AERA 2025 Annual Meeting Presentations—Instructional Quality in Collaborative Teaching: What Factors Support or Impede It? 

Instructional Quality in Collaborative Teaching: What Factors Support or Impede It? 
Date & Time: April 24, 2025 | 1:45–3:15 p.m MT
Location: The Colorado Convention Center, Floor: Meeting Room Level, Room 711

Presenter(s): Sarah Howard

Description:

Co-teaching is a prominent instructional model used to provide integrated language and content learning for EL-designated multilingual learners (Kibler et al., 2023), and scholarly attention is often paid to the structures and quality of teacher collaboration itself (e.g., Yoon, 2023). While this work is valuable, it does not address the resulting instructional quality that students experience, which Darling Hammond describes as the “sine qua non” (Levin, 2020, para. 2) of any reform effort. We draw upon observational and interview data to identify co-taught lessons featuring high-quality instruction (as conceptualized in Walqui & Bunch, 2019; WestEd, 2020), and then identify the collaborative communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and ecological factors (van Lier, 2004) influencing these classrooms. We also compare these instructional, collaborative, and ecological features to those found in lessons lacking features of high-quality instruction. Data are drawn from 40 co-taught middle and high-school lessons that were observed across three districts and in multiple content areas. Data also include 28 teacher and 33 school and district administrator interviews. Each lesson is treated as an individual case within a multiple case study design (Stake, 2006). Observational data (i.e., fieldnotes, audio-recordings, and lesson documents) were used to establish the instructional quality of each lesson, and both observations and interviews were used to identify the collaborative community of practice among co-teachers and the ecological factors shaping their collaboration. Analysis followed an inductive/deductive design (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane, 2006), with initial inductive coding and memoing followed by alignment of themes to above-mentioned theoretical frameworks, with adaptations to the frameworks as appropriate. Initial analyses suggest that a relatively limited number of lessons fully met our criteria for high-quality instruction, conceptualized according to characteristics of academic rigor, high teacher expectations, quality teacher/student and peer interactions, an integrated language focus, and quality curriculum (WestEd, 2020). Those that did, however, were supported by collaboration among co-teachers that featured extensive planning and ongoing communication, equitable sharing of responsibilities, and thoughtful syntheses of both teachers’ pedagogical approaches. These teachers also benefited from school and district ecologies in which administrators were knowledgeable, co-planning was prioritized, and co-teachers taught a limited number of other courses. Our analysis suggests that lessons without high instructional quality typically lacked the collaboratives and ecological supports found above. However, certain instructional patterns—such as rapid curricular pacing, limited peer interaction, a lack of teacher relationships with students, and disconnected language activities—were found even when collaboration and ecologies were strongly supportive. These patterns suggest that although structural support for co-teaching at the secondary level is critically important, an emphasis on instructional quality reveals multiple notable disjunctures in co-teaching, even when structures and support for collaboration are present. These are wide-ranging, from issues of content coverage/pacing to approaches to language pedagogy to opportunities for interaction and relationship-building. Such patterns suggest important areas of professional learning for language and content co-teachers, and for further research to understand how collaborating teachers can develop this pedagogical expertise together.