Thread: Team or Collaborative or ? Teaching

I have been in a departmentalized situation for several years now teaching 5th and 4th grades. Currently I teach fourth grade. I love this model because students benefit from the movement changing classes provide and if they don't mesh well with a teacher they are stuck all day with the same teaching style. For the teacher it means they can focus on an area where they excel----an area where they have more education. It also means less planning.

The state of Georgia is rapidly heading for inclusion which means all special ed students will be in a regular ed classroom and the special ed teacher will be in the regular room. Very few students will be self-contained in a special ed. classroom all day or even half a day. This may work for some special ed children but I see where we will have problems with many of the most severe students.

The state of Georgia is rapidly heading for inclusion which means all special ed students will be in a regular ed classroom and the special ed teacher will be in the regular room.

I didn't think there was any place where inclusion wasn't done in public school.....wow.

We have been using a team teaching system in our school, in grades 3 and up, since I started a year ago and in my previous school for the four years prior to my leaving.

It allows students to take advantage of the strong areas of each teacher. Moreover students interact with a variety of different students in the educational enviromnent, not just on the playground.

I have done it at two different schools. I've seen good and bad. The bad happened when folks did not have their hearts in it and resisted the change from self contained classes.

I partner teach with one other teacher and I have been lucky. Our teaching styles are perfect matches. This is a huge improvement from what I had before. It was a nightmare. There are good and bad combinations, so a lot of thought should go into which teachers teach together.

I have team taught for most of my career, in numerous formats. In one format, the kids K - 4 were in multi-age classes, and a team of 5 teachers switched kids in ability, not grade-level, groups for reading and math. We also switched homerooms for science units periodically.

That was the most difficult to manage. The simplest was working with one other teacher, and moving some kids between us for reading or math. I also did one year where we moved kids just for science and social studies; I had a 5/6 combo with only 6 6th graders, my partner had a 6/7 combo with only 7 6th graders. I did science, she did social studies, and we just sent the 6th graders back and forth. At that point, social studies and science is much more specific, and there was no meeting ground between the grade levels.

Currently I'm teaching 6-7-8 in a K-8 school, and we are departmentalized. My kids have 3 teachers; language arts, math, and science, with humanities taught by the homeroom teacher. It's a team of just 3 teachers, and I like it. We each get to focus on our personal strength.