Coteaching strengthens learning

Initial results have been encouraging. Coteaching creates a supportive learning environment for teacher candidates to learn to teach. The cooperating teachers appreciate having another professional available to assist with instruction, and introduce fresh ideas. Most importantly, the children benefit. Having two teachers in the classroom at all times increases the opportunity to identify and assist students who may be struggling, while keeping the rest of the class moving forward.

To learn more about the implementation of coteaching into UD’s ECE and ETE teacher preparation programs, see UDaily’s Collaborative Teaching article. 

The History of Coteaching at UD (Meet the Research team)

Coteaching has been utilized for at the University of Delaware for over 10 years in both the College of Education and Human Development and the College of Arts & Science. In 2003-2004 Kathryn Scantlebury introduced coteaching to UD, using it as the student teaching model for the Secondary Science teacher education program. During the early design-based research studies, Scantlebury worked with Jennifer Gallo-Fox and Susan Gleason to develop and improve the model. A portion of Gallo-Fox’s early research formed the basis for her doctoral research.

In 2005, Laurie Palmer, School of Education, initiated coteaching as a model for learning to teach within the elementary teacher education program for downstate Delaware, where it continued for eight years. By building strong partner expectations, Palmer was able to assist with the integration of coteaching into UD’s Elementary teacher program on their main campus.

In 2008-2009, SOE field instructor Stephanie Kotch-Jester initiated use of coteaching in a second Delaware school district. Kotch-Jester incorporated this ETE model into her doctoral work in 2010-2012.

In 2012, Gallo-Fox began developing a coteaching model for early childhood teacher education. The model was launched in 2013 and Gallo-Fox continues to utilize iterative programmatic research design to study and improve the ECE model.

Coteaching committees were formed in 2013 to expand the formal use of coteaching within CEHD, and in Fall 2014 coteaching was expanded across ETE and ECE as the primary model for learning to teach. As a result, over 266 teacher candidates will coteach at UD in 2015, engaging in 380 field placements.

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Current Research

The UD Coteaching Research Group has been meeting since Fall 2013 to study the implementation and design of the coteaching programs and participant learning in order to enhance on-going programmatic work. Coteaching is being studied by individual program and across the three teacher education programs utilizing coteaching at the University.

As a collective, the group utilizes multiple research methods to examine the existing coteaching models with a focus on professional development, the roles of stakeholders, and examples of exemplary practice in order to strengthen coteaching as a model for learning to teach. Common themes across the programs, as well as, the unique challenges and outcomes faced by each program that result from different structural supports are explored.

The group has two research foci:

Coteaching Implementation and Participant Learning
Coteaching at the University of Delaware is grounded in sociocultural theories of learning. Sociocultural perspectives of coteaching situate learning in the on-going interactions between teacher candidates and clinical educators. It is argued that through coteaching alongside others, the metacognitive processes of teaching are made explicit and that teachers learn to teach through their ongoing interactions.

To examine the ways coteachers share information and think within the coteaching construct, researchers utilize a range of data sources:

• videos of practice
• recordings of coteaching meetings
• interviews
• participant journals
• classroom records
• programmatic materials

Working within their individual programs, researchers studying coteaching dyads. Then in cross-programmatic work, the research team studies the data to develop a better understanding of the process of coteaching. Current work focuses on specific coteaching interactions (coplanning, copractice, and coreflection) to determine ways that learning is, or is not afforded within the model and to develop approaches for enhancing teacher learning.

Development of a Coteaching Evaluation

There are no psychometrically rigorous, validated survey instruments to assess teacher candidates’, clinical educators’ and students’ classroom coteaching experiences.  The group has developed survey items for clinical educators, teacher candidates, and elementary pupils based on core themes associated with coteaching as a model for student teaching that included coplanning, corespect, coevaluation and practices such as huddling, and stepping up and back.

The clinical educator and teacher candidate surveys were field tested during the 2014-2105 academic year with 196 clinical educators and 139 teacher candidates responding. The research group conducted confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to test the survey’s qualitatively thematically identified subscales of the survey. The final survey consists of 8 subscales:

1. Equality in the Classroom
2. Learning Opportunities for Students
3. Connecting Theory to Practice
4. Coteacher Collaboration
5. Professional Development
6. Personal Skill Development
7. Types of Teaching
8. Reflections on Coteaching

Reliability as measured by Cronbach’s alpha ranged from .679 to .875 for each of the six subscales.

The group has also developed a survey for upper elementary and middle school students. Initial field testing of the survey began in Spring 2015 and will continue in Fall 2015. Eight-nine students participated in the first round of field testing, a large-scale field test is underway.

In 2014, Kathryn Scantlebury, Jennifer Gallo-Fox and Elizabeth Soslau were awarded two Instructional Improvement Grants by UD’s Center for Teaching and Learning.

• $17,880 for Improving Coteaching across the University of Delaware’s Teacher Education Programs.
• $19,000 for Improving Undergraduate Student Teachers’ Reflective, Adaptive, and Metacognitive Practice across the University of Delaware’s Teacher Education programs through Multimedia Approaches.