In early December I had the great pleasure to give  two  3-hour presentations about co-teaching with my friend/colleague/former course participant. We did these presentations over two days and the first day was with Korean public school teachers and the second day was with “native” teachers working in the same public schools. (Please don’t ask why they came on different days!) As part of the 3-hour session we co-taught a roughly 3o-minute demo lesson for about 20 of the 90 audience members.  The rest of the audience watched the lesson with a task of checking the models of co-teaching that we showed. They also were asked to give us written feedback on the demo lesson.

In our demo we used two responses to a question about co-teaching  from an advice column (think Dear Abby for teachers) from KOTESOL’s quarterly magazine (the responses can be found on pages 10-11 here). We tried to model different co-teaching strategies while using  a PDP framework for a reading lesson. We split the group of 20 “students’ into smaller groups of 10 and did a variation of parallel teaching with each of us doing the same/similar vocabulary activities at the same time with some of the words that appeared in the texts. Next, we switched groups (well we intended to anyway. I forgot one day and just kept going with the same group!) and did some reading tasks (reading for gist, reading for more detail, and deciding if they’d like to work with the advice givers and why) with our groups. What the “students” didn’t know at the time was that there were actually two different sets of advice written by two different authors. After we let them in on this  surprise we gave them one more chance to read in preparation for telling a new partner from the other group about the advice they’d read. They read once again and then shared the advice. The final stage was for groups of 4 “students” to make a poster consisting of the best advice for co-teachers, either from what they’d read, heard, or experienced.

A rough outline of the 3 presentation hours ended up being  something like:

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