Dian Fluit Teaser

Co-Teaching

Introduction
The Dutch law, Passend Onderwijs (2014), and the Flemish M-Decree (2015) have a common goal: offering appropriate education for all children under 18 years. A policy objective is that students participate in mainstream education as much as possible. Both Passend Onderwijs and the M-Decree present a vision on providing appropriate learning environments for students, but putting these laws into practice has led to challenges that both pupils and teachers face. This dissertation attempts to discuss co-teaching as a substantive practical approach to create a powerful learning environment in a diverse educational context by gathering qualitative data.

Research goals
The general goal of the research is to understand the conditions of co-teaching regarding good collaboration and good teaching in education. The study starts with the conceptualization of co-teaching. The resulting definition of co-teaching will function as a layer for three empirical studies. The implications of our research will focus on conditions of good collaboration and good teaching.

The research has three specific goals that contribute to understand the implications: (1) clarifying the way co-teachers make their pedagogical approach visible in daily practice, (2) identifying the challenges in co-teaching and the related instrumental and normative professionalization needs of co-teachers, and (3) clarifying the meaning of sense making in their work, using structured team-reflection.

Research questions
To meet the research objectives we have formulated two research questions (O1 and O2).

O1: A. What are the thoughts of novice, experienced and supporting co-teachers about good teaching and good collaboration? What do co-teachers consider to be important in regards to good teaching and good collaboration?

B. Which joint needs for professional development come forward from novice, experienced and supporting co-teachers?

C. How do novice, experienced and supporting co-teachers value the use of an instrument for structured team-reflection?

O2: What conditions promote the creation of a more inclusive educational environment by means of co-teaching?

Studies
Assuming the added value of researching co-teaching from different angles, we first explored the research topic using scientific literature. In addition we studied co-teaching from the perspectives of respectively beginning co-teaching teams, experienced co-teaching teams, and peripatetic teachers who work as co-teachers. Below we are presenting the research purpose, the research questions, the methodology, the collected data, and summarize the main results and conclusions of each study. After the presentation of the individual studies (A), we will discuss the overarching findings of the joint studies on a meta level (B).

A. Individual studies
Study 1 (Chapter 2)
Team-reflection: the missing link in co-teaching teams
In the first study, the concept of the 'co-teaching' area is conceptualized from selected international