Release the expectation that questions must be followed by answers, and instead position questioning as a key part of the learning journey itself. 

On a recent episode of our Teaching Today podcast, Dr. Roberta Lenger Kang and Dr. Cristina Compton are in conversation with Dan Rothstein, Luz Santana, and Sarah Westbrook from The Right Question Institute, an organization founded on the belief that when people of all ages learn to ask the right questions, it leads to feeling a new sense of agency, confidence, and power. In particular, they talk about the power of the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a structured method for generating and improving questions. 

In its simplest terms, facilitating the QFT means walking participants through the process of producing questions, improving questions, strategizing around their questions, and reflecting on what they learned. To start, participants are given four rules for producing questions around a selected focus:

• Ask as many questions as you can
• Do not stop to answer, judge, or discuss
• Write down every question exactly as stated
• Change any statements into questions

Then, participants work to improve questions by identifying questions as open-ended or closed, reflecting on the advantages of each type, and experimenting with changing open-ended questions to close-ended questions, and vice versa. Strategizing around questions means participants identify the questions they find most important, and consider what they would need to know and do in order to work towards answers. Finally, participants reflect on what they learn throughout the process. 

Recently, I utilized the QFT in a whole school PD at one of our partner schools in the Bronx. In a recent round of classroom visits, the school leadership team had noticed a trend: more often than not, lessons lacked closure. Students would be in the middle of a learning activity when the bell would ring and they would need to pack up and move to their next class. I wanted to use the QFT as a way to launch this new PD topic. 

It was really interesting to listen to the episode in light of this experience. Here, I share five big ideas from the episode and reflect on their connection to my recent facilitation of the QFT, in hopes of bringing them to life with examples from the field. 

​At the beginning of the podcast, Luz shares with us the origin story of the QFT — how her and Dan’s work with families connected to a dropout prevention program in a low income community north of Boston inspired them to work on development of the skill of question formulation. 

Since so much of the mission of The Right Question Institute seems to be about empowering students in asking their own questions, I share the surprise that Cristina expresses about the fact that the strategy was actually born from work with adults. 

But upon further reflection, it makes sense. In Malcom Knowles’ six assumptions of adult learners, he stresses the importance of intrinsic motivation, or the idea that “adults learn best when motivated from within, not from incentives or other external influences.” Letting teachers drive the inquiry and steer the direction of the learning is crucial to intrinsic motivation, and the QFT is one possible and powerful lever for doing so. 

Relating back to my own experience, this point felt particularly salient for a topic like lesson closure — which, I think most would agree, is pretty dry on the surface. It felt especially important to consider how to engage teachers in a way that felt authentic, beyond basic compliance. 

​I’ll admit that when Cristina asks the panel a question about fidelity and what it looks like in relation to the QFT, I got a little nervous. In my PD session, I did not follow the QFT “to fidelity” in the sense of strictly adhering to the four steps that they outline. Rather, I took it upon myself to make some tweaks based on my content, audience, and purpose. For example, I didn’t have teachers change questions from closed to open, or open to closed; I thought our limited time would be better spent trying to categorize the questions into themes. 

So, I was heartened to hear how Sarah and the team were defining fidelity partly as the presence of those three types of thinking: divergent thinking, or “that really creative, generative thinking that happens when you first produce questions,” convergent thinking, which happens when “you’re working on the form of your question or when you’re prioritizing,” and metacognition, or “thinking about your thinking, which happens all the way through.” 

According to this definition, I think my adaptation of the protocol could still be considered faithful to the spirit and purpose of the QFT. This definition should also empower other teachers and facilitators to make the protocol work for them. 

​Dan’s point that the QFT can serve multiple purposes — formative assessment being one of them — really resonated with my facilitation experience as well. When the school’s principal shared that this was an area of growth for teachers, I trusted her assessment, but knew I didn’t have the full picture. I immediately began posing questions of my own: what was preventing teachers from closing their lessons? Was it a lack of conviction in the importance, a lack of concrete strategies, or something else I couldn’t have anticipated? The themes that emerged from their questions (many around the challenges of pacing) helped to steer the direction of the inquiry cycle to directly respond to their interests and needs.

​In summarizing some of the conversation, Roberta reflects on how the QFT “flips the script” on traditional learning in a few crucial ways, not only in terms of who is asking the questions, but also in terms of the purpose behind asking them — not to “fill in the blank” but as a way to embark on a learning “expedition.” 

When I returned to the Bronx the week following the QFT to continue the learning series, the school’s principal was excited to share that she already was noticing a positive shift in teachers’ practice around lesson closure. On a surface level, this was pretty surprising; after all, we hadn’t actually answered most of the questions yet, or discussed any concrete best practices. But in light of the podcast discussion, it makes sense: The questions themselves become the learning, or at least a large part of it. 

Here, Sarah reminds us that when trying the QFT for the first time, or in a new context, we have to tolerate the messiness of learning, recognizing that both facilitation and participation with any new protocol or strategies requires some trial and error, as well as multiple opportunities for mastery. 

I want to highlight this point, so as not to misrepresent my facilitation experience; while it was mostly positive, there were also some challenges. Teacher feedback suggests many, if not most, of the teachers found the PD session engaging and understood its purpose. Still, one teacher shared their frustration that the session was “focused on the problem” and not the solution. To me, this feedback highlights Roberta’s point that this way of engaging with a topic is a paradigm shift; when we enter a space as a learner, we expect to be given answers. But it also highlights for me the need as a facilitator to be even more explicit about the fact that protocol represents the beginning of a learning journey and not its entirety. Furthermore, as Luz suggests, I returned to the teacher-generated questions in subsequent sessions to make their connection to our work clear.

Look beyond traditional forms of data to choose a co-teaching approach that aligns with your students' needs and goals. 

Throughout my time as a coach at CPET, I’ve done a lot of professional development around co-teaching, and one problem I face is this: teachers, ever the committed and curious group, often want to try out whatever co-teaching approach we’re modeling and discussing right away — like in the next day’s lesson. 

You might be wondering: wait, why is this a problem? And I agree — this is a pretty good “problem” to have. I am so heartened when teachers exhibit this kind of eagerness and openness. At the same time, I worry that professional development on co-teaching can sometimes be interpreted as a “bag of tricks” to try and apply at random. We must remember that not all co-teaching models are equally effective in any given situation; we must select them thoughtfully and intentionally with our specific students, context, and content in mind. Ideally, and as much as possible, we want to choose a co-teaching approach based on a) our learning goals for students and b) what our data tells us about students’ relationship to those goals. 

Before I offer some specifics, I have to admit something: my former self — my early-career classroom teacher self — might have rolled my eyes at my current-coach-self writing an article on data-informed co-teaching. This is because I had a very narrow definition of data; I associated the word only with the scores that resulted from high-stakes and standardized testing. As a Special Education teacher, I was committed to seeing my students as more than a number, and so I resisted exclusively quantitative approaches to data analysis. 

As a coach, I am still committed to seeing students as more than a test score, but my definition of data has broadened over the years. While quantitative data analysis might have its place, I have come to understand student writing, student surveys, exit tickets, student conferences, and classroom observation as valuable data points that should inform instruction. As you consider the examples below, I encourage you to think of these things as data, too. 

Here is a glimpse into how your classroom data might inform your co-teaching approach. Below are three of the six co-teaching models and how different data insights might lead you to choose that particular model. 

​
You might use Station Teaching if…

• Your data suggests that students would benefit from review opportunities with certain topics before an assessment or project; 
• Your data suggests that students would benefit from gaining some background or context around a specific text or topic before digging in more deeply; 
• Your data reveals that your students have a wide range of interests in relation to a topic, and you’d like to incorporate as many of those interests as possible into instruction.

You might use Alternative Teaching if….

• Your data reveals that most of your students have reached a particular learning goal and are ready to move on, but a small group of students need further support;
• Your data reveals that most of your students need more time and support with a particular learning goal, but a small group of students are ready for enrichment or extension opportunities.

You might use One Teach, One Observe if…

• You simply don’t have the data you need on students’ progress with a particular goal to make an informed decision on what to do next;
• You’re getting conflicting information from various data points, and want to deepen your understanding of what’s going on with some focused classroom observation. 

In reality, there are many factors that inform our decisions about our co-teaching approach: our physical space, our co-teaching relationship, our principal’s preference, or the amount of time we have to co-plan. Content-specific considerations are also crucial; not all lessons would be well-suited for a stations lesson, for example. I am not naive to these factors and the impact they have on teachers’ practices. At the same time, I think it is helpful to remember that our co-teaching approaches should be serving our students, and not the other way around. 
​

Rethink this co-teaching model that, when used thoughtfully, increases teachers' ability to respond to student needs. 

​Of the six established co-teaching models, One Teach, One Observe is the one that gets a bad rap. In my experience as a coach, working with leadership and teacher teams to make the most of co-teaching, One Teach, One Observe is often the one administrators want to take off the table completely.

“If I’m dedicating the resources of two teachers to one classroom, I want there to actually be two teachers in the room,” is something I often hear, in one way or another. And it’s understandable that there would be an expectation of seeing two teachers actively supporting and interacting with students in a co-taught classroom. At the same time, I would argue that when used strategically and thoughtfully, the One Teach, One Observe model is a powerful tool for formative assessment and data-informed teaching. Unfortunately, there are some common misconceptions that cloud our understanding of the model and prevent us from using it as such. 

Here are some common myths around One Teach, One Observe worth busting. 

Often, I see or hear the model suggested for newly established co-teaching teams — as a way for the newer teacher to get to know the style and practices of the more seasoned teacher, or as a way to learn from their expertise. While one could make a case for this in certain contexts, it’s clear that this diverts effort and attention from the students in the room — the opposite of our goals in a co-taught classroom. Instead, students should be the focus of our observations; the observing teacher collects data around how students are responding to information or engaging in classroom work. 

The power of observation in the classroom is often acknowledged and discussed, but focused and sustained observation can feel like a pie-in-the-sky expectation when teachers face so many demands for their attention: a student comes in late and needs catching up, attendance is due, a video needs to be cued for the next portion of the lesson, two students need help settling a disagreement. The list goes on. 

This is the beauty of having two teachers in the room: one teacher can attend to these needs, while the other remains zeroed in on collecting the important data. 

​While it is true that the One Teach, One Observe model may require less planning than other models — and can be an option when co-planning is just not possible — communication and preparation are required for using this model to its fullest potential. First, co-teachers must decide — ideally together — that a particular lesson or lesson section provides an important opportunity to learn more about students’ current understandings or performance with particular concepts or skills; it is important to remember that our goals for student learning inform our choices around co-teaching approaches, and not the other way around. 

Second, we must decide the specific skills, understandings, or academic habits on which to focus our observations. In Teach like a Champion 2.0, Doug Lemov discusses the difference between simply “watching” students as they work, and “tracking” their progress through observation, with the latter meaning “the active seeking of the most important indicators of learning” (p. 45). In preparing to collect observational data during a lesson, we must ask ourselves: what specifically in students’ work or discussion will show me that they are “getting it”? We then must determine and prepare an easy-to-maintain system for tracking those specific “look-fors” (e.g. a list of student names, with a place to make a hash mark every time they refer to the map in their discussion on geographic factors). 

Perhaps the most coordination and preparation, however, comes with deciding what to do with the observational data once it’s collected — that is, how it will be used to make instructional decisions. Co-teachers might decide ahead of time that the data will be used to inform student grouping in real time; students who need further support with specific skills might work with one teacher in a small group, while the rest of the class continues on with the next learning objective. This requires having materials or teaching points prepared for the small group. Or, if the skills being assessed are not necessarily prerequisite to the day’s lesson, co-teachers might decide to look at the data together at the end of the day to determine differentiation or determine strategic grouping for the next day; perhaps students who would benefit from more practice with a particular skill will have a differentiated task, or the option to spend time at a learning center that supports them with review. 

In order to support co-teaching teams in all phases of planning, I have created an observational planning template to guide teachers in the before, during, and after of collecting observational data. 

​This is a myth that applies to all the co-teaching approaches — that co-teachers should stick to one model for an entire lesson — when in reality, hybridizing or sequencing multiple models within a lesson is often the way to more effectively leverage them for student success. 

This remains true in relation to the One Teach, One Observe model — if we are intentional and targeted in the type of data we are collecting, it is unlikely that observation is necessary for an entire lesson, anyway. Consider using this model at strategic points throughout a lesson — while students complete a Do Now activity, or for the first problem or question they are answering independently. This will free the second teacher up to provide more interactive support for the remaining time. 

​One of the drawbacks of the One, Teach, One Observe model — especially when used inflexibly or too often — is that one teacher might be relegated to an “assistant” role in the eyes of the student, a consequence we know can negatively impact classroom culture and dynamics. One way to mitigate that risk is to alternate the teacher observing and the teacher leading. This way, students see both teachers as instructional leaders, and both teachers have the opportunity to gain valuable insight through observation. 

With two teachers in the classroom collaborating and working together toward student learning, the opportunities to respond to students’ needs increase dramatically. Observation is a relatively simple tool that becomes powerful when utilized thoughtfully by teacher teams. 

Amplify small group instruction and strategic student grouping with this interactive approach.

​Three years ago, we were quickly shifting our classrooms to online platforms as instruction was going remote for an indefinite amount of time. We tried to keep teaching throughout the pandemic and survived the snafus that happened throughout the day. (Remember that time you thought you were muted, but you weren’t? Bleh!) Our learning curves for online teaching grew exponentially, and many of us have incorporated the most promising practices into our classrooms today, such as using Google Docs for group projects or editing and commenting on a student paper in live time. 

Although there is an educational app for just about everything, we suggest resisting the urge to default back to solely online learning (even while in person), and instead consider the unique benefits of being together in time and space. Let’s design opportunities for students to collaborate, and embrace the physical classroom by creating learning opportunities that take students away from the Chromebooks and into a live setting. 

Characterized by movement, interaction, and small group learning, station teaching is one of the six established co-teaching models that takes advantage of being together within the four walls of a classroom. As with all models, station teaching comes with its own unique benefits, challenges, and logistics — let's walk through this method in an effort to support you and your co-teacher in planning and facilitating this meaningful approach to learning. 

What is station teaching? 

Station teaching is when content and instruction are divided into distinct components or strands. Students are divided into equally sized, typically heterogeneous groups. 

Each teacher teaches a specific part of the lesson/content to different groups of students as they rotate between teachers. Students also rotate through center(s) where they complete an independent task. 

What promises does this model offer? 


​Station teaching provides an opportunity for smaller group instruction and strategic student grouping.
One of the more obvious benefits of station teaching is that teachers have an opportunity to work with a small group of students, thus allowing for more responsiveness to individual questions, preferences, and needs. Stations also allow us to leverage the benefits of strategic student grouping, where teachers are intentional in the way that students are grouped together in service of the learning goal. Typically, heterogeneous groups, in which students with a variety of learning traits and needs work together, work best for the station teaching model; at the independent stations in particular, students have the opportunity to learn from and teach each other. 


Station teaching allows for exploration of a topic or skill through multiple perspectives, entry points, and modes of expression. 
In Universal Design for Learning (UDL), a framework designed to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities, one of the guiding principles is that learners differ in the ways that they perceive and comprehend information that is presented to them. Therefore, it is essential that teachers provide students with multiple means of representation of content. Stations easily allow us to provide representation of a topic in multiple ways; each station could focus on a different text, visual, or audio source. Similarly, each station can allow students to express their learning through a different medium or modality; another important principle of UDL. 


Station teaching allows the opportunity for natural “brain breaks” and movement. 
Research has shown that regular, short breaks in the classroom can help students increase their focus and reduce stress. With shorter “chunks” of academic engagement and clear, natural transitions between tasks, the station teaching model inherently incorporates breaks for students. The time it takes for students to travel to the next station could be leveraged to provide students with the physical or social engagement they might need to sustain focus: perhaps you play a song that students enjoy, or invite them to do a particular stretch. 

Station teaching can help strengthen a co-teaching relationship by providing the opportunity for shared ownership of planning and facilitation. 
Anyone who has co-taught before knows that it can be difficult to find a groove in which both teachers are easily and equally sharing the workload of lesson planning and facilitation; obstacles like lack of common planning time, unclear goals, and difference in teaching styles and preferences can often get in the way. If you and your co-teacher are finding yourself in a stage of your team development in which roles feel lopsided or undefined, a stations lesson can be a helpful way to help redistribute some responsibility. The ways in which content and instruction are divided in station teaching offer a clear path for delegating planning and teaching duties; each teacher can be responsible for the designing and facilitation of one station (with coordination and communication, of course!). 

What are some potential pitfalls? 


​Noise level and space limitations can create challenges.
With several groups of students working on different tasks simultaneously, some students (and teachers!) might find the level of noise and movement in the room to be an adjustment. Preparing students for this might be helpful; you might say something like,  “Today’s class may be a bit louder than our typical class, but there will also be quiet moments at the end of the stations so you can collect your thoughts via writing.” 

It’s also helpful to think strategically about where each station is set up in the room; having the two teacher stations as far away from each other as possible is often the way to go, since teachers often have the loudest voices in the room! 


Careful attention must be paid to pacing. 
In contrast to learning centers, where students are moving between learning engagements at their own pace, station teaching is often characterized by coordinated rotation, where everyone moves on to the next station at the same time. This means that all stations need to take roughly the same amount of time, which can be challenging to anticipate in planning. All stations should have flexible tasks that can be shortened or extended with enrichment options or additional discussion questions, depending on how quickly a particular group engages in them. 


Not all content is well-suited for stations. 
One of the trickier dynamics of station teaching is that not all students will begin their learning in the same place; some will begin at the independent station, while others will begin at the station led by co-teacher A, while still others will begin at the station by co-teacher B. Because of this, it’s important that the topics or tasks at each station are non sequential — that one station is not a necessary prerequisite to engage with another. Therefore, stations are not ideal for topics or skills that require a specific or strict sequencing of tasks or texts. It’s also not ideal for tasks that require deeper and more sustained investigation or attention, since time spent at each station is relatively brief compared to a full class period. Rather, stations work great for topics that are broad with multiple strands, perspectives, or approaches, or for introductory explorations or final reviews. 

How can independent work be structured?

​Recent research has highlighted the benefits of letting kids do things on their own, and station teaching offers the opportunity for practicing independence. 

We have generally found independent stations should be built on familiar territory: a concept, graphic organizer, or task directions that students have seen before. Be sure to have all of the supplies ready at the independent station, and try not to overcomplicate the directions (this sounds obvious but can be challenging)! 

Here are just a few ideas for independent work: 

• Cut up key terms and ask students to research the terms (using dictionary or technology) and take notes on them using Cornell notes or a Frayer Model
• Practice doing more problem sets on a problem set they have previously been taught
• View images and ask students to take notes on what they see and wonder about
• Watch a brief silent video with closed captions and ask students to write their thoughts/ takeaways
• Read a grade level (or slightly below) engaging text on the topic, and ask students to annotate it (if this is something they are familiar with) 
• Write a letter or explain a concept they already know that relates to the overarching topic of the stations lesson

What can this model look like in action?

Given the promises and potential pitfalls of this co-teaching model, we can determine the kinds of lessons and learning objectives that will be best suited for this instructional approach. Here are a few examples: 


3rd grade ELA
Students engage in stations that support them with the skills of determining the main idea of a text. At one teacher-led station, students are creating titles for chunks of text. At the second teacher-led station, students are reading a short text and asking: what is this story mostly about? At the two independent stations, students are sorting pictures into categories, or listening to an audio book and answering multiple choice questions. 


7th grade Math
To begin a new unit, students are engaging in an opening inquiry around the question: Why are surface area and volume important concepts in everyday life? At one teacher-led station, students make observations about water displacement when an object is dropped in a glass of water, and make predictions on whether the tray will be able to catch the displaced water; at another, students are tasked with wrapping a present; at another, they must choose the best tupperware container for leftover “food.” After visiting all the stations, students reflect on the guiding question and discuss with their peers. 


11th grade US History
Historians often teach an era through a variety of lenses, such as the culture, the key events and figures, and the different perspectives of an era; this approach lends itself easily to a station lesson. When studying the Progressive Era, for example, students can investigate: How did the growth in industrialization and urbanization lead to positive and negative changes in American society? At one teacher-led station, students can look at images from the time period (from photojournalists such as Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine) and notice the subjects and stories these photographers may be trying to tell about urban life in the early twentieth century. At an independent station, students can define key terms, such as “muckraker,” “progressivism,” “industrialization,” “modernization,” and The Gospel of Wealth. Students can look up these terms and record what they learn in the form of Cornell Notes or a Frayer Model. At another teacher-led station, the teacher can facilitate a reading of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or The Story of Ida B. Wells, and ask students to make meaning of the text, and take notes on what the text conveys to the reader. After visiting all three stations, students can compare their notes and discuss the positive and negative impact of industrialization and urbanization during the U.S.’s Progressive Era. 

The devil is in the details

The more you and your co-teacher can plan in advance for the logistics of station teaching, the more successful your lesson will likely be. How long will students spend at each station? How long will they be given to transition between stations? Which teacher will be responsible for keeping time and cuing the students? How will students know where to go next? (We suggest a slide or poster indicating the direction of rotation for that one!) 

Preparing all the materials in advance and having a clear and brief set of directions at each station is crucial (particularly at the independent station).

Practice pays off

While this article details the logistics of station teaching with an eye on co-teaching, we cannot overemphasize the importance of designing opportunities for students to interact with each other and with the physical space of the classroom in all classrooms. We know that students missed years of face-to-face interactions due to the pandemic; we suggest being proactive and creating moments for students to embrace a shared space and interact with each other in a low-stakes way. 

With all these dynamics and logistics, your stations lesson might not go perfectly the first time; don’t give up! We encourage you to reflect on the challenges, tweak it, and try it again. Stations might be a bit of a learning curve for your students as well, but as with any classroom protocol or routine, station rotation and engagement are skills that can be explicitly taught, scaffolded, and practiced. It’s our opinion that the work pays off, as we’ve found this approach to be an interactive and engaging way to punctuate particularly compelling topics in a curriculum. 
​

Understanding your co-teaching partnership through the four stages of group development.

​In my work as a coach, I get the pleasure of visiting many co-taught classrooms. Like with all classroom visits, I’m interested in what students are learning, and how, and what teachers are doing, and why. But I’m also interested in the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) dynamic between teachers; I notice the polite smiles and awkward silences; or the shared glances and inside jokes; or sometimes, the eye rolls and cold shoulders. The state of the partnership itself is an important piece of the puzzle to understand how to help teachers — and therefore students — grow. 

It makes sense that co-teachers are having a wide variety of experiences with each other at any given moment. Sharing a classroom with another teacher can often feel like living with a randomly selected college roommate in a tiny dorm room; there is potential for connection and camaraderie, and also so much to navigate to make the arrangement remotely functional. And with co-teaching, the goal far surpasses peaceful coexistence in a shared space, as it involves the incredibly complex endeavor of working as a team to help a diverse group of students learn and grow. 

Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development — a framework developed by Bruce Tuckman in 1965 and since often discussed, revised, and extended — helps us understand that discomfort and tension are an inevitable part of working with others towards a common goal. The frameworks’ four stages — Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing — can help co-teaching teams understand where they are in the development of their partnership, and what they might do next to grow the team. 

Forming

What it is
In this stage, team members are focusing primarily on orienting themselves to each other and the task at hand; lots of energy is spent on identifying “the boundaries of both interpersonal and task behaviors” (p. 396). 

What it may look like in a co-taught classroom

• One teacher makes an error when going over a math problem; the other teacher catches the error but is too nervous to step in and say anything.
• Both teachers adhere strictly to their predetermined roles in the lesson, but do not act flexibly or improvisationally.
• Team members spend lots of time going back and forth when deciding how to assess students’ work.

What you can do
​Teachers in the Forming stage often benefit from additional time and space to get to know each other. These five questions can spark discussion around core values, collaboration, content, communication, and care with your co-teacher. Another option — especially if you are drawn to exploring things visually — is to create and share with each other a co-teaching body biography, as my colleague Dr. Laura Rigolosi and I have invited teacher teams to do in our workshops.

Storming

What it is
Storming, according to Tuckman, is “characterized by conflict and polarization around interpersonal issues” (p. 396). This can manifest as power struggles and clashes, confusion, or lack of interest in the group. 

What it may look like in a co-taught classroom

• One teacher may forge ahead with a lesson despite the lack of input from their co-teacher, thinking, “I’ve always done it this way and it always works.” 
• One teacher may disengage from co-planning and co-facilitating, thinking, “What’s the point? None of my ideas are heard anyway.” 
• At varying points throughout a class or lesson, teachers may be communicating mixed messages to students around expectations based on their own beliefs. 

What you can do
If you and your co-teacher find yourself in the Storming stage of your partnership, it is first and foremost helpful to remember that this is an inevitable — and even necessary — stage in becoming a functional team. In order to move through it, reflection, listening, and collaborative problem-solving become key. 

Dray and Wisneski (2011) have created a mindful reflection protocol to help teachers unpack their interactions with students and examine their own assumptions and biases in order to become more culturally responsive educators. A version of the protocol I have adapted for co-teachers can be helpful in reflecting on the assumptions we are making about our colleagues, imagining alternative explanations for their actions, and hopefully gaining more understanding of where they are coming from before broaching conflict. 

Norming

What it is
According to Tuckman (1965), Norming is the stage in which “ingroup feeling and cohesiveness develop, new standards evolve, and new roles are adopted.” There might be mutually agreed upon processes and procedures, shared problem-solving, and a sense of belonging to a team. 

What it may look like in a co-taught classroom

• A co-teaching team begins a routine of meeting during lunch every Friday to reflect on the week and outline the following week’s instructional goals.
• During a lesson, one teacher pauses in their mini-lesson to ask if the other teacher has anything to add.
• During a debrief meeting, one teacher expresses concern about the way students are grouped, and the other teacher thanks them for the feedback and asks for suggestions. 

What you can do
If you and your co-teacher are beginning to get into a groove, tools that help to concretize and ritualize your collaboration and problem-solving will contribute to growth. Consider adapting or developing a planning template, like this one, to guide your work together. 

Performing

What it is
In this highly productive stage of group development, roles become flexible and functional, and group energy is channeled into the task. 

What it may look like in a co-taught classroom

• During independent work time, teachers quietly confer about students who need additional support based on the formative assessment and make an in-the-moment plan for some small group instruction.
  
• A department head approaches one teacher with a proposal to host a new initiative in their class, and the teacher responds, “I’ll have to talk with my co-teacher and get back to you.” 
  
• During a mini-lesson, one teacher shares with the students: “This is Mr. _____’s favorite topic! I’m going to pass the ball to him!”
  

What you can do
Teachers don’t often get much of a chance to stop, reflect, and celebrate success, but doing so is so important for morale, for learning, and for transferring learning to new situations. If you and your co-teacher are at the Performing stage, consider engaging in a Success Analysis Protocol to better understand what made a particular practice so successful. Ideally, this would be done with a larger department, so that others can learn from the success as well. 

In much of the commentary on Tuckman’s original model, there is an emphasis on the fact the model is not strictly linear; particular events or circumstances may cause a group to re-enter or revisit a stage they’ve already moved through. In the co-taught classroom, it’s easy to imagine these circumstances: you have a new student who exhibits some challenging behaviors, you have a new curriculum you must adhere to, or there is an upcoming high-stakes event like a test or observation. As Judith Stein explains, “The four stages are a helpful framework for recognizing a team's behavioral patterns; they are most useful as a basis for team conversation, rather than boxing the team into a 'diagnosis.'"

WORKS CITED
Stein, Judith. Using the Stages of Team Development. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 
Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological bulletin, 63(6), 384.
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Set clear instructional expectations that help elicit students' most quality thinking. 

​There are many excellent reasons for looking closely at student work. We can look at the work to engage in inquiry around particular students and understand their strengths and struggles across classes and content areas, or we can look at the work of a particular class section in order to create strategic student grouping and inform differentiation for upcoming lessons. Sometimes, looking at student work can be a really meaningful way to reflect on our own instructional and curricular design — especially when we’ve recently created a new learning activity or assessment that we’ve never used before. 

Recently, I supported teachers at one of our wonderful partner schools in student work analysis for this purpose. Like many schools across the city, rigor is a focus for professional learning this year. For this particular learning cycle, teachers worked on designing rigorous tasks using the Rigormeter, a resource designed by Dr. Roberta Lenger Kang, which re-envisions Bloom's Taxonomy. 

For this particular session, teachers were invited to bring two different pieces of student work: one that “met or exceeded expectations” for the task, and one that “is not yet meeting expectations.” Here is a snapshot of what they did with those pieces of student work, and how this reflection will inform next steps.

What does success look like?

For the first round of reflecting and sharing, teachers spent some time with the piece of work that met or exceeded expectations. Teachers were invited to engage in individual reflection using an iteration of our What / So What / Now What resource, which offers a process for making low-inference observations, analyzing findings, and identifying a course of action. 

​In this round of reflection, teachers had the opportunity to consider and articulate the success criteria for their rigorous task, and identify the skills and knowledge required for students to produce work that meets or exceeds expectations. Ideally, we’d like to have a clear vision of the success criteria before we ask students to engage in a task, but when we are trying something for the first time, this type of reflection might be necessary to gain further clarity.

Let’s say a Social Studies and ENL co-teaching team is trying out a new assignment in which students are asked to plan an educational tour of Greece for the class. They are asked to choose at least three stops on the map and explain why a particular place or geographical feature is important for understanding the ancient culture of the civilization. A What / So What / Now What-style reflection on a successful student’s work might look like: ​

What are revisions and next steps? 

For the second round of reflecting and sharing, teachers moved their attention to the piece of student work that was not yet meeting expectations. Once again, they engaged with a What/So What/Now What protocol, this time with slightly different prompts: 

A sample reflection for that same scenario might be: 

Insights and next steps

During our whole staff debrief, one common high-level insight that emerged across departments was that we cannot make assumptions about students’ knowledge and skills before assigning rigorous tasks. Thus, a next step in the group’s professional learning will be to explore the concept of formative assessments and their connections to engaging students in work that is appropriately challenging. 

The whirlwind pace of teachers’ work does not always allow a beat to critically reflect on planning; often after trying something new, we must take stock as quickly as possible and then shift our attention to the next lesson, activity, or assessment. However, when we can carve out space for intentional reflection (and school leaders and PD coaches support us in doing so), there are undeniable benefits — perhaps the most obvious being that we have much better insight into students’ immediate needs. But also, if we understand student work to be a mirror of our own practice — reflecting back ways to improve our own instructional design — looking at what students produce in live time informs how we will design our next learning activity, or how we revise our design for next time so that it elicits students’ most quality thinking. 

How one high school is constructing their own definition of rigor, in service of developing high expectations and meaningful work for students. 

​After several years of prolonged uncertainty and hardship, a feeling of normalcy seems to finally be settling in, and schools want to refocus their vision for high expectations and meaningful work for students. As coaches, we’ve noticed that “rigor” has become a topic of particular interest for school leaders this year. 

However, not everyone has the most positive associations with the word, and we can’t really blame them (just look at the dictionary definition — yikes!). What we mean by rigor in the educational context is often unclear, and it’s for this reason that we believe in the importance of co-constructing definitions and characteristics of the concept as a school community. 

We’ve undertaken this endeavor with the Business Technology Early College High School (BTECH) — one of our wonderful partner schools in Queens, New York — and have been investigating the concept of rigor through a variety of entry points. Our inquiry around rigor began with a tool developed by our colleague, Dr. Roberta Lenger Kang, who envisions rigor as an odometer, a visual retake on Bloom’s Taxonomy. After working with the “Rigormeter”, the staff at BTECH engaged in inquiry around how to assess and establish criteria for rigorous questions. Here is a snapshot of how we explored this question and a look into the insights that were gleaned. 

Assessing for rigor

What makes a rigorous question? The central way that teachers pursued this line of inquiry in our workshop was through a hands-on, minds-on activity. In small heterogeneous groups (mixed in terms of both content areas and experience), teachers were given an envelope of paper strips, each printed with a question inspired by real high school curriculum (How does the greenhouse effect work? What is exponential growth and where do we see it in our everyday lives?). Working collaboratively, teachers were tasked with sorting the questions into categories according to their perceived level of rigor. As we circulated the room, we heard teachers engaged in rich and lively discussion as they made decisions about how to rank questions according to their rigor level, and why. 

Establishing criteria for rigor

After teachers spent some time engaging in the question sorting activity, we asked the small groups to reflect and discuss together: What criteria did you use to distinguish more rigorous from less rigorous questions? Then, when we came back together as a whole staff, we asked teachers: so, what does make a rigorous question? Here are some of the defining characteristic they articulated:

Additional definitions

After teachers generated their own ideas, we as facilitators offered a few additional criteria that worked to amplify and elaborate on the group’s working definition. The criteria we offered were inspired by some of the dispositions of competent readers delineated by Dr. Sheridan Blau in his article Performative Literacy: The Habits of Mind of Highly Literate Readers (2003) — with the thinking that if these dispositions allow for readers to make meaning of texts and “enable knowledge” (p. 19), then questions that inspire the cultivation of such dispositions will in turn cultivate meaning-making in general. 

​The importance of complexity and flexibility are also explored in Robyn Jackson’s How to Plan Rigorous Instruction (2010). ​

Next steps

​After generating their own collective definition of a rigorous question and considering the Blau-inspired characteristics as well, teachers were given the opportunity to apply these new insights to an upcoming lesson. Teachers left the session with a new Do Now activity or slightly tweaked questions that asked for justification, for example. Most significantly, they left with clarity on what counts as a rigorous question. 

As we continue working with this school, we are designing next steps in the professional learning process. Our upcoming sessions can focus on when and how to use rigorous questions, specifically, at what point of the lesson, and how to assess student response. We can also explore activities or teaching moves that pair well with investigating rigorous questions. We might also reconsider our essential questions and check how they measure against our “rigorous questions” criteria. There are many possibilities for moving forward with our inquiry cycle.

While there are plenty of resources and frameworks out there for teachers on creating compelling and meaningful questions, both facilitators and teachers found great value in doing some first-hand discovery, and in trying to articulate the nuance in what distinguishes rigorous questions from the rest.

Five questions that can help create a foundation for the hard and important work of teaching together. 

With each new school year, we wonder with excitement and anticipation: what will this cohort of students be like? What can I teach them? What can they teach me?

And, if you’re a teacher who works predominantly in co-taught classrooms, as I did, the very same questions arise with every new co-teacher: what will they be like? What can I teach them? What can they teach me? 

Indeed, co-teaching provides wonderful opportunities for new professional relationships and new professional growth. Over the years, my co- teachers became my de facto mentors, my co-researchers, and also, at my luckiest, my friends. But, at the beginning of each co-teaching relationship, it is always a little overwhelming, with so much to learn about each other and decide together. 

There may be some pressure to figure it all out before your students walk through the door, but that’s probably not realistic (especially if you have multiple co-teachers), and often the most valuable discoveries and decisions are made on the job, anyway — through the actual work of planning and caring for students together.

That is not to say that efforts to get to know each other at the beginning of the year are not important. On the contrary, it is always clear to me when walking into a classroom as a coach if a co-teaching team has had the time to invest in their professional relationship.  

Given the importance of this work and also the abundance of tasks the beginning of a new school year brings, it can be helpful to consider what insight will be most valuable right away.

Here are five questions that can jumpstart your partnership and spark discussion around core values, collaboration, content, communication, and care with your co-teacher.

What are some of your core values and non-negotiables as a teacher? 

This question is often lurking beneath the surface of many co-teacher conversations: how to structure group work, how to designate point values on a rubric, or how to support a student exhibiting challenging behaviors.

Sometimes, making the implicit more explicit at the beginning — naming the key beliefs, values, and theories that inform your practices — helps deepen the partnership and move collaboration forward. Furthermore, there is no denying that co-teaching often requires compromise, as you must integrate two separate visions of the classroom.

Having a brief conversation about core values and non-negotiables will help team members understand where there may be more or less flexibility. If, for example, I know that offering students choice is very important to my co-teacher, I know that preserving the place of book clubs in the curriculum is likely important to them. This will not only support you in respecting your colleague and their teaching identity, but will save time and energy on back-and-forth negotiations.

How would you describe the ideal co-teaching situation?

Just as there is an infinite number of teaching styles — arguably, no two are exactly the same — there are an infinite number of co-teaching styles. While some of the workings of the arrangement might be determined by external factors — schedules, content expertise (see question #3), or school leaders’ visions and expectations — it can still be important to understand your co-teacher's preferences around co-facilitation and collaboration. Ideally, would both teachers contribute to every lesson? Is there a co-teaching model that feels most comfortable? It might also be illuminating to ask about past co-teaching experience: what felt like it worked really well in the collaboration, and what felt like it did not serve the partnership or the students. 

What’s your level of comfort and passion with this particular grade level / course / content area? 

​Not every teacher will be equally well-versed, nor equally passionate, about all the curriculum or content of a given course or grade level, and this can be valuable to understand about your co-teacher. For example, at the high school level, one member of the team might have taught Algebra I for a decade, thus bringing a wealth of knowledge, experience, and resources to the classroom. Or, it may be that it’s one teacher’s first time setting foot in a US History classroom since her own school days, but she’s really looking forward to engaging students in the lessons of the Civil Rights Movement. At the elementary school level, a teacher might feel like a rockstar teaching multiplication, but lessons on writing keep them up at night. This information can naturally inform how planning and facilitation responsibilities are delegated, or who will take the lead where. 

How do you prefer to communicate between class times? 

​Ideally, co-teachers will have time set aside to reflect and plan together on a daily or weekly basis, but the need to communicate about particular plans or grading or students will likely spill over. Given the seemingly endless number of channels for that communication, it’s important to understand what works best for each member of the team.

Is it okay to text a question in real time, while grading essays in the evening, or should I put that in an email? Do you prefer lesson plans be sent over the school email, or should we use Google Drive? How should I let you know if I will be out sick? This is important information to glean so that you can respect your co-teacher’s boundaries and also ensure no important communication is missed. 

What’s your beverage or treat of choice? 

​This question is obviously a little more lighthearted than the previous ones, but important nonetheless! In a profession with so many intellectual, physical, and emotional demands, it can be really meaningful to invest in the well-being of our closest colleagues — to gift a little pick-me-up after a tough day, or to celebrate submitting your grades for the marking period. Knowing your co-teacher’s favorite baked food or how they take their coffee allows you to offer that kind of care when the opportunity arises. 

​Of course, these questions are intended as inspiration; if the exact phrasing doesn’t speak to you, consider other ways to engage with themes of core values, collaboration, content, communication, and care. One option – especially if you are drawn to exploring things visually – is to create and share with each other a co-teaching body biography, as my colleague Laura Rigolosi and I have invited teacher teams to do in our workshops. 

Ultimately, the goal is to get to know each other enough so that the gradual establishment of roles, responsibilities and routines — ones that honor individual teaching identities and preferences — over the course of the first few weeks is possible. Such meaningful conversations will create the foundation for hard and important work of teaching (and learning) together. 

Three strategies you can offer students of all levels — even when you can only connect virtually.

DR. LAURA RIGOLOSI
Curriculum & Literacy Specialist

JACQUI STOLZER
Senior Professional Development Coach

What happens when your class is full of 30+ students who have different strengths, different learning styles, and different comfort levels with the English language? We’ve been tackling this question alongside K-12 educators through PD series like Educating ELLs and Including All Learners, where we address the promises and challenges of teaching in heterogeneous classrooms by exploring the principles of differentiation and related research for classroom applications.

When we began another round of Including All Learners sessions last year, we set out to support a new group of educators as they worked toward their differentiation goals. We didn't yet know that we would soon experience social distancing, that toilet paper would become the most coveted household item, or that both teaching and learning would rapidly transition from in-person to online. 

During this time of online schooling, we are particularly concerned about students who either do not have online access, or do not have a quiet nook in their homes to learn. A few years ago, one of our students commented that he slept with the English novels from our class under his pillow — it was the safest place in his home, where he didn’t have a workspace of his own. 

As we write this from our individual homes and reflect on the recent shift to virtual education, we are focusing on the principles of our Including All Learners series that remain true in any kind of teaching and learning environment. Below, we will outline a few concepts from our workshops and share how they carry over to our online learning experiences. 
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​Disrupt the single story

We begin our sessions with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, The Danger of a Single Story. She explains to her audience how all of us, including Adichie herself, have told a singular version of someone’s life story, and have also been victim to a single story about ourselves. She shares how damaging and incorrect these single versions can be. 

This concept serves as a reminder that we must disrupt the single stories that are often assigned to our students, particularly those who are ENLs or are students with disabilities. This can be more challenging than it sounds, particularly when students have to be described in IEPs, which do not allow for a more complex telling of their life stories. In our workshops, we challenge ourselves and participating teachers to share other versions of our students’ stories — something you can continue to do in online communication with other adults in your community. 

What helps some students can help all

One of the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is that what helps some learners can help all learners. This concept can be illustrated by the design of public spaces — for example, people of all ages and abilities benefit from public bathrooms that are wheelchair accessible; they are wider, are often designed without entry doors, and are therefore easier to navigate and offer fewer opportunities for spreading germs. 

One way we try to illustrate this concept in our workshops is by providing all participants with tools that support their learning. For example, while we view the Adichie TED Talk, we offer our participants a simple graphic organizer (like a double entry journal) that allows everyone to listen fully, while also allowing them to recall specific compelling moments in the talk. Our double entry journal includes two components: a column on the left, partially filled out with quotes from the text (in this case, the TED Talk), and a column on the right, which is open for viewers to share their thoughts. Returning to the ideas presented in UDL, a double entry journal that includes specific lines from the text is useful for students who have central executive challenges, but in reality, everyone can benefit from the text references. 

The principles of UDL feel particularly important at a time when it is more difficult to ask students where and how they need support. Just as we provided a partially completed double entry journal for all of our participants, consider making your scaffolds accessible to all students on your online platforms. This might look like providing possible sentence starters to all students for written explanations, or providing a series of clues for students solving a math problem.

Show the messiness of thinking

Metacognition expert Dr. Saundra McGuire defines metacognition as simply thinking about your thinking. Being able to think about how you’re making meaning of a piece of writing — as well what you can easily understand and what you can’t — is an important aspect of engaging with complex texts. 

One tool we offer educators is a model of a think aloud, where we simply model the messiness of the thinking that goes into making sense of our reading, writing, and problem-solving. The goal is to dispel the idea that a text suddenly and magically makes sense without struggle and hard work, and to show them that everyone relies on thinking moves that help them chip away at difficult texts. 

Consider doing this type of think aloud with your students online — either in real time or as a short recorded video. Rather than simply creating a video where you explain the major steps needed for answering a question or solving a problem, try to capture yourself actually doing the work, making even your smallest thinking moves visible — the questioning, rereading, reasoning, and revising that often happens while engaging in higher-order tasks, but that we often do without even realizing. You might also share things like how you knew to begin your answer in a certain way,  or what bit of information caused you to stop and double-check your computations. Sharing these micro thinking steps will help students see that there is not a singular way to answer a question or to solve a problem, which may help them become more aware of their own thinking. 

As you continue adapting your instruction for remote and blended learning, we hope you will utilize the tools and concepts we have outlined here to ensure you are reaching all learners. While our in-person sessions are on hold, you can continue to participate in professional development on this topic by joining us online.

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