Advice
Organising your teaching
Watch this video (up to 2:24) where two experts, Nicole Wauters and Sandrine Di Tullio, give you advice on how to organise lessons with pupils with plural language repertoires. Co-teaching is an important part of this, as you will see.
Models of co-teaching
Co-teaching can be defined as the collaborative partnership between a mainstream teacher and a specialist teacher (e.g. language teacher).
Teachers can work with the whole class, including allophone pupils; with two groups, homogeneous or heterogeneous; or with several small groups depending on the pupils’ needs.
Co-teaching will be interesting on several levels: observation of the difficulties encountered by the pupils; sharing of the language teacher’s resources adapted to the non-native speakers; language-focused teaching (grammatical conceptualisation, lexical support…).
Read this booklet and discover 6 possible co-teaching schemes for the reception of allophone pupils in ordinary classes.
Some guiding principles for effective coordination
For collaborative practices to be effective, we have identified some guiding principles from the research:
1) Valuing each other’s expertise and giving equal status to all teachers (Creese, 2010; Davison, 2006; Premier and Parr, 2019)
2) Being able to negotiate power relations (Arkoudis, 2003), roles and responsibilities (Davison, 2006)
3) Adopt a comprehensive posture (Meunier, 2020) that sees diversity as a resource (Davison, 2006)
4) Planning learning and developing resources together (Bell and Baecher, 2012; Creese, 2010; Davison, 2006; Premier and Parr, 2019; Hue Nguyen, 2021)
5) Define explicit learning objectives (Davison, 2006)
6) Consider articulated and flexible pathways for foreign language learning
7) Establish a system for monitoring and evaluating students in the school (see Good practices)
8) Establishing a trusting relationship with colleagues (Davison, 2006) and the head teacher to support collegial decision-making.
