Two heads are better than one, or so the saying goes. But in a high school [1] classroom, are two teachers better than one? Asks U.S. News.
“It’s all in how you implement it,” says Susan Fitzell, an educational consultant. “It doesn’t work if you just have two bodies in the room.”
To be effective, both teachers need to be interacting with students, breaking them into small groups, and teaching to the needs of individual students, says Fitzell, a former special education teacher who began coteaching at Londonderry Senior High School [2] in New Hampshire [3] in 1993 and now coaches other educators on how to coteach. While Fitzell says she’s seen an increase in schools pairing two general education instructors in one classroom to manage larger classes, coteaching teams typically pair a special education teacher with an instructor specializing in general education areas, such as math or science [4]. This allows students with learning disabilities to take the same courses as their peers while still receiving individualized instruction, she says…