Co-Teaching Where One Teacher Lectures and the Other Redirects
Ms. Okafor, a special education teacher, co-teaches ninth-grade algebra with Mr. Lin. Their 28 students include six with IEPs whose service minutes specify 45 minutes daily of specially designed instruction in the co-taught class. In practice, Mr. Lin lectures from the board for 35 minutes while Ms. Okafor circulates and redirects, then she takes the six students to a side table for the last 10 minutes to review the notes. At the quarterly progress meeting, the six students had made no measurable progress on their computation goals and two failed the unit test. Mr. Lin says he does not want to slow down the class; Ms. Okafor does not want to damage the relationship. The principal asks for a plan.
1. Diagnose the problem in terms of the students' IEPs and the co-teaching model in use.
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Two separate failures, and they reinforce each other.
Service delivery. The IEPs promise 45 minutes daily of specially designed instruction. The students are receiving roughly 10 minutes of small-group review, and that review is a recap of notes rather than instruction targeted to their goals. On a service-log analysis, the district is out of compliance daily, and the progress data are the predictable result.
Model. The pair is using one-teach, one-assist-the weakest configuration, because it assigns the special educator a monitoring role with no ownership of content or planning. Circulating to redirect produces compliance, not learning. The six students hear the same lecture as everyone else and get their only individualization after the content has already gone by.
The structural cause is planning, not attitude. Neither teacher has shared planning time, so there is no mechanism for designing instruction that reaches the six without slowing the class. Mr. Lin's fear and Ms. Okafor's conflict avoidance are symptoms; the schedule is the disease. A plan that asks them to 'communicate better' will fail, and the same 10-minute side table will reappear within a month.
2. What co-teaching arrangements and scheduling changes would you propose, and how would you raise them with Mr. Lin?
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Open with data, not with critique. Ms. Okafor should bring the six students' work samples and progress graphs to a planning conversation and frame the problem as shared: 'Our students aren't getting what their IEPs promise, and I think our schedule is setting us both up to fail.' Naming the structural cause removes the implication that Mr. Lin is a bad teacher, which is what he is likely to hear otherwise.
Proposed structure:
- Station teaching two or three days a week. All 28 rotate through a teacher-led concept station, a practice station, and a technology or problem-set station. Mr. Lin keeps the pace he is worried about losing because everyone moves through the same content; Ms. Okafor teaches a station where she can deliver targeted computation instruction to her six students and to other struggling learners.
- Alternative teaching for the pre-teach: Ms. Okafor previews tomorrow's vocabulary and procedure with the six at the end of the period, so they enter the lecture already oriented.
- Parallel teaching for review days, splitting the room.
The non-negotiable: a weekly 30-minute co-planning block on both schedules, with a standing agenda tied to the IEP goals. Without it, none of the above survives contact with a Monday.
3. How would the principal verify that services are actually being delivered and that the students are progressing?
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Distinguish compliance evidence from outcome evidence; the district needs both.
Compliance:
- A service log documenting the 45 minutes, signed daily or weekly by both teachers. This is the record that answers a complaint or a state review.
- Lesson plans that name the co-teaching model for each day and the IEP goals addressed, showing that specially designed instruction is planned rather than improvised.
- Ten-minute walkthroughs by the principal or a special education coordinator, twice a month, looking for evidence that the six are working with a teacher on their goals, not just sitting in proximity to one.
Outcomes:
- Biweekly progress monitoring on each computation goal, graphed, so a plateau is visible at four weeks rather than at the quarterly meeting.
- Work completion and unit-test performance disaggregated for the six students.
Escalation path. If progress monitoring is flat after six weeks of faithful implementation, the principal should not treat it as a coaching problem-it may mean the IEP goals or service minutes need revision, or the students need a different instructional setting for part of the day. The principal's role is to protect the planning time and use the data, not to mediate between two adults while the students wait.