We are in the third year of providing co-teaching training and support to cooperating teacher and teacher candidate pairs. The training and practices have been well received and all our partner districts have adopted co-teaching as their preferred model for student teaching experiences.

Most partner schools and districts are now providing the co-teaching training with their own staff as well as using the online co-teaching training. As the partnership grows and more people own co-teaching professional development in the network, CEHD staff are able to focus on collecting data to improve this research-based, high impact model.

To assess what we’ve accomplished – and to determine what is still needed – we conducted a co-teaching fidelity study. University supervisors met with their candidates and cooperating teachers to learn if the pair is co-teaching and what instructional strategies are most common in the team’s practice. We asked what training the pair has completed and what training they still need. We probed general satisfaction with the process and asked for specific benefits of co-teaching for the K-12 students in their classrooms.

This spring we will compile the data collected to create a complete picture of co-teaching in our partner schools and other student teaching sites. These data will help us understand where co-teaching is successful and where it is not yet being used. As a result we will offer new, targeted training to our school partners and support to extend co-teaching in the next academic year.

Stay tuned for more details later this summer!

Submitted by:
Bob Utke, Clinical Learning Coordinator
Amy Jo Lundell, Clinical Partnerships Coordinator
Stacy Ernst, School Partner Network Coordinator & Interim TERI Director