Co-Teaching

Co-teaching has become a popular topic in the education realm. Though there are many advantages of having students with disabilities in a co-teaching setting, I believe our school systems are not ready for this type of learning environment.
For those who do not know what co-teaching is, it is a teaching style that asks for two teachers to come together to teach an inclusive classroom. An inclusive classroom is made up of both general education students as well as those suffering from a learning disability. The idea of having a co-teaching classroom is to include the learning disabled children in the general education setting to help with social differences and learning techniques. The model co-teaching classroom has many different types of strategies such as parallel teaching, one-teacher one-assist, station teaching, alternative teaching, one-teacher one observe, and team teaching. These strategies give each teacher even responsibility and allow for one of the teachers to give special attention to the students needing extra help.
Though co-teaching an inclusive classroom sounds very beneficial to all students in the classroom, more times than not the teachers do not use these strategies. I have personally been in numerous co-teaching classroom settings and have not seen the co-teaching strategies being used. Along with personal experience, I have interviewed an educator teaching an inclusive classroom and the feedback was not so positive. It seems that many co-teaching classrooms usually have one teacher do the bulk of the teaching while the other teacher runs off papers, grades papers, pulls aside one student at a time, or even just sits in the back of the class and listens. I believe this is a common practice in a co-teaching classroom for many reasons. This situation often occurs because the general education teacher feels the classroom is his/hers and they do not want to share the space/leadership, the relationship between the two teachers is not strong which leads to bad communication, there is not enough time for the teachers to sit down and plan out an organized routine, or the class size is too large to follow an effective grouping strategy.
Also, I believe co-teaching is an ineffective classroom environment because the grouping of students in a co-teaching classroom can range from gifted to severely disabled. Though co-teaching provides students with a good social environment, the teacher is pressed to teach students of a wide range of intelligence. Teaching students with a range from gifted to severely disabled can be done in some circumstances, but it is more likely to leave the gifted students bored and the disabled students lost. The gifted students often become bored with school when having to learn a subject below their intelligence level and they are not pushed to their highest academic achievement where as the learning disabled children push through material quicker than their understanding and feel lost/discouraged when trying to do an assignment. Though the co-teacher can pull one group aside whether it be the higher or lower, this creates a split amongst the classroom just as if they were seperated into different classrooms. By having the students in a seperate classroom versus being pulled aside in the general classroom gives the lower students a more quiet setting as well as allowing the students to learn without worrying about the other groups perception of them being in the lower group. Not only do the teachers have a hard time teaching such a wide range of children, they are pressed by the state, county, and school systems to produce results that are unrealistic when teaching a co-teaching classroom.
All in all, I believe co-teaching an inclusive classroom model sounds much better than it actually is. I do not think that co-teaching should necessarily be done away with, I just think there needs to be many modifcations made to the teaching style before it is used within a school. If the education system could find a good model for co-teaching an inclusive classroom, the teachers and students would benefit greatly!