What It Takes to Make Co-Teaching Work
December 5, 2018
By: Sarah Schwartz
Source: Education Week
In Lauren Eisinger and Kara Houppert’s co-taught 5th grade classroom, every instructional choice requires a lot of planning.
When Eisinger, a special education teacher at Naples Elementary School in upstate New York, and Houppert, a 5th grade teacher, wanted to start a class book club last year, they knew they would have to think creatively to accommodate reading levels spanning 2nd to 6th grades.
So they did a “book tasting,” giving students a choice among several different, appropriately-leveled texts. Once they grouped students, teachers ran the activity like “more of a guided reading,” said Houppert, with both of them reading aloud to different groups to support special education students who struggled with fluency and decoding.