Teachers’ and school leaders’ perception about practices and conditions for co-teaching in Chilean schools

Abstract

In the last decade in Chile, co-teaching has been championed as a teaching practice to address students’ diversity in classrooms and promote school inclusion. Its implementation has not been free of complexities, some of them associated with the conditions necessary to sustain these practices in schools. Considering its incipient implementation, this article presents a study that aims to explore the presence of co-teaching practices and the conditions that promote it according to the perception of teachers and school leaders, to discuss the opportunities and challenges that this represents for pedagogical leadership in the public school system. Through an online questionnaire, the responses of 178 teachers and 53 school leaders from 20 Chilean public schools are compared. The results indicate a high presence of co-teaching practices, with a more positive perception of school leaders compared to teachers. Meanwhile, among the conditions for co-teaching, the most notable are the time exclusively assigned to co-teaching in the organizational dimension, the internal training instances in the formative dimension, and the promotion of collaborative work in the cultural dimension. Furthermore, a positive relationship is observed between the clarity of roles among teachers who co-teach and the evaluation of co-teaching practices. Finally, based on the evidence presented, the relevance of pedagogical leadership in establishing conditions that promote co-teaching practices in public schools is reinforced.