article responds to the need for research on schoolwide coteachingmodels in the middle grades and for “close-up” data on the classroomcoteaching process in rigorous learning situations. It addresses the follow-ing research questions:

1. What is the school’s vision and model of coteaching? How has theschool put that model into practice?

2. What coteaching roles do teachers use in their classroom instruc-tion? How do those roles vary across pairs and teams?

3. How can coteaching engage students in understanding rigorouscontent? Given the current mandate to include all students in stan-dards-based instruction, we wanted to understand how coteachingmight provide academic support within a challenging curriculum.

The investigation examined these three questions in a low-income,culturally diverse middle school that instituted a model of inclusionand coteaching in 1995, then modified that model and brought it


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schoolwide over the next 3 years. These questions require diverse datagathering methods. We draw mainly on interview and classroom ob-servation data to present this coteaching model and describe howteachers implemented it across three interdisciplinary teams. Bothclassroom and organizational structures are a part of putting the vi-sion into practice.

This coteaching research is part of a larger study of three urban mid-dle schools in the Beacons of Excellence project funded by the U.S. De-partment of Education, Office of Special Education Programs. The goalof Education Development Center, Inc.’s (EDC) Beacons of Excellenceproject was to identify three urban middle schools that were makingrigorous content learning accessible to their low-income, culturally di-verse students, including students with disabilities, and achieving posi-tive results on high-stakes tests (Aguilar & Morocco, 2000; Morocco,Clark-Chiarelli, Aguilar, & Brigham, 2002). We selected the threeschools through a national nomination and application process, usingselection criteria that included dimensions of effective middle schoolsidentified by the middle-grades reform movement: academic excel-lence, social equity, and developmental responsiveness (Lipsitz, Mizell,Jackson, & Austin, 1997). A fourth criterion was that schools includedstudents with disabilities in heterogeneous general education class-rooms. From 40 applicants, we selected three urban, high-performing,inclusive middle schools, located in the South, the Midwest, and theEastern seaboard.

This article focuses on the Beacons school in the South, particularly thecoteaching approach that was well established in the school by the timeof the study. A feature of the school that stood out in the original selectionprocess was its integration of an inclusiveapproach—coteaching—within a larger middle-grades reform approachinvolving interdisciplinary teaming. Unique in many respects, thisschool is also representative of the cultural and linguistic variation ofmany middle schools, with its strong migrant population, new Latinoimmigrants, and high percentage of students identified as having specialneeds. The article draws on observations of the process of coteaching inthree interdisciplinary teams at three grades levels in this Beacons school.Our goal was to understand how teachers engaged in coteaching withinand across their interdisciplinary teams, and whether and how they usedthis collaborative practice to assist students, including those withlearning difficulties, in rigorous learning activities to build theirunderstanding of important information and concepts in the majorsubject areas.


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METHOD

School Setting

Dolphin Middle School is located in a large mixed-income county in thesouthern part of the United States. The school was established in 1994–1995as a reconfiguration of a K–8 education center founded in 1992. The formerprincipal of the K–8 school took on the role of principal in the new middleschool. Having researched middle-grades reform literature and instruc-tional approaches for young adolescents, he established the school on amiddle-grades model. Students in Grades 6, 7, and 8 are organized into“houses” with interdisciplinary teams. Most teams “loop” (i.e., continuewith the same students through seventh and eighth grade).

During the period that the Beacons study took place, the Dolphin studentpopulation underwent a change. In spring 1998, when the Beacon Project staffconducted a first site visit to Dolphin as a part of our final selection process,the school was culturally, linguistically, and academically diverse. Of the ap-proximately 540 students in the school, 64% were White students, 23% wereHispanic students, and 12% were Black students (including African Ameri-can and Haitian students). Students receiving a free or reduced-price lunchtotaled 57.7%. A total of 20% were students with special needs on individualeducation plans, and approximately 20% were members of migrant families.

In fall 1998, when we gathered our data on coteaching in the classroom,the school was undergoing a major transition. Many parents from an afflu-ent White neighborhood had just opened a local charter school, which re-sulted in the withdrawal of 90% of the White sixth and seventh graders fromthe middle school. At the same time, the number of entering Black students,including recent immigrants from Cape Verde and Haiti as well as studentsof African American descent, increased so that the student population be-came 54% Hispanic, 30% White, and 15% Black. Students receiving a free orreduced-price lunch increased to 87% and, as a result, Dolphin became eligi-ble for Title I funds, which are provided to low-income schools to supple-ment instructional support for students. By 1999, our most recent figures,27% of Dolphin students spoke English as a second language and 23% werechildren of agricultural workers.

Participants

This article focuses on 11 teachers whom we observed in coteaching rela-tionships in 1998–1999. Table 2 provides information on their teaching ex-


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perience. All of the teachers were relatively new to teaching. The Dolphinteachers were members of the sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade teams, andrepresent three of the four heterogeneous teams in the school. None of theseteams designated “honors” students or classes, and all teachers includedstudents with mild to moderate disabilities in their classrooms. A fourthgroup of teachers was not functioning actively as a team at that point andtherefore was not engaged in coteaching. A fifth group of teachers in theschool worked solely with English for speakers of other languages (ESOL)students, who were mainly Latino students learning English as a secondlanguage. We did not include this team in the study because the classroomswere not heterogeneous (all were ESOL students), and teachers were notusing a coteaching model.

The project also included key administrators in the school, including thefounding principal, who was previously head of the K–8 school; the assis-tant principal, who brought a strong background in special education; andtwo teachers whom we observed in the fall 1998 in coteaching relation-ships and were promoted to deans of students in spring 1999. One of thoseteachers was the seventh-grade special education teacher (1-SE in Table 2)in fall 1998; the other was the eighth-grade geography teacher at that time(3-G in Table 2). All of these administrators played key roles in developingthe school’s approach to coteaching.


TABLE 2Teachers’ Years of Experience

Teacher CodesTotal Years Teaching

Experience in 1998–1999Total Years Teaching atDolphin Middle School

Team 11-SE Special education 3 31-M Mathematics 4 41-G Geography 4 4

Team 22-SE Special education 5 42-G Geography 5 42-S Science 3 32-LA Language arts < 1 < 1

Team 33-SE Special education 4 33-G Geography 4 43-LA Language arts 5 43-M Mathematics 5 4

Note. Teacher 2-LA left before completing a full year at Dolphin.

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Data Sources

The first two research questions call for two different kinds of data andanalyses. Administrator interviews are an appropriate method for under-standing the school leaders’ vision, and how they created and imple-mented their model (Question 1), while classroom observations ofcoteaching are appropriate for investigating coteaching roles (Question 2).Both of these research methods are widely used in inductively buildingknowledge and theory about groups and organizations through under-standing the perspectives and behaviors of participants (LeCompte &Schensul, 1999; Patton, 1987; Strauss & Corbin, 1990). For the third ques-tion, we selected “expert teaching” examples from the coteaching observa-tions to form vignettes of coteaching in lessons involving particularly rigor-ous content as defined by Newmann and Wehlage (1995).

A four-member research team, all seasoned researchers with track re-cords of school-based research and with different research perspectivesthat included national school evaluation, special education research, andresearch on curriculum instruction, gathered all data and conducted all ofthe data analyses. The authors of this article were part of the research team.All four had between 20 and 25 years of classroom teaching and researchexperience, and were seasoned in instrument development and validation,interviewing, observing and scripting classroom instruction, and in quali-tative as well as quantitative research methods.

Administrator Interviews

To address the first question about the school’s vision and modeldevelopment, we conducted extended individual interviews with the keyschool leaders who were involved in decision making related to the school’scoteaching models. Because the principal, the assistant principal, and the twodeans of students had different roles in the school and had played differentroles in the founding of the school, we expected that they would contributeboth overlapping and different contributions to our understanding of theschool’s model. The interviews were each close to 90 min in length and wereconducted individually by a member of the research team.

Interview questions were developed by the research team and reflectboth the recent research literature on school leadership (Donaldson,2001; Elmore, 2000) and the researchers’ experience. They focused on (a)the rationale for including students with disabilities in the general edu-cation classroom; (b) administrators’ perceptions of the important fea-


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tures of the school’s coteaching approach; (c) how coteaching began andwhy the format and approach changed between 1995 and 1998; (d) therole each administrator played in the implementation of the model; (e)the factors that contributed to the success of the model; and (f) the chal-lenges they faced in instituting coteaching. Interviews were tape-re-corded, transcribed verbatim by professional transcribers, and checkedand revised for accuracy by members of the research team.

Coteaching Observations

To address the second research question about coteaching roles within andacross teams, we analyzed classroom observations at each grade level inwhich teachers were engaged in coteaching. During the 1998–1999 schoolyear, we conducted 40 classroom observations at Dolphin Middle School asa part of our larger Beacons study. Our purpose was to sample classes fromall four heterogeneous teams, from all four major content areas(mathematics, language arts, science, and social studies), and from some ofthe ESOL classrooms. For the coteaching analysis in this study, we selectedfrom that original set all of the observations in which teachers wereengaged in coteaching within three teams. This resulted in a total of nineobservations.

Ideally, we wished to have three observations from each of the threeteams engaged in teaming and coteaching to document the special educa-tion teacher coteaching with at least three different content teachers in eachteam. We achieved this data selection goal with the seventh and eighthgrade teams. In the seventh grade team (Team 2) we observed the specialeducation teacher (2-SE in Table 2) coteaching with three different contentarea teachers on her team: the geography teacher (2-G), the science teacher(2-S), and the language arts teacher (2-LA). Similarly, in the eighth gradeteam (Team 3), we observed the special education teacher (3-SE),coteaching with three different content area teachers from his team: the ge-ography teacher (3-G), the language arts teacher (3-LA), and the mathe-matics teacher (3-M).

We were not able to collect this ideal data set for Team 1, the sixth-gradeteam, because we were able to observe only two coteaching dyads in thatteam in fall 1998. These included the special education teacher (1-SE)coteaching with the mathematics teacher (1-M) and the geography teacher(1-G) from her team. However, we drew on a third observation of thesixth-grade special education teacher (1-SE) from a later observation set.We conducted a small number of classroom observations the followingspring, which included an observation of the sixth-grade special education


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teacher coteaching with the seventh-grade geography teacher (2-G),whom she was assisting temporarily. We included this in our corpus be-cause of the additional information it might provide about how this specialeducation teacher engages in coteaching. At the same time, the time lapseand the “cross-team” nature of this one observation made it different fromthe other observations, and we have exercised caution in making infer-ences based on it.

Two members of the four-person research team conducted each of theobservations of coteaching. We observed in pairs to document the interac-tions of teachers and students in as much detail as possible. One observerfocused mainly on the teachers’ comments and their interactions with stu-dents and with each other. This observer also recorded the teachers’ physi-cal movements in the classroom (e.g., moving to the front of the class,moving to stand behind a child who is inattentive, standing by the door togreet entering students) and the transitions from one activity to another.The second observer focused mainly on students with identified disabili-ties in that classroom (an average of five students and a range of three tosix), noting their level of engagement in the work and their interactionswith the teachers and with other students through the lesson.

The observers did not use a checklist or structured observation format.Rather, we came to the classroom with agreement among ourselves aboutthe kinds of information we were seeking based on our prior contacts withthe school, our research questions, our knowledge of the research litera-ture, and our own experience (Miles & Huberman, 1994; Strauss & Corbin,1990). Our goal, reflecting the second research question, was to gather asdetailed and complete as possible a record of the talk and interaction ineach lesson to conceptualize the instructional roles and approaches thatthe teacher pairs were using.

Each observer made detailed handwritten notes that included a nearverbatim record of the comments of each teacher, their actions in relationto students and to each other (e.g., 1-SE turned to 1-G and asked, “Shouldthey consult their books?”) and their physical movement in the classroom(e.g., “…left the front of the room to stand by the group of three stu-dents.”). Consistent abbreviations were used to identify teachers and stu-dents in the observation notes. We used this procedure extensively in thelarger Beacons of Excellence study, first piloting it by conducting a pairedobservation, then comparing notes closely to determine whether the re-cords provided both the breadth and depth of detail required by our sec-ond research question.

Weusedtheteacher-focusedtranscriptionrecordasthebasis for theanal-ysis described here and integrated into that transcript information from the


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student-focused observation that provided further detail about the teach-ers’ comments and interactions with students and with one another. Al-though time-consuming, this process results in data, both verbal andnonverbal, that can reveal “the meanings attributed (by teachers) to specificbehaviors” in an ethnographic study (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999, p. 19)and “yields a level of detail that permits close and repeated analysis of thedata” (p. 17). This integrated transcript of each lesson served as the basis fordeveloping a coding system. We applied the final coding system to thesetranscripts. In addition, we selected examples of expert coteaching in les-sons with particularly rigorous content from these integrated transcripts.

Data Coding and Analysis

Interview Data (Research Question 1)

We examined the interviews for references to the coteaching model and tosteps or processes involved in instituting the approach. Two researcherslistened to the interviews separately and examined verbatimtranscriptions, prepared by professional transcribers and validated by theresearchers by listening to the tape recordings. In addition, the researcherslistened to the interview tapes together to discuss and verify theirinterpretations in a collaborative process of interpretation that Wasser andBressler (1996) refered to as the “interpretive zone.” We looked forconfirmation of the model elements and steps across interviews andintegrated different perspectives and “pieces of the puzzle” from across theinterviewees. Consistent with an ethnographic tradition of constructingnarratives of events from the earliest to the most recent (Clifford, 1990), weconstructed a brief “history” of coteaching in the school. Reflecting agrounded theory approach to qualitative research, we were interested incapturing, in our brief history, the complexity of the model implementationprocess (Strauss & Corbin, 1990).

Observation Data (Research Question 2)

As with many qualitative and ethnographic studies, this study did not use apreexisting set of codes. We coded the observation transcripts using acoding system developed from the transcripts themselves. We used aninductive or “bottom-up” process to develop a system for identifyingimportant items to be coded and then ordered, counted, and assembledthose concepts into patterns related to the coteaching process (Kirk &Miller, 1986; LeCompte & Schensul, 1999; Miles & Huberman, 1994;


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Schensul, LeCompte, Nastasi, & Borgatti, 1999). Our purpose was tocapture as comprehensively as possible the range of in-class roles of bothspecial and content teachers in these teams. This would enable us todetermine the relative frequency of the distinct kinds of role behaviors thatwe identified in our data set (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999).

Two of the research team members, the principal investigator (Mo-rocco) and senior research associate (Aguilar), developed the coding sys-tem consistent with qualitative procedures discussed by Strauss andGorbin (1990) and Miles and Huberman (1994). The procedure below liststhe major steps the research team used to develop the coding system:

1. Identified the unit for coding. We attached a code to “actions” in thedata, which included conversational turns and nonverbal interactions ormovements. We defined a conversational turn as the text of a continuousteacher comment. A turn ends with a change of speaker or action.

2. Provided concept names for actions. Through repeated examinationsof the data, we generated conceptual labels then grouped and consolidatedthose labels (e.g., “categorizing”; Strauss & Corbin, 1990, p. 65).

3. Tested the comprehensiveness and reliability of a preliminary list ofcategories. Two researchers independently applied the preliminary catego-ries to selected transcripts to determine agreement across raters and to noteactions not identified by the system. Researchers then refined the system.

4. Retest for interrater agreement. Two researchers applied the revisedset of categories to determine their comprehensiveness and reliability.

Table 3 presents the resulting seven role categories, with subcodes forseveral of the categories. These characterize the full range of instructionalroles that teachers exhibited in the coteaching observations. Our goal wasto provide a set of codes that were as operationally defined and clear aspossible, so that another observer could recognize an instance of a categoryif they saw it (LeCompte & Schensul, 1999).

As with any schema for quantifying qualitative data, these categoriesreflect the best efforts of “outsiders” to the school to describe classroom be-haviors in a systematic way. Inevitably, these categories may not fully cap-ture the experiences and meaning of “insider” participants. At best, theywill reflect the researchers’ “theoretical sensitivity” or their ability to givemeaning to data, their capacity to understand, and their competence toseparate what is pertinent from what is not pertinent (Strauss & Corbin,1990).

Using the category scheme that resulted from these four steps, wecoded each action for each teacher in the nine transcripts. Because the


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speech turns and teaching actions varied widely in duration, the codingdoes not provide information about the amount of time teachers spent inany particular role. Rather, the system describes the kind and range ofroles each teacher took on in any one lesson.

We assigned more than one code to some teacher turns and actions. Forexample, in giving students directions on a vocabulary activity related toSteinbeck’s novel The Pearl, the language arts teacher in Team 3 (3-LA) pro-vided the following support during an observation:

9:45. Pick out 10 words from Chapter 3 that you didn’t know [from The Pearl].Work out a system with kids at your table to compare which words you didn’tknow. Ask, “Where is there agreement on the words?”

Teacher 3-LA was setting up the activity, giving students directions forselecting words. This was coded as “set up/engage students in learningexperience; (a) introducing and explaining the activity.” In the next state-ment, she coached them on how to collaborate in small groups. This was


TABLE 3Coding Categories for Classroom Coteaching Roles

Structure Definition

Set up/engage students inlearning experience

Teacher prepares students for a learning opportunity by (a) ex-plaining the activity, (b) clarifying directions, (c) providingexamples of how to carry out the activity, or (d) modelinghow a student might participate in the activity.

Motivate learning Teachers explicitly “enroll” students in the activity by (a) re-questing or encouraging their participation in an activity or(b) providing specific incentives for participation.

Provide instruction Teachers directly provide or guide content-area learning by (a)providing information, (b) explaining concepts, (c) posingquestions, (d) responding to students’ questions, (e) re-voic-ing responses, (f) modeling learning strategies, or (g) usingvisual or graphic support.

Monitor/providefeedback on work

Teachers guide students’ work by (a) giving praise/reinforce-ment, (b) giving negative or constructive feedback, (c) exam-ining students’ work, or (d) suggesting specific changes.

Manage instruction andbehavior

Teachers organize students’ work by (a) guiding collaboration,(b) distributing/ collecting materials, (c) managing transi-tions, (d) managing time, or (e) evaluating behavior.

Assist individual students Teachers help students manage and progress in their work by(a) circulating to observe students at work, (b) coaching indi-vidual students, or (c) coaching small groups of students.

Confer with coteacher Coteachers audibly converse about the direction of the lesson.

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coded “manage instruction and behavior; teachers organize students’work by (a) guiding collaboration.”

We tallied the codes by role category for each teacher in each observa-tion and used percentages to describe the frequencies of different roleswithin lessons, across lessons within a team, and across teams. Given thecategorical nature of the coding of roles, the frequencies of teacher actionssignifying these roles were explored by examining contingency tables.Pearson chi-square analysis was used to determine the significance of rolevariations between the content teachers and the special education teachers.

This approach to coding and analysis enabled us to describe the instruc-tional roles in these observations in several ways:

1. We combined the roles for all teachers to describe the range of roles thatteachers in the three teams took in classrooms with students with disabilities.

2. We compared the roles that special education and content teacherstook across all of the classrooms.

3. We compared the three teams in terms of the pattern of roles taken byspecial and content teachers.

4. Within teams, we looked at whether and how the special educationteacher’s role varied across content area partners. We were particularly in-terested in whether there was “parity” in the roles of the special educationand content teachers in these teams—whether both contributed in substan-tive though potentially different ways to students’ learning.

Examples of Expert Coteaching (Research Question 3)

To answer the third question, we selected examples of coteaching in whichteachers assisted students in rigorous content learning opportunities.Authentic and rigorous instruction were defined as instruction that requiresstudents to (a) engage in higher level thinking and construct knowledge,(b) focus on content deemed important by professionals in that contentdomain, and (c) address topics of importance beyond the school(Newmann & Wehlage, 1995). Members of the research team came toconsensus on segments of the observation transcripts that reflected all threecriteria, and selected two from different content areas to present in thisarticle.

RESULTS

The results of our analyses of the interviews and classroom observationsfollow, organized in terms of the three research questions discussed earlier.


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Research Question 1

What vision and model of coteaching do school leaders hold? How has theschool put that model into practice? The interviews provided an integratedpicture of the leaders’ vision and model of coteaching and the major stepsthey took in putting that vision into practice.

The Dolphin model embeds classroom coteaching in the context ofschoolwide interdisciplinary teaming. Teams are responsible for the samestudents for 2 years (“looping”), and serve as the first point of contact forparents. Teams, which include content teachers and a special educationteacher, develop curriculum units, assess students’ progress, and plan in-terventions for students with specific needs. Coteaching is an extension ofthat collaborative planning into the content area classroom.

The founding Dolphin principal and his staff determined that from itsopening, theschoolwould integrate amiddle-grades reformmodelwith theinclusion of students with disabilities in heterogeneous general educationclassrooms. Together they examined the middle-grades reform literatureand instructional approaches for young adolescents and organized gradessix through eight into “houses” with interdisciplinary teams of teachers.Some of the teams “loop” (i.e., continue with the same students through sev-enth and eighth grades). Describing that founding year (1995–1996), the as-sistant principal recalled his desire that the new middle school includestudentswithspecialneedswhohadbeeninself-containedclassroomstheirentire school careers: “The biggest problem that we faced was that they hadbeen isolated for so long, they really didn’t know how to function as stu-dents in a basic education classroom.” The principal and assistant principalalsoreadresearchontheinclusionofstudentswithdisabilities inthegeneraleducation curriculum and classroom to determine how best to meet theneeds of their students, many of whom, in addition to being second-lan-guage learners, new immigrants, or children of agricultural workers, hadidentified disabilities. The administrators felt strongly that their studentsneeded consistent relationships and a sense of belonging to a learning com-munity that was both caring and intellectually rigorous.

During the school’s first year, in addition to visiting other schools,teachers and administrators met with different outside consultants andtalked about their vision for the school. With funding from a state grant,the principal chose to work with education consultants who trained teach-ers in research-based practices that are responsive to individual learningstyles. These practices included integrated thematic learning, a life-skillscurriculum, and classroom routines such as writing a daily agenda on theboard that make explicit teachers’ expectations for students. The faculty


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selected specific professional development topics with suggestions fromthe external consultant and the principal. The principal viewed this profes-sional development as critical in building an inclusive middle-gradesmodel—the organizational context for classroom-based coteaching.

The school adopted a flexible block schedule that allowed team mem-bers common planning time, as well as time to learn how to write curricu-lum, develop support strategies for individual students, and designassessments to guide their instructional planning. The principal gaveteachers the responsibility for developing classroom instruction in concertwith the Florida standards and district curricula.

From the school’s founding, the principal involved teachers in the de-velopment of a coteaching model. The model evolved through three for-mats, a collaborative instruction model, a “traveling” model, and aschoolwide model. In 1995–1996 the Student Collaborative Instruction(SCI) model was established through a grant. The school set up a numberof isolated general education classrooms with 10 regular education and 10special education students who were taught by a content teacher and aspecial education teacher. In 1996–1997, when the SCI funds were no lon-ger available to fund an expanded corps of special education teachers, theprincipal asked teams to volunteer to include students with disabilities intheir classrooms and to work with a special education teacher in theirclassrooms. In this model, a special education teacher “traveled,” follow-ing a cohort of students with disabilities from one classroom to another toprovide services to those students. The special education teacher was not amember of the team. When the volunteer teams realized the value of a spe-cial education colleague for all of their students, they began to move to-ward including that teacher as a member of the team.

Between 1997 and 1998, the administrators implemented a schoolwideapproach, placing students with disabilities in heterogeneous classroomsin all of the teams, with every team including a special education teacher.According to the principal, the model became a “subject area model”rather than a traveling model. Ms. S., a dean of students in 1998–1999 and aspecial education teacher when the school opened, describes this time as aparadigm shift:

The first year, I began in a self-contained classroom. Toward the end of theyear, I was approached about joining the sixth grade team. It would be thefirst time that we really tried a true team concept with an inclusion model.They sent us out to visit local and other middle schools in the state. It was veryexciting to talk to other people. [The principal] gave us the chance to createsomething incredible.


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The model made the status of the special education teacher equal to thatof the content area teachers and made the interdisciplinary team, ratherthan the special education team, the special education teacher’s primaryreference group. Ms. S. commented:

We began to see the buy-in of regular education teachers and exceptional ed-ucation teachers that this was not only benefiting ESE [Exceptional StudentEducation, the designation used for special education in this district], but alsobenefiting every student in the school. The heart of Dolphin Middle School isour teams. Everything goes on in those teams—inclusion, integration, loop-ing. The teams are the foundation of Dolphin Middle School.

According to the school leaders, coteaching became the expression ofinterdisciplinary teaming in the classroom, a marriage of the content teach-ers’ content knowledge and content pedagogy, and the special educationteachers’ strategies for making that content accessible to all students. Thespecial education teachers carved their own niche in the teams— an exper-tise in understanding and responding to both students’ and teachers’needs.

In an inclusion or coteaching model, not only do we have to consider our stu-dents’ needs, but we also need to consider the basic education or regular edu-cation teachers’ needs. We’re entering their environment and we have to bethe ones to go one step above and beyond. I’m the bridge, not only betweenthe students and the services that they need, but also between the teachersand their content areas (Ms. S.).

According to the deans of students, both coteaching “pioneers,” thisschoolwide model called for the special education teacher to plan with theentire team and then teach with each teacher in the classroom for some part ofthe week. Over time, decisions about how to distribute the special educationteacher’s coteaching role across the content teachers would depend on theneeds of both the students and each particular teacher. At a minimum, thespecial education teacher had three roles: (a) to be present in classrooms thatincluded students with disabilities, (b) to understand these students’ learningstrengths and needs, and (c) to model for the content teacher ways to makecomplex content accessible to a wide range of students.

Research Question 2

What coteaching roles do teachers use in their classroom instruction? Howdo those roles vary across pairs and teams? Observing coteaching in three


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teams enabled us to analyze how Dolphin’s visionary model of coteachingwas played out in the classroom during the 1998–1999 school year, the 4thyear since the school began to implement coteaching arrangements. Thecoteaching data yielded several kinds of information about teachers’ class-room roles, including the following: (a) the kinds of instructional rolesteachers took in coteaching classrooms, (b) how the roles of special educa-tion teachers and content teachers compared, and (c) how the special edu-cation teacher role varied across partners.

Instructional Roles in Coteaching Classrooms

The frequencies of codes for special education and content teacherscombined the three teams’ codes. Figure 1 indicates that teachers focusedheavily on academic learning in the classrooms we observed. Over 30% (n =88) of the combined teams’ actions were coded as “provide instruction.”The other categories with the greatest proportion of combined team codeswere ones that supported instruction: “assisting individual students” (n =59, 21%), “setting up instruction and engaging students in learning” (n = 44,16%), and “monitoring and providing feedback on learning” (n = 31, 11%).Our tally sheets indicate that the “manage instruction” codes, whichconstituted 13% (n = 47) of the total teacher codes, referred to guidingcollaboration, distributing materials, managing transitions, and to praisingstudent behavior, rather than correcting negative behavior. Overall,students in these classrooms were engaged in learning, and teachers werefocused on instruction.

How Roles of Special Education and Content TeachersCompare

We conducted analyses to compare the roles that special education teachersand content teachers assumed in their classrooms using the frequencies inTable 4. Figure 2 indicates that special education teachers at Dolphinengaged in all of the same instructional roles as the content teachers.However, the content teachers and special education teachers distributedtheir actions across the seven roles differently. When teacher roles wereexamined by content and special education teacher status using a Pearsonchi-square analysis, the differences were significant (�2 = 15.888, df = 6, p <.05). The proportion of the special education teachers’ activities devoted toproviding instruction is smaller than that of the content teachers (25.6% vs.


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36.6%). Table 4, which shows the role distribution by team, indicates thatthe special education teachers in Teams 1 and 3 engaged in few instances ofmonitoring and providing feedback while the special education teacher inTeam 2 did more monitoring and providing feedback. Consistently acrossteams, the special education teachers devoted more moves to assistingindividual students than did the content teachers.

Although the pattern that the content teacher engaged in more instruc-tion actions and the special education teacher engaged in more student as-sistance appears to hold for all three teams, the pattern is less distinct inTeam 2. As Table 4 indicates, the coteaching pairs in Team 2, the sev-enth-grade dyads, were somewhat more similar to one another than teach-ers in the other teams in providing instruction and individual assistance.Fifty-four percent of the instruction actions coded in Team 2 classroomswere made by the content teacher and 45.8% by the special educationteacher, in contrast with 82.6% by the content teacher and 17.4% by the spe-cial education teacher in Team 1, and 64.7% and 35.3% in Team 3. The pro-portions of student assistance actions were also more similar for thecontent teacher and special education teacher in Team 2 than in the otherteams. Forty-five percent of the “assist student” actions coded in Team 2were made by the content teacher, in contrast to 28.6% for the Team 1 con-tent teacher and 20% for the Team 3 content teacher.

How the Special Education Teachers’ Roles Vary AcrossPartners

Team 1. Although both content teachers (1-M and 1-G) were more ac-tive than the special education teacher (1-SE) in providing instruction, the


FIGURE 1 Coteaching roles for all teachers across teams.

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335

FIGURE 2 Coteaching roles for content and special education teachers.

TABLE 4Percentage of Coteaching Codes for Content and Special Education Teachers in Each Team

Content Teachers Special Education Teachers

Role categories n % n %

Team 1Set up/engage 9 75.0 3 25.0Motivate learning 2 100 0 0Provide instruction 19 82.6 4 17.4Monitor/feedback 1 50.0 1 50.0Manage instruction 5 83.3 11 6.7Assist individual students 4 28.6 10 71.4Confer with coteacher 0 0 0 0

Team 2Set up/engage 10 71.4 4 28.6Motivate learning 6 75.0 2 25.0Provide instruction 26 54.2 22 45.8Monitor/feedback 9 36.0 16 64.0Manage instruction 7 63.6 4 36.4Assist individual students 18 45.0 22 55.0Confer with coteacher 2 50.0 2 50.0

Team 3Set up/engage 8 44.4 10 55.6Motivate learning 2 67.0 1 33.0Provide instruction 11 64.7 6 35.3Monitor/feedback 2 50.0 2 50.0Manage instruction 10 50.0 10 50.0Assist individual students 1 20.0 4 80.0Confer with coteacher 1 50.0 1 50.0

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special education teacher provided some instruction in both lessons. Thespecial education teacher and the geography teacher (1-G) alternated tak-ing the lead in instructional activities while the other circulated to clarify di-rections and provide support. In separate comments, the special educationteacher and the math teacher (1-M) each communicated to the class that re-gardless of which teacher was “in charge” students were accountable toboth teachers. As the special education teacher directed students on how tocarry out an activity, she called students’ attention to the fact that the math-ematics teacher was circulating with an assignment sheet. The mathematicsteacher picked up on that comment and told students to stay focused on lis-tening to the special education teacher’s directions: “Put your name on itbut listen to Miss —.” In the mathematics classroom, the content teachertook the lead in most activities; the special education teacher intervened, inteam teaching style, to prompt students through activities, pose questions,and organize their homework.

When she took on a support role, the special education teacher watchedclosely for opportunities to make an activity more accessible. While circu-lating and monitoring students’ work during a mathematics activity, sheobserved that slow computation skills were hampering several studentsand immediately brought them calculators. Both observers of the twosixth-grade lessons noted the integrated character of their interactions intheir summary notes: “Both take leadership roles in the class, both in-struct,” and “they present a coherent, unified approach.”

Earlier, we explained that we drew on a third observation of the sixth-gradespecial education teacher from a later observation set the following spring. Atthat time, we observed 1-SE, the sixth-grade special education teacher,coteaching with the seventh-grade geography teacher (2-G), whom she wasassisting temporarily. In that observation of 1-SE with the Team 2 geographyteacher, the special education teacher demonstrated a strong, equal teamteaching role. The two teachers virtually finished one another’s sentences asthey set up a news article writing activity that required students to draw ongeographic and political information about particular countries they had beenstudying. They then circulated to provide follow-up assistance to small groups.This expanded role may reflect growth in her skills, a variation in her skillsmade possible by a difference in 2-G’s teaching style, or some combination ofthese factors. The observation provides evidence that, at least by that time in theyear, 1-SE was capable of an active and equal coteaching approach.

Team 2. The seventh-grade special education teacher on this team,2-SE, was a “pioneer” special education teacher in the school. She was ac-


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tive in building the coteaching models and provided us the most detailedteacher view of the model in our spring 1999 interviews. She and her sci-ence (2-S) and geography (2-G) partners demonstrated expert coteaching.With both teachers, she stood near the front of the class and contributed toinstruction in ways that augmented and clarified the tasks for students,rather than exactly duplicating the content teachers’ roles. In sharp con-trast, her coteaching with the language arts teacher (2-LA) looked surpris-ingly like the traditional special education teacher “aide” role. The specialeducation teacher never spoke to the class as a whole; she provided individ-ual assistance to several students but had no other opportunity to enter intothe teaching process. As the principal explained to the research team, thelanguage arts teacher, who was the least experienced teacher in the threeteams (see Table 2), was uncomfortable with integrating students with dis-abilities into the classroom and working in coteaching relationships. Thisteacher left the school before the year ended. This atypical situation for theseventh-grade special education teacher illustrates how dependent thecoteaching relationship is on a shared commitment to inclusion and collab-oration on the part of both teachers.

Team 3. The eighth-grade coteaching arrangements also included “al-ternate leading and assisting” and “team teaching” structures. The specialeducation teacher, 3-SE, took a highly active role with the mathematicsteacher (3-M). These coteachers smoothly handed off the lead in responseto needs of the class. The math teacher signaled her lead early in the classduring a 15-min homework check, saying, “Homework out! Let me check itoff.” While the special education teacher circulated quietly around theroom, the math teacher stopped at each desk, audibly commenting on eachstudent’s work in a way that reiterated her expectations to the class: “Goodnotebook order. I appreciate that. You need to show your thinking on pa-per. A bunch of answers doesn’t mean anything.” She used an overhead toexplain answers to particular problems.

At this point, the special education teacher moved to the front of theclass and shifted the group to a new activity on the commutative propertyin equations: “Okay, put your homework away. The only thing you need isthe start-up section of your math notebooks and a pencil.” The special edu-cation teacher assumed a full range of instructional roles—made the tran-sition, introduced and explained the activity, provided instruction, andgave students feedback on answers provided by the groups .

Apparently sensing some restlessness in the eighth graders as this activ-ity concluded, the mathematics teacher moved into the lead and began a


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“showdown,” a strategy that allows students to let off steam. She gave stu-dents markers and placed them at the long white board, where they couldtalk and draw randomly. For a few minutes the classroom was controlledchaos. When the math teacher shouted, “Stop!” students moved quicklyback to their desks. As they seated themselves, the special educationteacher again moved to the front and transitioned them into a math gameon distributive properties until the end of the class period.

In coteaching with the language arts teacher (3-LA), the Team 3 specialeducation teacher also alternated in taking the lead but with greater em-phasis on providing support. In the geography classroom, both teachersstood at the front of the class, alternating conversational turns. As they re-viewed the directions, the special education teacher made certain that stu-dents understood by asking clarifying questions and explaining how theywere to work in groups. In conferring with each other while studentsworked, the observers noted that the two teachers presented a collegial im-age of equal professionals.

For all three classes in Team 3, the observers commented that bothteachers contributed to students’ learning and that they worked togethersmoothly. The observer of the mathematics class, in which the special edu-cation teacher was particularly active and led two mathematics activities,raised a question about the special education teacher’s content knowledge.She noted that his “instruction was confusing and not always as mathe-matically competent” as the knowledge of the content teacher.

Research Question 3

How can coteaching engage students in understanding rigorous content?From across the teams, the Team 2 special education teacher and two of hercoteaching partners presented particularly strong examples of the use ofcoteaching to make rigorous and authentic content accessible to all stu-dents. The two examples were selected for discussion because they met thecriteria for rigorous and authentic instruction discussed earlier (Newmann& Wehlage, 1995). The special education teacher’s interactions with thecontent teachers in these two examples illustrate how experiencedcoteachers who share a strong grasp of the content can support studentswith learning difficulties in grappling with and understanding rigorouscontent. The two lessons required different kinds of thinking from stu-dents: the geography lesson required students to synthesize informationabout African people and places, whereas the science lesson required stu-


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dents to build an understanding of difficult concepts about the forming ofthe earth’s crust and the continents.

Coteaching Support for Synthesizing Information

In the geography lesson, the special education teacher first assisted theclass as a whole in understanding their assignment—to develop riddles insmall groups. Her next support strategy was to shift to assisting anindividual student with disabilities to participate fully and appropriately.

The two teachers engaged students in a fast-paced lesson on NorthAfrican geography, in which they were to write riddles about Africancountries, leaders, or landmarks, using geography clues. They wererequired to construct at least five clues and order them from most to leastdifficult so that students “would have to think hard to get the answer.”The geography teacher began giving directions, and the specialeducation teacher worked closely with him. When the geography teachercalled out, “What are some countries?” the special education teachercalled on individual students, urging them to respond to his question.“Who else haven’t I talked to today?” She motivated them to participateby complimenting the class (“You are so resourceful!”). Shedemonstrated how to construct a riddle by thinking aloud: “Where do Ifind great clues? Where can I find information? Well, encyclopedias, thebooks…” She drew a large graphic organizer on the board and wrote inpossible topics and clues as students called them out. When a studentoffered the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, as a riddle topic, shechallenged the student to look up the spelling of the name (there aremultiple correct spellings) and then complimented him to the class:“Thanks to Oscar, we have all the right spellings.”

The special education and the geography teachers posed questions andrehearsed the activity until students were ready to form small groups.Stan, a boy with a mild form of autism, stood out in this process of choos-ing partners. Stan’s teachers described him as a boy who retained knowl-edge well and was improving in mathematics and making connectionsbetween ideas. He tended to react with frustration to changes in routineand became annoyed with other students, often feeling that “they are notso smart.” As other students found partners, Stan hovered by his desk,looking around, but did not move to get a partner, and no one came over tohim. The special education teacher watched this. Finally, Stan walked overto Chris, a boy with identified learning disabilities, who was sitting byhimself, and they began to work on a riddle together. At this point, the spe-


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cial education teacher moved her attention from Stan to a group strugglingto choose a topic.

When it was time for students to bring their riddles to the class, bothteachers turned their attention to Stan. He and Chris had completed a riddleon Muammar Qaddafi and wanted to be the first to read theirs aloud. Theirfirst clue was “I am insane.” When the class laughed, the geography teacherreminded them in a serious tone that their statement was “an Americanopinion.” When the other students solved the riddle by the third clue, Stanshook his head in frustration. Picking up on his feelings, the geographyteacher asked Stan and Chris to read the rest of their clues. When they werefinished, he applauded their work: “Those were excellent clues.”

The special education teacher stepped in again to provide Stan specialsupport when the riddle presentations continued, and Stan jumped upseveral times to call out answers without raising his hand. The special edu-cation teacher stood near him and put her hands gently on his shoulders,saying quietly, “Remember what we talked about.” When he raised hishand appropriately and correctly answered “mosque” to a riddle, she pat-ted his back in appreciation. Both teachers were attuned to students’ indi-vidual needs and both encouraged and restrained Stan at different times,yet the special education teacher assumed primary responsibility for en-suring that he remained engaged and productive.

These two teachers publicly validated their partnership as the twosixth-grade teachers did in an earlier example. They conferred audibly asstudentsdevelopedtheirriddles,discussingwhether theyshouldallowstu-dents to consult books and notes while they guessed one another’s riddles.They decided to do so, making certain that students heard their decision.

Several characteristics of their partnership helped this diverse group ofstudents manage this challenging riddle task. In the process of setting upthe activity they used a wide range of strategies such as thinking aloud, ex-amples, graphic organizers, repeated directions, and reinforcement of in-dividual students, all of which helped make the activity accessible tostudents with different learning needs. The special education teacher pro-vided many of these. They both followed up with detailed individual sup-port, yet the special education teacher gave priority to helping the studentwho appeared most vulnerable in the lesson.

Coteaching Support for Concept Understanding

In another example, this same special education teacher assisted the entireclass throughout a science lesson to make the content teacher’s conceptexplanations more accessible. Both the nature of the content and this


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teacher’s more traditional lecture style made all the students vulnerable. Asa result, the special education teacher intervened in the whole-classpresentationtomakethelanguageandexplanationsmoreunderstandable.

On this day, students sat in formal rows to watch a sophisticatedPowerPoint presentation on plate tectonics and the formation and move-ment of the continents over Earth’s crust. The science teacher remained atthe projector behind his desk as he showed slides of South America andAfrica at different points in their formation as continents. He taught in lec-ture style, providing very little explanation for technical concepts. He re-ferred a number of times to Dr. Alfred Vegner, the scientist responsible formodern plate tectonics theory, without explaining who he was. The specialeducation teacher positioned herself between two rows of desks, facing thescience teacher, listening to the lecture and watching students’ faces.

The science teacher talked about the similarity of the coastlines of conti-nents on different parts of the globe—evidence that all the continents wereonce a single piece of land. He discussed how the continents would fit to-gether like pieces of a jigsaw if you put them together and how semi-liquidareas under the Earth’s crust enable the crust to move. Apparently con-cerned about some students’ understanding at this point, the special edu-cation teacher intervened in a firm voice with a metaphor to help teach thisconcept. “I’m trying to think what to compare this to. It’s like a surfboard.The ocean is like the lithosphere [the semi-liquid matter under the earth’scrust], it moves the surfboard and me sitting on the surfboard is like thecontinents.” A student commented, “Like a bearing. The lithosphere.Things move on it.”

The class became a “duo-lecture” as the science teacher talked about theslides and then the special education teacher asked students questions andexplained ideas related to plate tectonics theory. Her questions promptedstudents to use their background knowledge and experience to build un-derstanding.

Several characteristics of the coteaching partnership in this classhelped students actively grapple with difficult concepts. The specialeducation teacher had sufficient understanding of the material, probablyfrom curriculum planning sessions and team meetings, for which shewas the team leader, to be able to translate technical ideas into imagesfamiliar to students. She understood students’ need to ask questions inorder to apply their minds actively to the difficult material. Because theteacher was focused on the whole class, she geared her interventions toall students. Further, the geography teacher was apparently at ease withher decisions about when to intervene and “reteach” the concepts inanother way.


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Across these two lessons, we see a special education teacher who under-stands the content, uses a broad and flexible repertoire of interventionsthat range from whole-class to small-group to individualized work, andselects her “target”—the class, group, or individual—using her insightinto what is most needed to promote content understanding.

DISCUSSION

This study builds on research on coteaching in a number of ways. It buildson general guidelines suggested for coteaching programs (Cook & Friend,1995; Rice & Zigmond, 2000; Walther-Thomas, 1997) to describe in depthhow one school put a model into practice in several teams. It complementsstudies of the planning processes that take place between coteachers(Walther-Thomas et al., 1996) by detailing the actual coteaching process inthe classroom. It moves beyond anecdotal accounts to a systematic analysisof detailed records of coteaching in four content areas.

The parity that has been found lacking in many coteaching partner-ships, where the special education teacher is often subordinate (Rice &Zigmond, 2000), is present in the dyads observed in this study. Some of thespecial education teachers in our sample were more active in providing in-struction than others, yet all three contributed a full range of instructionalroles. Several features of the model in this school may help to explain themutual respect and equality present in these dyads and the high level ofcoordination in their teaching. First, the special education teachers werefull members of their interdisciplinary teams. Their primary referencegroup was the team, not the special education staff, and all members hadcommon time for planning. One of the special education teachers waselected team leader by her content teacher peers. Second, school policy dic-tated that teams had decision-making power in areas of curriculum, stu-dent assessment, and instructional accommodations, and the specialeducation teacher was a part of those decisions.

Further, the school incorporated a number of organizational structuresto provide consistent support for teacher collaboration across the teams. Acommitment to inclusion of students with disabilities in heterogeneousgeneral education classrooms was present in the leadership and throughmost of the faculty. The school incorporated several routines into everyclassroom lesson—greeting students individually when they enter andleave, agendas on the board, regular test preparation exercises—reflectinga schoolwide effort to create a level playing field for students who may bechildren of agricultural workers and enter the school late in the fall and


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those who are recent immigrants, as well as the many students who comefrom low-income families in the county. Regular team planning time re-flected the understanding that interdisciplinary teams were the core orga-nization of the school.

Finally, all of the teachers participated in professional development to-gether, an important indicator of the integration of the general and specialeducation systems in a school (Glatthorn, 1990). In many systems, specialeducation teachers lack opportunities to develop subject matter knowl-edge. They may develop skills in generic teaching strategies but not in pro-viding students the cognitive tools for building an understanding ofimportant ideas and ways of knowing in a content area (Palincsar & Col-lins, in press; Voss, Wiley, & Carretero, 1995). At Dolphin, special educa-tion teachers participate fully in professional development activities withcontent teachers.

Together, these features of the model support the idea that coteaching isnot an isolated classroom practice but the extension into the classroom of acomplex system of teacher collaboration that reaches to all levels of schoolorganization. Furthermore, this study contributes to our understanding ofmiddle-grades reform in urban settings. Dolphin’s coteaching model wasdeveloped and implemented in a school with a predominantly low-in-come, minority student population, including recent immigrants and stu-dents in migrant families, and offers some promise for other urban middleschools. Coteaching could potentially improve the impact of teaching onstudent learning among similar populations. Several recent studies showthat good teaching can counteract the effects of poverty and minority sta-tus (Haycock, 1998; Haycock, Jerald, & Huang, 2001). Groundbreaking re-search in Tennessee and Texas revealed that teacher effects are cumulativeand hold up regardless of the race, class, or prior student achievement. Yet,as Haycock (1998) pointed out, students in urban schools often receive theleast effective teaching.

One limitation of this study that should be addressed in future researchis that it did not assess the impact of the model on student learning. TheDolphin model and other schoolwide coteaching models in urban contextsneed to be studied further, with a focus on assessing student outcomes.The challenge will be to design studies that document the features of themodel and its implementation across the school, and use research designsthat show how student gains relate to that implementation (Slavin, 2002).Further research should document the process of planning, assessment,and classroom coteaching that characterize the full cycle of coteachingwithin interdisciplinary teams. Because this study focused on teachers rel-atively new to the profession, future studies might investigate the roles of


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more diverse groups of teachers in terms of teaching experience and par-ticular experience with coteaching.

Finally, this study contributes to school reform literature on howschools become exemplary learning communities. A national study of re-structuring schools found that a sense of shared responsibility for studentlearning on the part of teachers is a hallmark of professional community ina school. Professional community is associated with a strong focus on stu-dent learning and on higher levels of student achievement (Louis, Marks,& Kruse, 1996). The coteaching partnerships in this school reflect that senseof shared responsibility and offer the possibility that coteaching may pro-vide one strategy for building professional community in high-performingmiddle schools.

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Catherine Cobb Morocco, Ed.D., is a Senior Scientist at Education Development Center, Inc.Her research and writing focus on literacy development and instruction and access to rigorouscurricula for academically diverse groups of students. In collaboration with teachers, special-ists, and researchers, she designs and studies school-based professional learning environ-ments that promote literacy development in the middle grades.

Cynthia Mata Aguilar directs projects at Education Development Center, Inc. that promoteculturally responsive instruction in urban schools and classrooms. Her work has focused onliteracy instruction, professional development with teachers, and academic achievement forstudents with diverse cultural and academic backgrounds.


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Coteaching for Content Understanding: A Schoolwide Model

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