Swimming in the Deep End. Jennifer Abrams

Case Study in Challenge Framing: The Co-Teaching Challenge

      A student support director knew she believed in inclusion of students with special needs, and wanted to do more push-in support (support provided within the general education classroom) for students receiving additional assistance versus taking them out of class and placing them in resource classes. She had been at workshops and done some research on the effectiveness of co-teaching, and decided to roll out co-teaching in ninth-grade classrooms, pairing resource teachers with content-specific teachers for the following fall. She made the pairings and put a day of training on the books. The content-specific teachers thought of resource teachers as supports for specific students they had in their classrooms. The resource teachers self-identified as experts at understanding learning differences and being case workers for their students but did not consider being co-teachers as part of their professional identity—colleagues at the same school, maybe, but not co-educators in the same room.

      Teachers attended a mandatory one-day training on what was expected as of the start of the school year. The training explained that now everyone would be working together (with expected parity) in the same room several hours a day. No common prep was factored in. The rollout began. It wasn’t an immediate success, nor was it a complete success several years later. There were power struggles, hurt feelings, and a lot of confusion. The big question that teachers and parents continue to ask and should be asking is whether this program has been helpful for student growth and well-being. The conversation continues.

      In this scenario, the student support director believed that students needed to be in general education classrooms for a longer portion of the day. She wanted to live out the idea of inclusion in practice to improve instruction for all, but she didn’t take into deep consideration the dynamics on the ground for those who would implement it. If she had studied the challenge a bit more before making this decision, might the implementation have gone more smoothly? Most likely. In this scenario, the response seemed reactive and somewhat personal. The director cared deeply about making change to do more push-in instruction, but the teachers felt blindsided and insulted by it being sprung on them at the end of the year, as many needed to change their schedules and had little time for collaborating, communicating, and preparing to shift their practice. Being more proactive when implementing this change could have improved the outcome. For example, if you are encountering ideas at conferences that you think will make life better (such as new evaluation systems, different curricula, and so on) and you want to bring them into your school or district, are you sure that the solution you put into place will fix the problem you might have? Not only knowing what your challenge is but also knowing whether the initiative you are implementing is the right fix really is an essential deep-end skill.

      You may be asking yourself, “But what if I don’t get to decide what the challenge is and I am responsible for the rollout just the same?” If the state or the school’s board of education has already determined without your input to implement a new initiative, you still have a responsibility to see where this diagnosis came from and to understand its origins. While it might be that no one asked for your input and now it is a problem and an emergency for you and your colleagues, it still is something to research, to understand, and to begin to frame a plan of implementation around. Why? Because your colleagues will look to you as the person to articulate where this challenge came from and how this initiative will be a part of the solution.

      And while you can build up your sphere of influence so that next time the higher-ups roll something out they might ask for your input ahead of the changes, understanding the framing of this challenge will help shape the communication and implementation plan for this initiative going forward. You have the responsibility as a deep-end leader to know what challenge this initiative is solving and to communicate this thinking to your colleagues.

       Question 2: Do I Know Whether This Challenge Requires Solving a Problem or Reaching a Compromise? Can I Speak to This Difference?

      When deep-end leaders work to frame challenges, it is important to recognize you may not always be dealing with a problem that has a direct solution. Instead, the situation may present a polarity you must work to manage. Knowing the difference between a polarity and a problem will help you to better focus your efforts and shape your communications. Problems are solvable. For instance, finding a time when everyone can attend a meeting or determining what to add to the agenda for the parent meeting are problems with solutions. Polarities are to be managed. Polarities include things like achieving better balance between common aspects of our assessments and what is up to each individual teacher and dedicating more time to focusing on teacher well-being rather than focusing solely on student well-being; these are challenges to be managed.

      Just as we need to both inhale and exhale and can’t do one without the other, polarities are not an either-or situation but instead yes and kind of work. In education, we often hear of certain pendulum swings, from a focus on whole child or the focus on back-to-basics academics; from a focus on the art of teaching to the science of teaching. Swinging from one side to the other causes both sides to get defensive and protective, and no divergent and other-focused thinking can happen when a side is in fight or flight mode. No one can—as much as others might want them to—cowboy up (that is, intentionally determine to overcome a challenge) while in this frame of mind. Jane A. G. Kise’s (2014) Unleashing the Positive Power of Differences: Polarity Thinking in Our Schools is an excellent book that “provides tools and processes for avoiding those pendulum swings by listening to the wisdom of multiple points of view” (p. 2). This involves a focus on both sides of a polarity.

      For example, consider how a polarity was approached when one of the principals in a school district in which I worked rolled out common assessments as the next year’s must-do. The principal told the teachers that things were changing and the district would dictate their common assessments. Teachers went crazy; they were accustomed to and still wanted autonomy in their classrooms and in their practice. If the administrator had instead communicated what teachers needed to align and what they could do with autonomy, rather than focusing just on the aligning assessment aspect of teacher practice, it might not have appeared that she was disrespecting teachers. The polarity discussion might have been more successful and resulted in greater buy-in from the teachers if she had framed the assessment shift as part of a polarity to support common achievement, and highlighted what wasn’t going change (instructional strategies) alongside what was going to change (assessments).