Today’s K-12 environment demands careful consideration of student academic, emotional, physical, and social needs in equal measure. Teachers are working collaboratively in their K-12 classrooms, using co-teaching methods to meet these needs and remediate lost learning. They’re teaming up to lead, instruct, and mentor students in core subjects, electives, or library science to promote more holistic, student-focused experiences. It’s a popular instructional mode that can help teachers modify their learning approaches to meet students where they are, increase their capacity for learning, and celebrate their individual differences as learners.
Team teaching most often involves groups of general education and special education teachers working together in diverse, all-inclusive settings. It’s a partnership between teachers bringing their biggest strengths and practices to the classroom while remaining flexible and open to new strategies. The teams may be interdisciplinary, such as teacher-librarian collaboration, or involve teachers from the same departments at the same grade level working together, using a variety of supervised activities to reach all learners and help them cultivate their skills. Using Gale In Context: For Educators and Gale eBooks: Professional Learning in support of collaborative instruction gives teachers the opportunity to assess and differentiate their instruction techniques between each other, to help them discover and implement new ways of teaching.