This chapter further elaborates the content presented in Chapter 8 by expanding the description of co-teaching as seen in inclusion classroom and describes co-teaching in year-long residency models. Students pulled from general education classes and taught in resource settings exclusively often do not benefit from the instruction of content area teachers when they are out of those classrooms. Thus, co-teaching became one of many collaborative strategies that schools considered to meet the needs of all students within the educational framework. State departments also began considering strategies for TPPs and school districts to work together to provide a rich clinical experience for preservice teachers. This chapter explores both co-teaching collaborative approaches for improved student outcomes in an inclusive classroom and how beneficial co-teaching is to year-long residents.
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State Departments of Education (SDE) and many Educator Preparation Programs (EPP) encourage collaborative methodologies for program design, development, implementation, and evaluation. The statewide support for such endeavors presents a considerable advantage for many EPPs trying to refocus their efforts on the pre-school to graduate programs (P-20) collaboration pipeline, emphasizing core values held by both Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) and their Preschool-Grade 12 partners (P-12). It is essential to sustain such collaborative efforts. The push for educators to collaborate at all levels of education (P-20) has created effective communication pathways for many institutions at various geographic locations within the state.
The development of large-scale educational reform initiatives facilitates implementing reforms that have been identified as beneficial to education (Sande, 2019). Frameworks for large-scale collaborative models, for instance, Comprehensive School Reforms (CSR), are among the waves of improvement efforts that radiated from the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, a landmark indictment of US public schools (Sande, 2013; Staresina, 2004). The basic principle of CSR is that schools must overhaul their systems from top to bottom instead of using a fragmented approach to address achievement issues (Staresina, 2004).
Other large-scale models include initiatives such as Response to Intervention initiatives (RtI), Positive Behavior and Intervention Support models (PBIS), school-wide reform initiatives, inclusion, and co-teaching (Horner et al., 2009; Hughes & Dexter, 2011; McIntosh, Filter, Bennett, Ryan, & Sugai, 2010; Sande, 2013; Sugai, Horner, & McIntosh, 2008).