Dear Parents and Guardians,
I hope everyone is enjoying this long weekend. I would like to begin by thanking everyone
who gave up their time last Thursday evening to join us for this year’s Open
House. I enjoyed meeting every one of
you who stopped by to introduce yourselves to me. Some of you told me how well you liked learning
about the co-teaching model of delivering instruction. McCall and the Winchester Public School
district are committed to increasing the support and opportunities for
practicing co-teaching. The reason is
the co-teaching benefits to both students and teachers are numerous, and those
advantages are well supported by research.
For those of you unfamiliar with co-teaching, it is a method
of delivering instruction where two or more certified education professionals
share instructional responsibility for a single group of students. At McCall, the co-teaching partners are comprised
of one general education teacher and one special education teacher. However, co-teaching partners can be made up
of a general education teacher and one specialist like a Reading Specialist, a
Speech and Language Pathologist, or a teacher for English Language Learners. I have also seen co-teaching teams that are
made up of a core academic teacher (e.g., a math teacher or an ELA teacher) and
an Exploratory Teacher (e.g., Fine Arts or Music Teacher).
The main benefit of creating co-teaching classrooms is to
lower the teacher to student ratio thereby increasing opportunities for
individual instruction, small group learning, and stronger teacher modeling to
occur. McCall, like many schools across the state, uses co-teaching as a method
to deliver special education services.
By delivering individualized instruction within their core academic general
education classrooms, the school will be able to minimize or even eliminate the
need to pull students with disabilities from Exploratory or elective classes
such as Performance Arts and Fine Arts courses.
In addition to allowing students to learn in the least restrictive
setting, the school can also eliminate the stigma students may feel when they
are asked to leave their general education classes in order to receive
services.
The advantages to co-teaching go beyond benefiting students
with special needs. Research shows that
co-teaching, when done well, will increase the gains that high performing
students will make as well. The ability
for teachers to collaborate and draw from each other’s expertise will result in
instruction that more creative and targeted toward all students’ needs. In addition, the inclusive learning
environment that co-taught classrooms creates the opportunity for all students
to learn from each other and enriches the learning experiences of all students
regardless of their abilities and needs.
The challenge of creating an effective co-teaching structure
is that the co-teachers’ work goes beyond what happens in the classrooms. An effective co-teaching model provides the
co-teachers the necessary time outside of the classes they teach to co-plan and
co-assess. Co-planning is critical
because co-teachers need time to develop the necessary rapport with each other
and think carefully about how to deliver instruction in order to meet the needs
for the students in their classes. Co-assessing
is crucial because teachers need to analyze the data they collect in order to
determine whether the instructions they delivered actually bring about the
outcomes they wanted to achieve.
While the benefits of co-teaching are clear, it is more expensive
to implement it than the traditional one-teacher-one-class approach. The main reason is we are utilizing two more licensed teachers to teach one class of students. Therefore, I urge everyone to keep in mind
not just the positive outcomes produced by co-teaching but also the resources
our school needs in other to implement this model effectively. During this past week’s Open House, many of
you saw snippets of what McCall has done to promote co-teaching and the
positive results it is creating. I hope
you will continue to support this very worthwhile effort.
Sincerely,
James Lin
Principal
McCall Middle School
