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Co Teaching : A Service Delivery Model

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Co-teaching is a service delivery model in which two educators-one typically a general education teacher and one a special education teacher or other specialist-combine their expertise to jointly teach a heterogeneous group of students, some of whom have disabilities or other special needs, in a single classroom for part or all of the school day (Friend, 2011). Co-teaching can be thought as a marriage, it can be beautiful and inspiring to watch, but can be scary and not always work out. There are several issues that can affect co-teaching such as planning time, roles and responsibilities in the classroom. Yet, co- teaching can work with the right approach and hard work. Co-teaching can be compared to marriage in the sense of in the beginning it is like dating, where you start to get to know each other, when you reach the engagement level, everything is working great, and the final step is marriage where sometimes you run into problems but it’s okay, because you have each other. Effective co-teaching must maximize the benefit of having two individuals with different type of expertise working together (Kloo & Zigmond, 2008; Little & Dieker, 2009). Co-teachers should discuss their instructional set of beliefs, their own strengths and weakness as educators, their expectations for themselves and each other, and then their preparation for assuming co-teaching roles then it can be decided how to best use their talents in the classroom (Friend, 2011). Co-teaching exists due to

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