The Collaborative Initiative in a High Achieving School: Working Together to Achieve Success
Collaborative teaching has been defined in many ways in recent research. Perhaps the most descriptive and appropriate moniker is “co-teaching.” In true co-teaching, two or more educators possessing distinct sets of knowledge and skills (for example, a general educator and a special educator) work together to teach academically heterogeneous groups of students in the general education classroom (Bauwens and Hourcade 1995). Many administrators in recent years have taken a definition such as this, placed two professionals in the classroom, crossed their fingers, and hoped for the best. Dr. Marilyn Friend, the widely perceived “guru” of the collaborative initiative from the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, more sharply focused the definition as Two (or more) educators or other professionally certified staff (not a paraprofessional) share instructional responsibility for a single group of students primarily in a single classroom or workspace to teach required curriculum with mutual ownership, pooled resources, and joint accountability although each individual’s level of participation may vary (Friend, 2008).
The need for co-teaching is simple, during the 1995-96 academic year, three-fourths of students with disabilities received most or all of their educational programs in general education classrooms. That trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future (US Department of Education 1998). The focus on over-identification of special education students and the introduction of Response to Intervention (RTI) added to the urgency of finding solutions to the new classrooms of America.