This is a guide to inclusive teaching practices in Room 210, which is the Humanities makerspace at the high school. The post provides an overview of the process alongside a cross-section of strategies and techniques in English 10 and English 11 courses.
Co-teaching in a makerspace starts with flipped instruction — all lectures and notes posted online well in advance of any unit, individual lesson, or assignment. We plan instruction around student needs and curricular requirements. It’s done collaboratively: We discuss; I write and post. That keeps instruction consistent and clear1.
We collaborate with other teachers whenever possible, which also helps with alignment and consistency. In 2018, that meant partnering up our English 10 classes with another teacher’s unit on A Long Way Gone, including a UNICEF service project. And we otherwise follow our district’s ELA framework, sticking to assured experience and common texts as a means of teaching the same universal skills and traits.
That universal framework leads into our profile-based assessments, which use consistent expectations and language. There is flexibility for us to differentiate and even individualize assignments, because the substructure remains the same. The universal profiles, skills, and traits also give us a consistent basis for feedback and redirection. At all times, all teachers and students in the space are speaking the same language.
Next, we use redundancies to help students. This is the engineering version of redundancy: backup resources and systems to insure that all students get what they need. Instruction is posted here, to this website, and then cross-posted to Google Classroom; depending on need, we also print copies of these posts for distribution in class. All central texts are available in multiple formats, from audiobooks to PDF files to photocopies. Assignments are started and often finished in class, and then something is always handed in through Google Classroom or Google Drive. Copies of all writing are submitted as evidence of grade abatement profiles through Classroom, but students can also share directly with us, print and submit hard copies of assignments, or complete the work entirely by hand. Many assignments — most that aren’t essays — also have a Google Forms component, which makes it easier for us to sort responses by class, target missing work, look at patterns in the whole class, identify individual needs, etc., in addition to creating a further redundancy.
All these options — especially the multiple ways to hand in work — create plenty of opportunities for feedback, and feedback is the key to a co-taught classroom. In-class feedback is a given; it happens during every period, and we make a point to dedicate our time as evenly or effectively as possible. The “or” is operative: Due to our use of flipped or interstitial instruction, there is rarely a need for groups of students to stop and do the exact same thing at the exact same time. We are able to circulate constantly in order to intervene as necessary — to reinforce positive choices and correct negative ones. It’s a better form of feedback. In fact, the logic of that hyperlinked essay is stronger in a co-taught class than it was in the solo AP course for which it was originally written: We both act as experts, giving every student twice the opportunity to learn and then to teach others.
Examples of ICT Work
Here is an example of co-teaching in a Regents-level English 10 class:
The instructions were posted online for all students. They were given seven questions based on the first five chapters of A Long Way Gone and our pre-reading exercises and discussions, which are visible here. This is a screenshot of what the instructional post looks like:
That showcases the other flipped instruction happening in the makerspace. In English 11, another co-taught class, the students are receiving the same level of instruction. What’s more interesting is the evidence of feedback through this interstitial site. Both teachers developed that general feedback, using recent student work to generate feedback on the first profile scores of the year. (This is common, as seen in this general feedback post from the next scoring cycle.)
The English 10 assignment required answers to seven questions about the novel and the reading process. This is part of our unit on A Long Way Gone, and as an example of what we mean by “redundancies” in instruction, here is what that looks like on Google Classroom:
The assignment for the first five chapters — again, seven guided responses to seven questions about characters, plot, and the reading process itself — had to be typed in a Google Doc and submitted through Classroom, but it also had to be copied over into a Google Form. That gave my co-teacher and I a chance to monitor student progress and provide feedback in different ways.
The next screenshot shows me sharing the responses to that Google Form with my co-teacher:
This is one way to split the responsibilities of giving feedback. We can use the technology to talk to each other where students can’t see, like this:
I’m highlighting an obviously deficient response and preparing to ask how we should intervene. That’s a common question: What kind of feedback is going to motivate this particular student? How can we get more out of him in order to develop his writing? This is especially useful with students who haven’t done the assignment in full.
Form are one of the fastest way to look at patterns in student responses across a roster, which helps when we shift to giving feedback in real-time, as students finish their work, through a few different mediums. Here is what it looks like when we load Google Classroom to check on student progress on that same assignment:
Note that this is before the actual deadline. In a makerspace, especially a grade-abated one, the focus is overwhelmingly on process. You can see in this screenshot a bit of positive feedback to one of the students who finished already, but the real benefit of the workshop model is that it lets us run a kind of triage. We can see at a glance which students need attention first — the ones whose screen-capped work is minimal or missing.
Again, you can see the first part of a private comment left for a student who simply didn’t write enough. This is the equivalent of redirecting a student during the period when he gets distracted or discouraged. The advantage to using Google Classroom is that these comments are private, and students are notified about them through their GAFE accounts.
We are also able to open up student work for a particular assignment in Google Drive, which gives us another avenue for feedback:
This is additional redundancy that lets us differentiate. This Google Drive folder gives us access to all student work at once for any particular assignment, even before the deadline. In this case, the first student document was last modified at 9:05 by a teacher. That’s actually during the class period — an example of my co-teacher opening up and working on the writing while sitting with the student.
Where the ownership of the document has shifted to me, it means the student’s work has been submitted formally through Google Classroom. That sparks the usual feedback loop, in which we read and respond to student writing as a complete artifact.
More on ICT Feedback
All of this online and interstitial feedback exists in addition to the in-class, face-to-face feedback that occurs during the period. The importance of that face-to-face interaction has always been emphasized, and it matters doubly in a co-taught course.
As an example, I’ll explain a pre-reading assignment given to a co-taught English 11 class. Students were tasked with responding to a series of articles and ideas, all of which had been flipped online in an instructional post a week earlier. We set aside a class period and noticed, through the Classroom-generated thumbnails, that some students were already handing in work. We ran triage:
The first level of triage, especially in an ICT class, is often based around missing or incomplete work. Writing especially must be develop enough to allow for richer and more individual feedback. In this case, the student in the lower-right corner of that screenshot submitted very little:
Remember that this is still during the period, with a deadline of midnight for the complete writing assignment. My co-teacher found this to explain that this would obviously not be enough to earn credit, and to encourage him to focus on the flexibility and depth built into the assignment. Either teacher can then follow up with a private comment on the piece itself, a comment through Google Classroom, or a conference the next day. It depends on the student’s amenability.
When a student needs more direct interventions to be successful, we coordinate around a list drawn from our district’s RTI and MTSS implementation:
- Accommodation: Additional Time
- Accommodation: Schedule regular breaks
- Accommodation: Student removed from group to work by himself
- Cooperative Learning
- Corrective Feedback
- Counseling
- Differentiated Instruction
- Double dose of explicit, systematic instruction
- Explicit Systematic Instruction
- Goal Setting with regular follow up
- Guided Practice
- Individual Outreach
- Instruction tailored to student interests and/or social situation
- Modeling
- Monitor with Frequent and Timely Feedback
- Multi-Modal Instruction
- Positive Reinforcement / Rewards
- Remediation and Acceleration
- Responsive Scaffolding
- Summarizing
- Supplemental research-based intervention curriculum
- Targeted tutoring outside of class time
- Use of manipulatives (concrete) and/or pictorial representations
This list is common to all classrooms, co-taught or not, but it takes on special importance in light of the divergent needs of an ICT roster. As we identify those needs, we are able to coordinate interventions. Here is an example from the very same day as every other example in this post2:
This is a student with self-identified difficulties speaking and writing in English, and this is her chance to write, without risk, about those struggles. This assignment replaces the original essay about A Long Way Gone — a substitution possible through a profile-driven assessment model — so she can grapple with a more pressing academic need. And while she met with only one of us to discuss the possibility of this individual assignment, everything else, from the prompt to the eventual feedback, runs through two teachers.
I’ve also been developing an interstitial classroom in ELA for almost a decade. Those older sites are evidence of how long it took to develop an iterative process, and it would be unfair to demand another teacher take on the posting/design responsibilities any more than they’re comfortable. ↩
This is important, because it highlights how any cross-section or snapshot of the classroom would reveal the same mechanisms. Barring the rare days set aside for prescriptive test prep, every period sees the same level of co-taught differentiation. ↩