Delivering for “Our Students”
A Collaborative Approach to Diverse Learner Support
By: Kelley Prosser
At Summit Preparatory Charter High School, a part of Summit Public Schools, a unique program has elevated the role of special education teachers and presented new possibilities for diverse learner support. Inspired by a teacher’s fresh perspective and supported by a school’s improvement culture, the systemic approach to collaboration between teachers has already benefited students — and helped build the conditions for the launch of a co-teaching pilot this school year.
Alisa Gonzales knew that there was even more she could do to support her students and colleagues. It was the fall of 2019, and she and the other learning specialists — Summit Prep’s title for special education teachers — had already enhanced the student experience inside the school’s Learning Center.
A few times each week, diverse learners came to the Learning Center to work with a learning specialist on their Individualized Education Plan (IEP) goals. There, they received tutoring and additional support to build the foundational skills necessary for success in core classes.
While Gonzales supported students every day, she knew that outside of the Learning Center classroom there were more opportunities to help students bridge the divide between the specialized support that she provided and the academic work happening in their math, social studies, science, and English classes.
At about the same time, a Summit Prep math teacher was looking to grow her own practice to better support her diverse learners. She wanted to meet every one of her students at their level and to differentiate her lessons so that every student found the work accessible, motivating, and challenging.
With encouragement from school leaders, the two teachers joined forces. Gonzales began informally “pushing in” to the math classroom to offer the support the math teacher sought. Her time with students in the classroom didn’t count as specialized academic instruction, but it helped the math teacher to build skills for supporting diverse learners in the general education setting.
Soon, other Summit Prep teachers approached Gonzales asking for similar coaching. Gonzales helped teachers better serve their diverse learners, and just as importantly, she integrated what she learned about upcoming classroom activity into her planning for the Learning Center. This approach created a stronger connection between her work with students and students’ experiences in her colleagues’ classrooms.
These initial interactions with teachers were informal, occurring when Gonzales and her colleagues had extra time during lunch or a planning block. Maggie McCleskey, a Summit Prep English teacher, was one of the teachers with whom Gonzales partnered. “You can imagine,” McCleskey said of the partnership, “how easy it is for that [time together] to get pushed to the wayside.” Often, competing priorities prevented the informal collaboration that the teachers enjoyed.
Then, in Spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic began, classrooms went online, and the need for support — for students and teachers — became even more acute. The informal communication that had once happened in passing was no longer possible. Gonzales was undeterred: “I kindly forced all my general education teachers to meet with me once per week.”
The teachers were grateful for the collaboration and support as they navigated virtual learning. For Gonzales, the regular interaction provided the opportunity to influence teachers’ perceptions of special education and the responsibility they shared for diverse learners.
“Sometimes,” she said, “we all need a reminder that we’re teaching for every single individual student.”
The coaching partnerships gave Gonzales an idea for what diverse learner support could become: one she would later propose to school leadership.
Building Consensus
Fast forward to Fall 2021. With students and teachers returning to classrooms, Summit Prep Principal Cady Ching was grappling with the lingering challenges resulting from nearly two years of virtual learning. Relationships among faculty, administration, and students — “all of them!” she said — had to be built quickly. This urgent relationship building was critical for student success: educators needed to address students’ academic and social-emotional needs, which had grown during remote learning.
Gonzales was ready with her idea “to formalize the structure where teachers would feel more supported in supporting their students, and then ultimately, for students to be more successful in their classrooms and feel a greater sense of purpose.” Ching saw in Gonzales’s coaching idea an opportunity to address both relational and academic needs, and offered her wholehearted support.
But it was clear that simply saying, “do this” to general education teachers would never be successful in the long term. The Summit Prep team would need to build consensus around a system to connect and support both general education teachers and learning specialists in order to serve students with IEPs.
They began the consensus-building effort by surveying Summit Prep faculty on how they wanted to receive support to serve their diverse learners. Responses repeatedly mentioned one-on-one check-ins with learning specialists, push-in support, and exemplar resources.
With these responses in mind, Gonzales and Ching outlined the goals they wanted to achieve through the new program:
All teachers would understand the current strengths and instructional needs of each diverse learner in their classroom.
All teachers would be supported in preparing lessons and materials that meet the needs of their diverse learners (as identified in their IEPs) while inside their classrooms.
All students with IEPs would be provided with the accommodations, modifications, and services in their IEPs from all school based IEP team members (general education teachers, case managers, and administration) with fidelity.
Ultimately, with Ching’s backing, Gonzales put forward a proposal to faculty. “Alisa was an expert in the way she built consensus around this,” said Ching. When Gonzalez didn’t get full faculty consensus on the initial proposal, she went back to work, getting input and feedback from teachers. She addressed teachers’ fears of losing preparation time by reframing coaching as another way to prepare, and used the example of teachers she already worked with to show how this type of coaching could be easily added to teachers’ standard practice.
Eventually, the final proposal addressed all of the team’s concerns, and everyone was in agreement. The proposal was approved.
“All of our teachers really want to be excellent teachers,” said Ching, “They care so deeply about their own practice.”
Launching Co-Coaching School-wide with NIC Support
At Summit Prep today, each learning specialist meets with the teachers in their caseload for 30-minute coaching sessions every other week. Summit calls the arrangement “Co-Coaching,” because it compliments the coaching general education teachers also receive from school leaders on an alternate schedule.
To quickly define and implement the program, Summit Prep utilized the expertise available to them as part of the Networked Improvement Community for Students with Disabilities (NIC). Led by Marshall Street, the NIC is made up of ten public charter districts united in a shared aim to make dramatic gains for Black and Latinx students with disabilities experiencing poverty across the United States. Marshall Street Improvement Advisor Giovanna Santimauro helped Gonzales to structure, document, and test ideas through Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles, a key process of Continuous Improvement. To start, Santimauro helped Gonzales define and implement the agendas for the first Co-Coaching session and the bi-weekly meetings that followed.
In the first Co-Coaching session for each general education teacher, the learning specialist and general education teacher define the teacher’s goals for skill development to support diverse learners.
These goals — which focus on getting to know students, accommodating students’ needs, creating instructional scaffolds so that all students access the curriculum, and planning instruction in ways that promote differentiation for all students — help teachers to “start to think of [students with IEPs] as ‘our’ students, not just the education specialist’s,” said Gonzalez.
Half of each subsequent session is spent working toward the teacher’s goals. The remaining time builds camaraderie and enhances the work of both teachers: The learning specialists help general education teachers plan for the content and skills being taught in the classroom and then use their knowledge of those classroom plans to inform their own planning for the Learning Center.
Co-Coaching within an AP Literature Classroom
Maggie McCleskey was delighted to formalize the strong, but informal, relationship she already had with Gonzales. The goals they had established centered on improving McCleskey’s ability to implement accommodations and differentiate instruction in her AP Literature course. She wanted, she said, to be “a bit more creative in the sorts of activities that would become the blueprint for my classes.”
Previously, for one unit in the course she’d had the entire class read the same text, each student choosing a different lens through which to analyze the reading. Through her conversation with Gonzales, McCleskey decided to offer multiple text selections, each at a different difficulty level, allowing students to choose a text for analysis. Then, with that much differentiation, they explored how to bring students back together to a whole-class experience.
“That’s where it helps to talk with the learning specialist,” McCleskey said, “because for me that’s something I needed a partner to talk through. What is individual and what is collective?”
For another lesson, in which students each read excerpts of multiple texts, McCleskey sought guidance on how to support students reading below grade level. Ultimately, she offered multiple accommodations to the entire class. She provided reading support by personally recording audio of text for students to listen to as they read. She offered online and offline reading options as alternative formats for each reading. And for reading time, she allowed flexibility for students to choose to read independently, in pairs, or in small groups.
In addition to growth goals, Gonzales and McCleskey discussed plans for upcoming classes.
“I realized, if I’m going to have the gift of her support, the way to maximize that is to keep her as informed as possible.”
Through these regular conversations, Gonzales understood classroom activities deeply, in a way that allowed her to plan for Learning Center time.
From the outset, McCleskey saw the value in the arrangement. “This is beautiful,” she recalls thinking. “We’re a team. You’re a diverse learning specialist, and I’m a gen ed classroom teacher. Of course we made a partnership!”
Ultimately, the partnership between Gonzales and McCleskey was so successful that Gonzales began entering the AP Literature classroom on occasion to support diverse learners alongside their general education peers — foreshadowing Summit Prep’s readiness for a co-teaching pilot this fall.
More immediately, one month before the end of the semester, all of McCleskey’s diverse learners were passing the class — a result that differed from previous years, and that both teachers were proud of, especially when all of the students walked across the stage at graduation that spring.
The Why behind Co-Coaching: Collaborative Teaming
At the foundation of Summit Prep’s co-coaching model is collaborative teaming, the practice of general and special educators working together to support students. This is a research-backed method for ensuring students who need specialized support are able to engage with their peers and the general curriculum, rather than being isolated from it. Collaboration provides opportunities for educators to work together to draw on their diverse knowledge, strengths, and perspectives to define, plan, implement, assess, follow through and follow up on ways of helping learners develop to their fullest.
The concept may not seem groundbreaking, but the reality at most schools is that schedules and structures prevent regular collaboration between teachers for the purpose of comprehensive student support. In many schools, special education is siloed, and diverse learner support and accommodations are not as effective as they could be. Furthermore, support for diverse learners is often relegated to special education teachers, not shared among teacher teams.
As a result, said Summit Prep Principal Ching, “there can be a lot of ‘othering’ that happens [to diverse learners] … It’s not good for kids and it’s not the way we think about our young people at Summit.”
The Key to Success: Leadership Buy-In
“One of the cool things about my job is that my role has changed every single year, which speaks a lot to how ready we are to grow our special ed program,” said Gonzales, in reference to Ching’s attitude toward both diverse learner support and continuous improvement at Summit Prep.
According to Gonzales, the structure of the program is unique, as is the systematic way that conversations between learning specialists and general education teachers are prioritized. “I think that speaks to how Cady has really made supporting our diverse learners a priority at our school — and I think that’s a trend throughout our entire network.”
Indeed, the Co-Coaching program and the process for establishing it demonstrate Ching’s commitment to improvement within the school she leads. “Not only are we saying collaboration is a priority,” she said, “but we’re driving for consensus within the team … and we’re all coming together to center our diverse learners in a way that champions all kids.”
Co-Coaching Paves the Way for Co-Teaching
Further evidence of Summit’s commitment to reach all students is apparent in Summit Prep’s Co-Teaching pilot this fall, a mere 12 months after the proposal process for Co-Coaching began. In four classrooms, learning specialists and general education teachers co-teach math and English courses, sharing responsibility for instructional planning, delivery, and assessment to serve the needs of all students in the classroom.
After a recent site visit to observe the Co-Teaching pilot, Adam Carter, Executive Director of Marshall Street, reflected on the inclusive culture the Summit Prep team has created.
“There was great respect shown between specialists in the Learning Center, as well as between the co-teaching pairs. That respect then extended from teachers to students throughout the day, and students reciprocated respect, for both the Gen Ed teachers and the learning specialists.”
The collaborative benefits of the Co-Coaching program led naturally to a strong launch of Co-Teaching at Summit Prep, Carter observed. Far from relying on a One Teach / One Assist model of co-teaching, Summit Prep co-teaching teams are employing Team Teaching and Alternative Teaching to maximize the impact of two professional educators in targeted classes.
As Carter said, “planning emphasized both teachers’ strengths. The English teacher had a high-level plan with instructional objectives; the learning specialist supported the operationalization of that plan into scaffolded instructional activities. The objectives and instructional activities to accomplish the objectives are strengthened by the collaboration.”
Just as importantly, the English teacher used curriculum and materials developed for the Co-Teaching classrooms again with other student groups later in the day, benefiting all students.
This was Part 1 of Summit Prep’s journey toward co-teaching. Part 2 is anticipated in Summer 2023.
The story was co-authored with Marshall Street, whose Continuous Improvement (CI) team uses the tools of CI to tackle intricate, systems-level problems in K-12 education. Learn more about Marshall Street’s work in CI at marshall.org, or email marshallcomms@summitps.org to connect with the NIC for more information.
