The goal of co-planning is to ensure that collaborating teachers develop high-impact, data-driven adaptations to lessons that meet the needs of all students by drawing on the expertise of both the general and special education teachers. Effective co-planning leverages four key components — alignment, reflection, removal, and selection — to meet this goal. This practice highlights how teams across the NIC honed this work over time in a variety of collaboration models and includes a co-planning meeting template for schools to apply to their own settings.

Why it Works

• Co-planning drives alignment in instruction across all settings, accelerating learning and minimizing confusion to positively impact student experience.
• Strong co-planning builds knowledge, skill, and capacity among educators, especially benefiting those new to the field.
• The structures of co-planning allow for the development of a strong, trusting, and collaborative relationship between educators.

Collegiate Academies used data-driven co-planning cycles to double the number of students with disabilities meeting graduation requirements through alternative pathways.

Collaborative student work analysis pairs a general and a special educator together to collect and review data on student performance and progress in course content. It deepens both educators’ understanding of student strengths and needs in order to align on instructional next steps. This practice includes Green Dot’s Student Work Analysis Protocol, which can be adapted by schools to meet their needs.

Why it Works

Collaborative student work analysis using an instructionally focused protocol meets the needs of Black and Latinx students with disabilities experiencing poverty by:

• building educators’ capacity to understand root causes of misunderstandings,
• ensuring critical alignment between teachers,
• explicitly acknowledging the impact of students’ learning needs on their work, and
• leveraging multiple forms of data.

After collaborating teachers at Ednovate implemented a collaborative student work analysis model, the course pass rate in their class increased from 79% to 97%.

Strong co-teaching that drives results for students requires teaching in ways that are often unfamiliar to educators. To implement co-teaching successfully, schools can take a gradual release model that helps build teachers’ knowledge and skill in implementing high-impact co-teaching models in their classrooms. Collegiate and Green Dot’s work provides a roadmap for how other schools and districts can provide timely and effective coaching to improve the quality of co-teaching.

Why it Works

• High-impact co-teaching promotes inclusive learning environments with tailored instructional opportunities for all students.
• Dedicated coaching acknowledges that sharing instructional responsibility in nontraditional ways is new and requires direct support.
• Optimizing the roles of both co-teachers can lead to higher job satisfaction.

When co-teachers optimize their roles during lessons, all students experience double the support they would have with one teacher.

This case study explores the coordination and implementation of quarterly professional development days for co-teaching teams that blend professional learning with intentional co-planning time. These facilitated days create purposeful time for teams to connect, reflect on student data with a student work analysis template, expand knowledge of high-leverage co-teaching models, and design instruction using those models for the upcoming quarter.

At Ánimo Watts College Preparatory Academy, quarterly co-planning PD days contributed to an increase of nearly three times the percentage of students with disabilities passing classes with a C+ or higher.

Effective instructional coaching for collaborative teachers requires a different approach than coaching individual teachers. This guidance document provides school leaders with recommendations and resources that have been used to form effective school teams at Collegiate Academies, Green Dot Public Schools, KIPP Northern California, and Summit Public Schools.

Collaboration between general and special educators has the ability to transform the experience and learning of both students and teachers. But collaborative work between these two historically siloed departments is neither intuitive nor easy to achieve. This guide addresses some of the most common questions leaders face when setting up effective coaching of collaborative teams.