Virtual Co-Teaching
COVID is still very much a reality here in Asia. Since starting school in August, we’ve been in person for maybe six or seven weeks. The rest of our teaching and learning has been all virtual and synchronous. It wasn’t the most ideal situation having moved back into a co-teaching role this year as teachers and students are stressed from having to navigate their education online. It’s been a tough transition, but that being said, we’ve seen a lot of success!
When initiating a virtual co-teaching relationship, I would often receive the response, “Oh let’s just wait until we’re back in person.” However, now that our virtual learning space is becoming more and more of a permanent reality, waiting to go back in person isn’t realistic. I’ve been working with my more willing colleagues to implement virtual co-teaching models to demonstrate that it can be successful without expending a lot of energy. Over the course of the past few months, we’ve developed a co-teaching routine that has greatly benefited the students as they continue to learn online.
Co-Teach with a Single Subject
One big piece we had to navigate was our new virtual schedule. Periods were shortened to only 45 minutes with a 15 minute break in between each class. This helps both students and teachers reduce their screen time, and it gives us a moment to take a mental break away from the computer. However, 45 minutes flies by extremely fast, especially when things are virtual. If we’re lucky, we can manage a maximum of two different activities in this time frame. We’ve found that co-teaching with a single subject two or three times a week is our maximum capacity at this moment, especially since I’m the only co-teacher for the whole school.
I co-teach with one colleague in ELA class, but I’m also encouraging him to incorporate a lot of our strategies in other content areas. Co-teaching in a single subject has both helped us develop our co-teaching relationship as well as get him more comfortable with different co-teaching models. We plan to potentially expand our co-teaching into other content areas during the second semester. This can also help if you’re unfamiliar with the curriculum. It will give you time to learn the ins and outs of whatever curriculum your using one at a time as opposed to learning everything all at once.
Maintain Co-Planning
When talking with other co-teachers, co-planning seems to be the most important piece of the puzzle. Yet, it’s also the piece that seems to be cut due to time constraints and meetings. My colleagues and I have designated a 30 minute co-planning period each week during our matching prep periods. This is done either in person if we’re both on campus, or via video chat. Since I’m working with my colleague in ELA, we set aside some time for us to look at what standards the class is working on each week. This gives me context to embed language components within the lesson, and from there we decide on what co-teaching model we’ll be utilizing. Co-planning may take longer than usual at first, but the more you do it the faster it becomes. This is typically because co-teachers become more familiar with the content, and a certain flow of co-teaching develops that makes things smoother.
Co-planning doesn’t just have to be during a meeting. After I plan with my colleague, we go our separate ways and prepare materials. We’re always asking each other questions and sharing resources via chat. Since we use Seesaw as our primary teaching tool, we share our lessons with each other and give each other feedback. Sometimes I’ll add language components or scaffolds to his slides that we didn’t discuss during our planning. Over time, he started adding these pieces on his own. This consistency is a crucial part of co-teaching because I’m in so many other classrooms. I remind teachers all of the time to implement these strategies when I’m not around. If teachers are relying solely on their co-teacher to implement language instruction, then ultimately our students won’t gain much.
Since my scope has been so large and teachers are so stressed out, I had to meet teachers where they’re at.. Some were either not ready for co-teaching or there wasn’t an immediate need in their classrooms. Instead, I work with them during their planning sessions to help them implement various language strategies within their classroom. For example, I worked with one fourth grade teacher as her students were moving into writing survival stories. She’s been working on using more descriptive writing. I recommended some strategies and modeled them in her class.
When talking with other co-teachers, co-planning seems to be the most important piece of the puzzle.
Co-teaching online has varied depending on each teacher. Some classrooms that I know really need the support simply don’t have the capacity to be co-teaching. So, I expanded my co-teaching support to willing specialists. I recently have been co-teaching/coaching our P.E teacher as she had several questions about how to support language development in her class, specifically with oral language output and vocabulary usage.
I started by conducting observations of her classes to get a better idea on how her lessons are structured and where we could fit in discourse strategies. We then met to plan the lessons for the week, and based on my observations I recommended a discourse strategy and modeled it throughout several lessons that were planned for the week. In this case, I recommended expanding TPR (Total Physical Response) and providing opportunities for students to engage with their vocabulary. I modeled the strategies and we debriefed at the end of the week, sharing our observations and reflections. The P.E teacher committed to trying out some of these strategies on her own when we weren’t co-teaching together.
I’ve co-taught with specialists before (check out @readysetcoteach’s blog post about my experience here) with tremendous success. Opportunities to build rich language are plentiful in specialist classes, yet they are often overlooked when considering language support.
V: A sentence stem up top, “Our heart is important because it _____.” with a selection of choices accompanied with pictures on the bottom: pumps blood, carries oxygen, cleans waste.
This is a discourse example I used for our elementary P.E class with first graders to encourage the use of content vocabulary.
My favorite tool that has been in regular use since virtually co-teaching is breakout rooms. From a co-teaching perspective, breakout rooms are a perfect tool for station/alternative/parallel teaching. Typically, these models are ideally done within the classroom, but teachers often run into the issues of space and noise level. Breakout rooms lend themselves naturally to these co-teaching models as they create a separate space for each teacher to work with groups of students.
Using the stations model, I worked in classrooms where the homeroom teacher led a reading mini lesson and I led a grammar mini lesson. We started together in the main room to introduce the goals and objectives for the lesson, then we seamlessly broke off into our own separate rooms. After 15 minutes, I wrapped up the lesson and left the room to join the second breakout room while the homeroom teacher replaced me. A 15 minute time frame feels like the perfect amount of time to complete an activity for a virtual elementary lesson – anything longer and the students start to lose interest and become visibly exhausted. The last 5-10 minutes of class was a reflection on what we completed and a brain break before we transition to another lesson.
One student in a first grade classroom is an emerging English speaker. Being online has been a struggle since it’s a lot more difficult to interact with his peers, which is an essential component to language development. When being introduced to new content, this student had to process the language as well as the academic topics that were being discussed. Over time, he became lost and disengaged.
We used alternative teaching to help mitigate this. During our “flex periods” (an optional 45 minute period every day to catch up on work or receive 1-1 support) I met with this particular student to review the following day’s ELA lesson in a breakout room while the other students were catching up on their assignments. The ELA lesson was prepped ahead of time, so I used some components of the lesson as well as tailored components to fit his needs. This way, pieces of the upcoming lesson would be familiar to him and he would have a head start while simultaneously customizing it to his interests. In our 15 minute session, we reviewed vocabulary and discourse models. The next day, we completed the lesson as a class and he was more eager to participate since the material was familiar.
Finally, parallel teaching is another great model to use in breakout rooms. Managing an entire virtual classroom of students is daunting – it’s difficult to keep everyone’s attention and it’s challenging to monitor student progress during their activities. I use parallel teaching with my co-teacher specifically during guided/independent practice. This gives us the opportunity to work with students in smaller groups as opposed to guiding everyone through the lesson activities at the same time. It also allows us to answer more student questions and differentiate a lot easier.
Initially, I was quite reluctant to try them out as I felt that from a management perspective it would be a massive headache, but after setting clear expectations and lots of practice, the kids are able to engage in breakout rooms independently.
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Co-teaching virtually took a lot of practice. None of us really knew how it would turn out, so it required a significant amount of trial and error, reflection, and tweaking. We also needed a constant reminder to be kind to ourselves – none of us signed up for virtual teaching, but it’s a reality for the foreseeable future. Feel free to share your virtual co-teaching success stories and processes!