Whether you’ve been co-teaching for days or decades, your co-planning system (or lack thereof) will make or break the success of your partnership and co-taught classroom. If you co-teach all day long with common preps and plenty of time for collaboration, you’re already set up for robust co-planning. However, if you are a secondary team, in a part-time co-teaching model, or some other situation that creates scheduling differences within your partnership, it can be hard to find the time to co-plan, especially if it isn’t built into your schedule. But regardless of which situation describes you, we have solutions! Read on for some strategies to turn the chaos into a well-oiled machine.
For Full Day Co-Teachers (who we know are still extremely busy)
Even if you are together in the same classroom all day long, there are still only so many minutes in the day and it can be easy for those minutes to dwindle away before you’ve accomplished your whole to-do list! In these cases, it’s easy to let your co-planning fall to the wayside. Phone calls to parents, answering emails, making copies…the list can pile up quickly, and before you know it, your “co-planning” time is gone! We suggest creating sacred planning time, where you will meet to discuss the essentials, and you won’t be interrupted by anything other than an actual emergency. To really protect this time, you can communicate it to your administration and post a “Do Not Disturb” sign on your door. Come to this meeting with either an actual agenda or a clear idea of what needs to be discussed.
For part-time co-teachers who don’t have co-planning time (or don’t have enough)
Ideally, you would be able to sit down and co-plan every lesson every day, but that isn’t always possible. Even if you have absolutely no co-planning time at all, you can still find ways to co-plan asynchronously. Apps within the google suite, like google docs and google drive, offer great ways for you to communicate your thoughts and ideas, share materials, and respond to each other without having to sit in the same room.
Maximizing your co-planning time:
Use the following steps to have the most productive co-planning sessions:
- Organize and preview all lesson materials
- Gather ideas, resources, tricky vocab, and concepts that may need pre-teaching or re-teaching
- Come together (in person or via your asynchronous method) to plan just the essentials
- What are your class and individual objectives?
- What model(s) will you use for this lesson/these lessons?
- In what ways will you differentiate, and for whom?
- What will each of your specific roles be during the lesson?
- What materials are needed and who is responsible for acquiring them?
Many teachers have found it helpful to have some sort of accountability system in place to divvy up the work and keep track of who is doing what by when. Feel free to use this spreadsheet (just click “Make a Copy” and delete the text that’s already in there in order to make it your own!)
Conclusion
With all of these suggestions, keep in mind: the easiest way to co-plan and implement what you’ve planned is to use small group teaching. In order to teach whole group, and do it well, your co-planning is likely to be very involved, as you will need to discuss and agree upon all the little details within the lesson, as well as your agreed-upon roles. Utilizing a model like Station Teaching, Parallel Teaching, or the hybrid model allows you to plan the bare essentials together, and then plan the details of your group on your own time. As you become more comfortable with the small group models and your trust for each other grows, you’ll begin to notice that you need less and less co-planning time.