Definition and description of co-teaching
A general definition of co-teaching is two or more people sharing responsibility for teaching some or all of the students assigned to a classroom. It involves the distribution of responsibility among people for planning, instruction, and evaluation for a classroom of students.
Enhancing the initial definition presented above, a co-teaching team may be defined as two or more people who agree to:
Enhancing the initial definition presented above, a co-teaching team may be defined as two or more people who agree to:
- Coordinate their work to achieve at least one common, publicly agreed-on goal
- Share a belief system that each of the co-teaching team members has unique and needed expertise
- Demonstrate parity by alternatively engaging in the dual roles of teacher and learner, expert and novice, giver and recipient of knowledge or skills
- Use a distributed functions theory of leadership in which the task and relationship functions of the traditional lone teacher are distributed among all co-teaching group members
- Use a cooperative process that includes face-to-face interaction, positive interdependence, performance, as well as monitoring and processing of interpersonal skills, and individual accountability
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