Mrs. Goodman's Idea Of Collaboration In The Classroom

The thought of collaboration brings the view of working together. “When teachers collaborate, they: Work together to solve problems and generate feasible solutions that they implement and evaluate and reflect on their own instructional practices and are eager to make changes that improve outcomes for students(Vaughn & Bos, 2015, p. 117)”. Collaboration in a school setting refers to teachers,other professionals, administration, families, and students working together to form an effective learning environment for students. Collaboration is key to ensure that all involved are on the same page in understanding the needs of the student, the essential content that needs to be learned, and any intervention necessary to help in areas of struggle.

Goodman is a general education English teacher with most of her experience at the secondary level. Over the years Mrs. Goodman has come up with some creative ways to increase family involvement. To get the school administration to agree to her ideas she effectively communicated a detailed plan which included logistics, cost, student benefits and a clear end result that shared the common goal of student success. Examples of events include student produced movie night and mock trials with family members as the jury. Mrs. Goodman uses these events to establish relationships with families and get them to buy in to the educational environment being established. After these events, collaboration and support from families increases dramatically. With the school district’s adoption of google’s educational products, Mrs. Goodman takes advantage of google classroom and it’s features that allow parental viewing of the website. This allows parents to monitor the activities and assignments that their child is participating in. Mrs. Goodman also adds her coteachers as contributors to google classroom and shares editable documents which has helped alleviate some of the pressures of actually having to be face to face to mutually plan. Based on her teaching style and the dynamics of her classes, Mrs. Goodman’s preferred model of coteaching is “One group, one lead teacher, one teacher “teaching on purpose”(Vaughn & Bos, 2015, p.

These pressures leave the general education teacher “focused on teaching content and less on teaching individual students(Vaughn & Bos, 2015, p. 119)”, or as Mrs. Cynova states “general education teachers focus on the class and sometimes forget about the special needs of some of our students.” Mrs. Cynova believes designated mutual time to collaborate would help remind the general education teacher about the level of understanding of special education students and the accommodations and modifications necessary for their success. The interview brought to light other issues general education teachers take for granted like the lack of task analysis breakdown and how a last minute change of plans can have a negative impact on the special education student. Therefore, she is a huge advocate of special education teachers actively participating in subject area PLCs to ensure general education teachers are aware of and planning for the special needs student. An administrative barrier often encountered is that the SPED department is treated as the “stepchild” and are left out of the TAT. Finally, the parental issue is whether the parents are too involved or not involved at all, regardless of the case she positively communicates first to let families know she is on their