Dr. t. lee

Reflections on the Co-teaching Experience

I am concerned about the sustainability of the changes implemented during my co-teaching experience. As one of my co-teachers noted in her final survey, many of the changes we implemented as co-teachers will be difficult to sustain with one teacher. It also remains to be seen how much of the instructional supports my co-teachers will continue to use with their classes given the state of instructional resources. For example, the writing rituals such as only using pencil were not maintained with consistency. Beginning writers should use pencil because the use of pen produces smears and less friction on the page than the use of pencil; this often renders writing illegible and makes it difficult to discern between teacher feedback and student writing. Additionally, using pencil enables beginning writers to more easily erase and correct errors.

There were also some areas of my co-teaching experience that needed development. First is the lack of depth with respect to student assessment; classroom assessment should be used to evaluate and inform instruction. Georgian co-teachers were required to give four “results tests” per semester. The testing environments and content currently in use are not preparing Georgian students to compete in the international education sector. While I modeled for my co-teachers how to incorporate the use of student surveys and how to use rubric based assessments and a variety of formal and informal assessments, it remains to be seen whether and how they will implement more authentic forms of assessment.

The second area needing development is the ability of Georgian co-teachers to follow lesson plans or maintain timetables. Every co-teacher teacher struggled with gauging the amount of instructional time needed to facilitate activities and timing instructional activities during station teaching and parallel teaching. Georgian co-teachers often skip the limited writing practice, class composition, and student dialogue activities available in the English World Program – instead they veer off into lengthy tangential grammatical analyses. While such activities may produce great transcribers, they will not produce scholars or individuals who are equipped with the thinking and conversational skills needed in global commerce. Georgian co-teachers also had difficulties sticking to the lesson plan when one was available (for example, the co-teacher who had the level 1 teacher’s guide did not attempt to conduct the lessons in the manner suggested by the authors; thus embedded skills such as following directions and scaffolded learning of grammatical concepts were not introduced to the students with integrity).

Finally, co-teachers are assigned to instruct too many levels and not provided with enough prep time; master schedules need to be revised to limit the number of sections and levels taught so that teachers can become more specialized at lesson planning and curriculum development. These issues can be corrected with more effective administration practices accompanied by targeted teacher training and observation.

Even with these needed improvements, the majority of my co-teachers were enthusiastic about learning and applying a variety of instructional methodologies. Given the proper intensive, ongoing training, instructional resources, and financial support they will take Georgian students to new heights we cannot even begin to imagine at this time.

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