As a teacher of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students at a K–8 school, my role includes monitoring the support and accommodations of each child's Individualized Education Program within the general education classroom. This task requires regular collaboration with general education teachers to determine how to present lessons to meet DHH students' individual goals while ensuring their comprehension and participation.
Collaboration can pose challenges, ranging from time constraints to conflicting personalities and teaching philosophies. I recognize my natural tendency to favor being the "lead teacher." That's why I designed a three-phase collaboration project for myself in hopes of improving my personal collaborative practices over the course of the school year.
A general educator and I learned we would be in the same classroom during pre-planning, just five days before the first day of school. Though we were members of the same professional learning community, we knew very little of each other personally or professionally and had never worked together closely before. I soon felt a sense of tension and a need to clarify our responsibilities and figure out what was and wasn't working.
There is often a stigma that the special educator's role is less demanding than that of a general educator, who deals directly with a greater number of students. Special educators simply have a more in-depth role with fewer students. With an understanding of each other's roles comes a greater appreciation for what we all do, as well as a clearer picture of our common professional goals.
A Personal Plan of Action
Before I worked directly with the general educator, I wanted to look inward and address my own practice. I used a collaboration readiness scale and a collaboration log to identify my personal strengths and weaknesses, as well as daily examples of successful collaboration and unsatisfactory interactions. The readiness scale allowed me to assess my own investment and resistance to collaboration. My collaboration log held records of our work together: the purpose of the collaboration, the specific activity, and my satisfaction with the outcome.
In Phase I of the project, I identified our distinct roles as support facilitator and general education teacher, the purpose and frequency of our collaboration, our individual needs for improvement, and the potential benefits of improving our relationship.
In Phase II, I identified schoolwide and personal factors affecting our collaboration. There is a common misperception that students with disabilities who are not able to accomplish the curricular standards as they are presented to general education students should be pulled out of class by the special educator, rather than working with the students and DHH teacher directly in the classroom. This practice was routine in our school.
Phase II also involved identifying a vision for our collaboration: a more systematic flow of communication and a greater sense of comfort when working together to better meet our students' needs. At this stage, I involved the general education teacher in order to create a set weekly meeting schedule with specific outlines for discussion. We had the same common goal: having a greater effect on student success. To implement our vision, we needed more structured communication with precise agendas and outcomes, which we hoped would result in a more effective use of time. We also wanted ongoing professional development in order to enhance our collaborative skills and team-building strategies. By building a better working relationship, we hoped to model positive behaviors for our students.
In developing a separate personal action plan, I created specific objectives for myself. For example, I recognized my lack of confidence in the general educator's subject area and a tendency to minimize my expertise with special needs, so I wanted to be more vocal in sharing my ideas and concerns in our planning sessions. I kept a log of each weekly session, documenting the content, questions posed, and any positive comments. In addition to the log, I asked the general educator for the following feedback about the effectiveness of our meetings and used responses to continue thinking about what I could do better:
- Do you feel like our weekly sessions are productive?
- Do you feel like our collaborative efforts are positively affecting student progress? Do you have any specific examples?
- What do you feel is working well?
- What changes need to be made?
A Work in Progress
In Phase III, I reflected on the results we achieved and next steps. I felt well-prepared to collaboratively meet DHH students' needs, but I was not a content-area expert in each subject and relied on the general educator to identify crucial content during instruction. In our weekly collaborative sessions, we were able to design curricular adaptations with a focus on Universal Design for Learning concepts and learn more about each other in the process.
Our students' success also improved. According to student grade reports, the class average prior to our collaborative efforts in Quarter 1 was a D. In contrast, Quarter 3's class average was a B. We made modifications to student assessments, including the use of visuals and leveled texts, that helped students demonstrate content knowledge without being hindered by their reading level. As I gained familiarity with the general educator's instructional style, I was able to better redesign lessons to meet DHH students' needs.
Given the outcomes I achieved personally and professionally, I would involve a general education partner in any future collaboration assessments. I would suggest that we both complete a readiness scale and discuss our results. This approach would give us both a joint baseline measurement to grow from, allowing us to target goals for our working relationship and individual skills. When general education and DHH teachers commit to regular collaborative sessions, they make strides toward understanding the complexity of each other's work.