Today, we would like to talk about the practice of joint online teaching we put to the test at Le Sallay Academy at the end of the last academic year: for one week, there were almost no regular classes at our school, as we held special seminars instead, each prepared by two teachers of different subjects.

We call this practice ‘co-teaching’ which is a term often used to describe any situation when a class is for some reason conducted by more than a single teacher. For instance, in the field of special education, this word refers specifically to classes conducted by a teacher with the help of an assistant who helps the special needs children. This approach helps manage the learning process so that special needs children could learn at the same pace as neurotypical (i.e., 'normal’) children. At Le Sallay Academy, we embrace inclusion, and so we make use of this same strategy too. That said, today, we would like to talk about something else, to wit, classes prepared together by two teachers of different subjects.

Our school has two departments: Humanities (comprising literature, English, history, geography, social sciences, and foreign languages) and STEM (math, chemistry, physics, biology, and geology). The basic idea behind co-teaching is to hold several classes on a topic that pertains to several different school subjects but is nevertheless never covered by the curriculum directly.

For instance, our senior students had a biology & math co-teaching class on genetics, while our younger kids took part in a biology & physics session discussing astrobotany (yes, it is an actual discipline, and no, we never had any astrobotany lessons in our school days either).

It goes without saying that co-teaching classes can be held between departments too. At the Humanities department, our most popular educator with the STEM kids and staff is Dr. Melinda Rice, our history teacher: together with Nika Ocksenchuck, our science teacher, Dr. Rice held a co-teaching class on the plague pandemic, examining it from the point of view of both history and biology, and she also collaborated with our Spanish teacher Olga Baley for a class on the colonization of Latin America which involved reading historical documents in the original Spanish.

The topics can be narrower: for example, our literature teacher Matthew McConnell held a co-teaching class with our math teacher Roman Tsvetnikov on Flatland, a dystopian novella by Edwin Abbott Abbott which describes a world of two-dimensional characters - figures, lines, and dots - who at some point discover the existence of three dimensions.

Originally, we came up with the idea of co-teaching and implemented it back in December 2019, during our in-person sessions. Le Sallay Academy does not have any grades, and children are separated into groups based on their level of proficiency in each subject, so during co-teaching classes, they find themselves in the company of new people. Such classes are very interesting and easy to hold when everyone gets together, and neither kids nor teachers have to be a hostage to the time zones which is what happens sometimes when planning an online education schedule (our students and staff reside everywhere from Novosibirsk to California, which are a long way apart!).

The next time we held our co-teaching week during another in-person session in March 2020. Alas, we never got a chance to get together again since then: we had to cancel our June and September in-person sessions because of the COVID-19 pandemic, while in December, we had two separate in-person sessions, with one held in the U.S. for those living in America, and the other in Russia for people living in the Eastern hemisphere.

That is why we finally found the resolve to hold several online co-teaching classes, first in June, and for another time in November, during the new academic year.

Each student had two to four co-teaching classes, and afterwards, they were expected to prepare a project, like writing an essay, constructing a model, drawing a poster, etc. It is a good way to introduce some variety to online education (which becomes essential when in-person sessions get canceled), and besides, it gives kids an opportunity to collaborate in groups they are not accustomed to, get to know other students, and discuss some topics beyond the scope of regular school education and even their curriculum at the Academy with their teachers.

Holding such classes — not to mention whole weeks of such classes — is certainly not a simple task in terms of administrative complexity. However, our successful record proves anything is possible. And the inspiring thing is this practice is extremely beneficial not just for kids, but for teachers too. We will of course hold co-teaching weeks at the Academy again.

What’s more, we are hoping our experience will prove useful for other schools, both those who have always been involved in online education, and those who are forced to implement distance learning now.