The co-teaching strategies we have used most often are team teaching and one-teach-one-assist. We had a blast team teaching math on Wednesday. Somehow our lesson turned into a sort of game show staring Ms. Morrow and Ms. Jorde. We were talking about using the distributive property to break difficult multiplication problems into 2 or 3 easier problems. With two of us we were able to kind of take on characters--Diane being the stubborn one who hadn't learned her higher multiplication facts and me being the one who knew the facts and knew how to break the problem down. The kids thought it was hilarious and Diane and I had a good time too. We hadn't done much co-teaching for a while as I have been taking over most lessons so it was refreshing and fun to team teach again.
While every lesson certainly can't become a show it was a fun way to spice up a math lesson on a grey day.
Your math teaching story sounds exactly like a team teaching approach, although I think some of what happened was spontaneous, rather than planned. That's fine! I hope I get a chance to see you and Diane try a co-teaching strategy when I'm visiting. This expectation is new to everyone, so I need to build my background knowledge for how a co-taught lesson looks/sounds in action, and what it took to put the lesson together. Co-teaching sounds appealing to me for many, many reasons, but I know the reality of organizing for this approach requires knowledge, additional time, and some risk-taking. Let's think about scheduling a time for me to visit when you've intentionally planned one of the 7 co-teaching strategies to be included. Sound good?
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