co-teaching reflections

The co-teaching activity designed was an English reading day lesson. It was based on a book called “Stuck”, written by Oliver Jeffers. For the implementation of this session we decided to use three different types of co-teaching practices: one teach-one assist, parallel teaching and station teaching. At the end, we covered the 3 types of co-teaching with the activities we developed, although we would like to highlight that it was hard to teach children you do not know. For this reason, depending on the school we were, each teacher had a different role, and there was one teacher who had a major role in the school that was hers.

Going deeply into this fact, we believe that this activity cannot be considered a real co-teaching practice at all. On the one hand, when we had to go to a school that was not ours, we did not know the students and they did not know us. Therefore, we did not know how to treat them and we did not feel comfortable enough to take the group and start leading it. Moreover, we did not know the school, where things were or how to deal with some situations. We believe that real co-teaching is what we have been doing with our school mentor during this last months, because we both knew the students, how to deal with them, how to teach them, which kids need more help, since we have been working together for 4 months.

 

On the other hand, however, the activity went really good. Children had fun and loved the story. Moreover, they also learned a lot of vocabulary that they did not know before and they could link a reading activity with some fun, because sometimes kids relate reading with an obligation and we have to try to avoid this feeling with the English subject as it is very important for them to read. It was a good opportunity to provide the students with games in which the book was worked instead of using a comprehension drilling activity.

 

We are really happy about the experience we experienced as we got to see a different school, but we believe the general co-teaching activity should be modified in order to make it more relevant. As a way to improve it, we propose going to the other school at least 2 or 3 days so that you can meet the students and feel less unuseless during the co-teaching activity.

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