Teaching Together, While Apart: 3 Tips for Co-Teaching Virtually
Teachers need one another. Whether through resource sharing, co-teaching or a lunch time ‘vent session’ – we rely on one another for mutual support and expertise. Now that our educational world looks a bit different, we’re not always as near to one another as we’d like. That’s a difficult reality, but even in a virtual learning world, we can and should stay connected. In fact, there are a lot of things we can still do, including resource sharing, co-teaching and even that lunch time ‘vent session’… it just looks a bit different than before. Our need to stay connected and collaborate hasn’t changed, but our approach to doing so has. We’ve had to get creative, reframe and think outside of the box – which is what we do best!
Co-teaching is one example of a powerfully collaborative educational practice that may seem far out of reach in this new age of distance learning. However, it’s still incredibly important! Co-teaching parallels the philosophy of inclusion and illustrates the importance of communication, problem solving and diverse perspectives. We need co-teaching now more than ever to provide examples of healthy and productive relationships for our students. Although we can’t be together, we can still model what togetherness means and why relationships are so critical to helping us all learn and grow.
Not only is co-teaching still just as important – it’s still possible! Here are three tips to help you effectively implement co-teaching from afar with your colleagues.
1) Get Aligned
Create Ground Rules: Get on the same page with how you’ll work together. Define your responsibilities and personal/professional boundaries. Use ‘Backward Design’ to decide how you’ll assess students’ outcomes first and allow that direction to guide your lesson planning process.
Clarify Roles: Determine how you’ll integrate co-teaching practices into the weekly schedule and what that will mean for each of you. Will you be applying a variety of co-teaching models with synchronous presentation? Or will you be centering your work together on planning and assessment only, while presenting separately? Although any combination of approaches can work, your level of joint clarity on how your partnership will look is a key to success.
Develop A Communication Plan: Decide the frequency and medium for your regular touchpoints and block out time for collaborative planning at least once per week. Identify how often you expect to hear from one another between meetings – Quick email updates after lessons? A post-lesson debrief via video chat?
2) Initiate Systems
Choose Your Tools: Technology tools will play a major role in the co-planning and co-teaching you do this year. Work together to choose a tool or tools with which both parties are comfortable. Consider the work you want to do together and choose accordingly. Will you work together in the same virtual space? Asynchronously? Do you want to be able to collect data? Track changes? Google Apps like Docs, Sheets, and Slides are great, simple tools that allow for collaboration. But you might also want to consider something more visual like Padlet or Mural.
Create Agendas: It’s easy to get off track and spend your 30 minute plan period talking about what Joey did in math class, but agendas will help you to be productive, even if you have limited time. Structure your agenda according to priority and add time limits to ensure you get to everything. It doesn’t always feel natural to be so business-like about collaboration, but you’ll be sure to leave the meeting feeling accomplished. Don’t forget to build in some time for those vent sessions, too!
3) Stay Connected
Use Collective Language: When writing or speaking to your co-teachers and students, be sure to use terms like ‘we/us’ to reinforce a collaborative approach. You are a team and you’re modeling teamwork, so integrate these small but mighty words consistently to make your message of community-building clear.
Prioritize Reflection: Improvement comes through acknowledging what worked well and what didn’t. Virtually learning may be completely new, so be comfortable with a degree of trial and error. Build in at least 10 minutes of your weekly touchpoint to celebrate successes and troubleshoot missteps. A judgement-free zone for productive reflection will strengthen your relationship and support your own mental wellness.
We hope these few tips help you and your teaching partners get centered and prepared for more virtual collaboration. We understand these are challenging times and things won’t always go as planned, but we encourage you to lean on one another just as you always have. Consider the ideas we’ve shared, identify strategies that work for you and reach out to other colleagues to learn what’s working for them.
What steps will you take to teach together while apart this year?
This post was written collaboratively with Clare Killy, Director of Inclusive Solutions at Aspire Chicago. Clare leads Aspire Inclusive Solutions, developing high-quality, inclusion-focused tools to benefit the community. She is committed to connecting schools, businesses and organizations with the resources they need to be more inclusive of individuals with disabilities and their families.