Instructions:
Overview and Purpose:
This field-based assignment is intended to provide candidates formal opportunities to apply specific collaborative process, communication, and co-teaching approaches in classroom settings. To successfully complete the assignment, candidates need to collaboratively plan instruction with “volunteer” colleagues, coordinate times to speak with and develop materials for one student’s family, and critically evaluate multiple aspects of their experiences in the context of this assignment, including the impact of co-taught lessons on student learning. Along with the final paper, candidates will be required to include self-generated logs to include dates, duration, and focus of each planning meeting as well as phone/email contact information for co-teaching partners.

Components:
1. Identify one professional partner with whom you will work, and also a family with whom either you or your co-teaching partner has a good relationship. Because this assignment requires more than a one-time interaction commitment (i.e., a substantial amount of time) from your co-teaching partner, it is critical that you clearly explain the requirements of the assignment as you identify a colleague with whom you will work. You must work with a colleague whose role/discipline is different from your own. Since you will assume the role of special educator, you need to work with a co-teaching partner who is a general education teacher, a specialty teacher, or a related service provider (e.g., speech and language pathologist, occupational therapist, school psychologist, guidance).

Co-teaching partners must participate in all aspects of planning, implementation, and evaluation; you must jointly develop, plan, deliver, and evaluate each lesson. Again, it is very important that you fully explain all that is expected for this assignment to your co-teaching partner.

Lessons must be implemented in classroom settings with groups of students (i.e., your lessons cannot be delivered as 1:1 or 2:1 or 2:2 instructional interactions). In the ideal, you and your co-teacher will present your co-taught lessons to a large group of students with varying learning levels and needs. The group of students for whom instruction is designed must include students who have IEPs and/or receive special education supports. If you anticipate challenges in fulfilling this assignment you must speak with your instructor by the 2nd week of the semester.

2. Jointly with your co-teaching partner, design and implement two (2) cross-disciplinary lessons. You must also use two different co-teaching approaches. Cross-disciplinary lessons should reflect the specific professional expertise, strategies, and/or focus of the co-teaching partners. When you develop your own cross-disciplinary lessons, be sure that lessons reflect the expertise that you have as a special education teacher and the unique professional expertise of your co-teaching partner. This can be included in the lesson plan outline but will need to be elaborated in the paper, when it is submitted.

Your two lessons can be related to each other OR they can be completely independent in focus. Similarly, your lessons can include more than one co-teaching approach, provided that selected approaches align with instructional goals.
Note that for this assignment, you may use team-teaching, parallel teaching, alternative teaching, and station teaching approaches in your lessons BUT you may NOT use the one teach, one assist/observe approaches.

3. Identify a family with whom to work (the target family must be linked with a student who participated in the co-taught lessons). Reach out to this family alone or with support from your co-teacher and arrange time to speak with them. Elicit from them an area of need with which you can provide professional support. It is very important that you encourage the family to identify a priority of their own choosing (i.e., one that they believe will enhance their child’s participation in family or community life). This portion of the assignment depends in large part on your ability to establish rapport with the family and to support them to voice their needs. For many of you it will be difficult to establish rapport and trust if you are not the teacher of record. In this case, your responsibility is collaborate again with you co-teacher and to explicitly guide him/her so that together, you communicate with the family in ways that elicit their needs. Keep in mind that the focus of this component of the assignment is on applying strategies to collaborate with and build trust with family members. Again, it is crucial to listen to them well and to NOT tell them what you think they need to do, or let your co-teacher do this.

Use course emphasized communication strategies to learn what the family would like and then develop “family friendly” materials – including clear directions for them to use at home. A week or two after you provide these materials, follow up with them to find out if materials were helpful. Finally, be prepared to revise or supplement materials if you learn that what you provided did not meet the family’s wishes.

4. Reflectively evaluate your experiences during this assignment. Include, at minimum, what went well/not well in your planning and/or implementation of the assignment and/or each lesson; the co-teaching partnership; communication or other skills that emerged as warranting further growth; the impact of your collaboration with the student’s family on this family’s relationship with school personnel; the impact of co-taught lessons on student learning or other outcomes; other “take aways” including steps that you would initiate to increase the use of co-teaching and other collaborative teaching approaches in school settings.

Use the outline that follows to organize your formally written Co-Teaching Experience paper. Note that this paper must be uploaded to Chalk and Wire as a word document NOT in a locked PDF file. Supplemental materials such as student work samples or your logs may be scanned in as PDFs.

Papers must conform to APA guidelines, including, at minimum: 1 inch margins, correct spacing between sentences and paragraphs, correct grammar and punctuation, use of academic language, 12-point font, and properly formatted title page and headers.

REVIEW ALL MATERIALS ASSOCIATED WITH THIS ASSIGNMENT TO ENSURE THAT YOU INCLUDE ALL NECESSARY ELEMENTS IN YOUR WRITTEN PAPER. THE ASSIGNMENT AND ASSESSMENT RUBRIC ARE AVAILABLE TO YOU VIA CHALK AND WIRE AND BLACKBOARD.

Papers should be organized according to the headings that follow. Do not exceed page limits:

I. Establishing the Collaborative Partnership: Background (no more than 1 page):
 Briefly describe the school, classroom, and students who were involved in your co-taught lessons. Include your co-teacher’s name (real), his/her role and discipline professional experience (# of years teaching and at current school), other staff involved, and your own background.
 When describing the students, be sure to maintain confidentiality (use first names only) and use respectful, person-first rather than deficit emphasized descriptions of students and/or their learning needs.
 Describe why you chose this person for the assignment and what was required of you to arrange times to plan and develop lessons and materials that were used in this assignment.
II. Cross Disciplinary Lesson Plan Development
A. Lesson Plan OUTLINE (1 page/lesson; see sample template):
 Describe the lesson’s focus, students’ learning objectives, and NY State and/or Common Core Standards aligned with the lesson.
 Indicate the co-teaching approach(es) to be used in the lesson, who did what (roles) during instructional sequencing, and structures set to ensure that co-teaching approaches were coordinated (e.g., if station teaching was used, how did groups move between stations).
 Indicate how student learning was assessed during and at the end of each lesson (formative and summative assessments).
B. Summative Review of Implementation. At minimum, address the following (1-2 pages/lesson):
 Explain how each co-teaching partner’s expertise was used to develop the lesson’s content and/or sequencing.
 Discuss why you chose the specific co-teaching approach(es), i.e., what you wanted to accomplish and/or if another approach would have been less or more helpful.
 How well did you and your co-teacher implement the chosen co-teaching approach(es)? Did you plan, coordinate, and work well together? Why/why not?
 Did students appear to benefit from your co-teaching? Why/why not?
 If you were to do this lesson over, what would you change to improve it? Indicate if you would use a different co-teaching approach and if so, why.
III. Home-School Collaboration. At minimum, address the following (1-2 pages):
 Describe how you established rapport with the family (how did you arrange to meet them, how often did you meet, did you need an interpreter). Comment whether your work with the family was supported or undermined in any way by others (e.g., your co-teacher, other classroom staff).
 Describe the family’s priority, the materials that you developed, how you supported them to use what you developed, how you elicited their feedback once you gave them your materials, how you responded to this feedback, and if you revised materials for them.
 Discuss what you learned from this assignment about what needs to happen to ensure positive and meaningful rapport with families.
IV. Overall Reflection and Evaluation. At minimum, address the following (2-3 pages):
 Evaluate how well you “led the way” with your co-teaching partner to plan and implement your lessons. Include how you applied course-emphasized collaboration skills (e.g., coordination, problem solving, and communication), and if you took specific actions to ensure parity between you and your colleague and/or classroom staff.
 Critically assess whether the co-teaching approaches you used positively impacted student learning outcomes — based on students’ participation, completed work, your direct observations, and feedback from students, your co-teacher, or other colleagues.
 Share what you learned about the range of communication and other skills necessary to ensure successful co-teaching and coordination with colleagues, establishing rapport with families to solidify home-school collaboration, and whether there are steps you might take in the future to continue to refine your co-teaching and collaboration skills.
Supplemental attachments:
1. Planning log.
2. Scanned samples of student work.
3. Sample/copy of materials created for family.
4. Other relevant artifacts.
References: Include a list of the sources referred to throughout your report – you may use a smaller point size in the reference section. Use APA referencing both in text and the reference list. Remember, when you are at a conference the person you are referencing may be there – consequently, it is imperative that you reference correctly.
Abstract
 Write a 200 word Abstract
 Two – three sentences per section of the report
1. Intro – what/why your report is about (ref)
2. Method – who and how
3. Results – main findings
4. Conclusion – what can be inferred?
 ‘Structured Abstract’
 This means you can include stats
Evaluation
 Write a 500 word Evaluation of the study.
 Do not use this section to include new information or similarly just summarise (restate) your report or findings
1. Address genuine issues (i.e. assume that your p’s are appropriate and that you do have enough p’s etc.) concentrate on how the design be improved
2. Future research – but must have a reason: if M vs. F why!?
3. ETHIC’s – what ethics should you take into account?
 – E.g. ‘drug users’ what ethical issues would you encounter?
 This is the section that students tend to struggle with most and get wrong. It is not intended that this section be used to just repeat the report or add other research that could/should have been included in the report. Nor should they ‘make things up’ e.g. one participant was late.
 Students should include genuine improvements. There is likely to be room for improvement – this has limited them to a 2 x 2 but what other conditions could have been included? Don’t suggest that more participants are needed – they most definitely are not needed for this type of experiment! Particularly where something is significant there is nothing to be achieved by including more participants. Furthermore, you are more likely to get a null effect if there are not enough participants.
 Future research must have a rationale and not just lazy suggestions such as compare males and females, you must have a rational e for it – why would we predict a difference?