leadership in high schools

• How should schools attend to the management needs of students who require a smaller setting, more restrictive, yet at the same time need to be academically challenged and integrated with their general education peers?
• If co-teaching is possible, what are the merits of this program for students who loose the nurturing, caring, safe environment of a special needs 1:6:1 or 1:8:1 classroom?
• What are the disadvantages of integrating special needs students using a co-teaching model?
• With NCLB and the new certified requirements for Special Ed. teachers in the content areas, will the need to use co-teaching diminish? 
• Was co-teaching “invented” so that special ed. highly qualified teachers could gain exposure to content and thus pave the way to higher academic instruction and student expectations for spec. ed. students?
• Is co-teaching only the most successful when the special education teacher is certified to teach the given content area and thus can fluidly move and understand concepts within the various content subjects?  If this is true does this mean that a highly qualified teacher of special education, grades 7-12 can only provide  “watered down” instructional content because he/she cannot be expected to understand and teach high school content to the same degree that a general education teacher can? 

Points to Ponder:

A special ed. teacher understands accommodations and modifications.  He/she can examine content and present it in a way that is palatable to special needs students.  This has been proved at the Hewes Center and has resulted in students passing regents exams. 

Teachers, special education teachers included are students themselves, learning is possible at whatever age therefore content can be learned and taught to others because teachers understand pedagogy and can apply learning and teaching strategies to all content.  What is needed in all cases in a genuine interest in and an affinity for a particular subject.  The challenge is how to take material and plan a lesson using that material which leads to teaching and learning.  Co-teaching provides special education teachers the opportunity to teach lessons in unique and interesting ways using holistic approaches which challenge age groups rather that specific spec. ed or gen. ed populations. 

At the Hewes Center, we have chosen a path to improve and provide more challenging instructional practises, demand higher academic performance from students – learner outcomes and broaden access of students to regents diploma level curriculum.  Co-teaching has worked for us.  Yes there are kinks in our system,  but we have to work out these kinks under the the umbrella of Part 100 regs which is general education and to which all students belong, and then modify our path and specify our direction under part 200 regulations which classifies some students.   

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