A Co-Teaching Model:

This article relates the story of a first grade teacher and a child who was the only deaf student in the entire school. Because he had no one who could communicate with him--not teachers, not students, no one, this situation tugged at the hearts of a committed team of professionals. A teacher of the deaf, a first grade general education teacher, a speech-language pathologist, an occupational therapist, and an interpreter, none of whom had worked with a deaf student before or co taught, began to work collaboratively to provide services. As professionals they looked back on the experience as one of their most rewarding--and decided to take a closer look and reflect on that year to improve their own practices and hopefully help others. Here they explore why this collaborative model worked and how a group of professionals from different disciplines, each with different goals for the student and with no experience working with a deaf child with a cochlear implant, came together to make Jeffery's year a success. Further, they wanted to see if they could use this experience to develop a co-teaching model to support other students with cochlear implants in a general education classroom. In retrospect they also ask one another, "What did we do just right?"