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What the Best Co-Teachers Do Every Spring

4/27/2018

It's springtime and the best co-teachers are getting ready for a year-end evaluation of their co-teaching efforts. Use one or more of the following ideas to gather information about the strengths and needs of your program.

Ask your students to complete a survey about their experiences with co-teaching. Use this one or design your own.
Videotape students as they respond to one or two brief questions about their co-taught classes. (These video clips can be a powerful tool for promoting co-teaching.)
Examine your attendance rates. With effective co-teaching, you can expect a boost in attendance rates at the secondary level.
Do you have students who will be exiting special education or ELL services? Powerful co-teaching should improve your exit rates.
Gather all of the co-teachers in the building to discuss what worked well and what needs to be changed for next year. Celebrate your successes while striving for even greater success next year!

For more ideas on sustaining and growing your co-teaching program, join me in Chicago in July for the National Train-the-Trainer Institute, Co-Teaching that Works!

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Not Your Mother's Boring, Old Scavenger Hunt!

4/13/2018

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When I was a kid, my mother used to try to get me out from under her feet by giving me a list of items to find outside. I would return an hour or so later with an odd collection of heart shaped rocks, twigs that looked like letters, and dead bugs. (It would take me quite awhile to gather the courage to pick up the dead bugs, and my mother was banking on that!)

Thanks to GooseChase for developing a much more exciting, technology-based version of a scavenger hunt!

Each GooseChase game has a list of missions that students complete. You can either choose from their large bank of missions or create your own. When creating your own, you get to describe each one and assign a point value. Finally, you can create up to three teams in the free version, giving them whatever name you’d like and setting up a privacy passcode for each team.

Last week, I used GooseChase with a group of about 50 adults who were interested in improving their teaching and presenting skills. They were divided into 3 teams (Red, Blue, Green) and had a list of four missions to complete. For example, one mission was to find research on the connection between movement and learning, snap a photo of it and submit the photo. Another was to take video of a movement that might be incorporated into a training session for adults.

Participants were highly engaged, quickly moving through the missions as they tried to beat their colleagues on other teams. And, best of all, they were generating content for their own learning, rather than being spoon-fed by the “sage on the stage.” I can see this being a highly motivating activity for students. At least one student per team will need access to a wi-fi enabled device with a camera and the GooseChase app pre-loaded.

Thanks to Richard Byrne for sharing this app on his site, Free Technology for Teachers. If you don't follow him, you should!

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Creating an Explicit Process - SDI in Action

4/2/2018

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Developing specially designed instruction (SDI) for math lessons can sometimes feel like a challenge. Special education teachers frequently ask me for examples of what this might look like in an inclusive classroom when we are using the general education curriculum.

I use seven key questions to help me plan (see my list here). Once I know which IEP goals are related to the lesson, I consider ways that I can teach students a learning strategy that will be transferrable to other lessons and settings.

At a recent co-planning session with a teacher, we analyzed a lesson that teaches students to use comparison bars as a strategy for solving addition and subtraction story problems. As I thought about my Question #5 – What is the metacognitive process a successful learner might use? – I realized that as a learner, I would want to have a step-by-step process in a concrete form. While the lesson expected the teachers to talk the students through the process, there was no visual of the process, nothing explicit or concrete. I have also found it very beneficial to teach students that when they are confused about a process, they can create a clear, step-by-step list of what to do. (This makes this skill more generalizable.)

Based on our discussion, we quickly listed the steps, then reduced the word count and added some visuals. We cleaned it up a bit so that we could print out cards for each student that might benefit.

To make this more powerful SDI, co-teachers can guide students to see how and when they can develop their own process cards to help with complex tasks. If this is done throughout the year, students will become independent and have a skill that can generalize into other situations.

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What the Best Co-Teachers Do Every Spring

Not Your Mother's Boring, Old Scavenger Hunt!

Creating an Explicit Process - SDI in Action

Anne M. Beninghof

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