Opportunity to Learn and Opportunity to Teach: Co-Teaching in Bilingual Special Education

• In Event: English Learners With Disabilities and Opportunity to Learn

Abstract

Purpose
This study examines how teachers’ collaborative practices on a fourth grade team influenced the opportunity to learn (OTL) for English Learners (ELs) with disabilities (ELwDs) in a bilingual special education context. Following Heafner and Plaisance’s (2016) lead, I explore how teachers navigate institutional structures and practices that mediate OTL for ELwDs.

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework
OTL has become a muddled concept since its origins in determining the statistical validity of comparing student performance on math assessments (McDonnell, 1995). OTL has been expanded to examine the overall effectiveness of teachers, primarily in regards to the amount of “instructional time, the instructional content covered, and instructional quality” (Elliott & Bartlett, 2016, p. 8). This paper focuses on how various types of teachers collaborated to conceptualize, organize, and navigate instructional time and content in a bilingual charter school for ELwDs.

To that end, this paper draws from literature on co-teaching and teacher collaboration, which often address collaborations between general education teachers and either a special education or an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher, rather than the dynamics when all three are present (e.g., Honigsfeld & Dove, 2010; Friend et al., 2010). Furthermore, studies of co-teaching in bilingual contexts have focused on the relationships between teachers of different languages, novice and veteran teachers, or a bilingual teacher and a special education teacher (e.g., Hock, 2018; Pontier & Gort, 2016; Schwarz & Gorgatt, 2018).

Methods/Data Sources
These data are from an ethnographic study with the fourth grade team at an inclusive bilingual charter school in a racially and economically segregated community in a large city in the Northeastern U.S. The fourth grade team consisted of five teachers: bilingual, Spanish, English, special education, and ESL. Methods included participant observation approximately three full days a week in the 2018-2019 academic year, formal and informal interviews with the teachers and four administrators, and document collection throughout the year.

Results and Significance
This study ultimately found that ELwDs’ OTL in terms of instructional time and content were impacted by special education services, rarely receiving ESL services. ELwDs did not have the same access to grade level content as their peers in English classes but did to a larger extent in Spanish classes. However, rather than situating this gap in individual teachers’ effectiveness, the teachers’ ability and capacity to provide OTL to ELwDs were constrained by institutional structures both legally and within the school, including the service delivery model that fragments the needs of ELwDs, logistical constraints, and the unequal status of various types of teachers.
This study asks researchers and practitioners to question the efficacy of the service delivery model when considering OTL for ELwDs, particularly considering the intersectional gap (Cioè-Peña, 2017). Despite providing both language and special education services in a bilingual setting, teachers struggled to provide equitable instructional content and time for such students in English classes and to a lesser extent in Spanish classes. This paper has implications for how teachers collaborate and how educational leaders can reconceptualize and organize services for ELwDs.

Author

• Jennifer Phuong, University of Pennsylvania