Welcome to my website about Integrated Co-Teaching!
On this homepage I will introduce myself and the website you are about to explore.
Integrated Co-Teaching (ICT) is a type of special education service in which one general education teacher and one special education teacher work together in the same classroom to support and teach children with and without identified disabilities together.
About Me
I’m so glad you decided to explore my website. My name is Rachel Kurtz, and I am currently a special education teacher in an ICT classroom at KIPP STAR Elementary School (KSES), a charter school located in Washington Heights, New York City. The making of this website is the capstone project for my graduate degree in Early Childhood Special and General Education at Bank Street College of Education.
I come from a family of educators–my father is a child psychologist, my mother is a preschool special education teacher, and my sister is a preschool teacher. In high school, I began working in the field of special education by working one-on-one with a student with autism at a religious school on weekends. It was during this experience that I first started to develop my passion for advocating for all children to be included in the same classroom setting, regardless of diagnosis, exceptionality, or special need.
While attending college at New York University, I had the opportunity to work one summer at a camp for students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other disruptive behavior disorders. This experience taught me many techniques and lessons I still use to this day: I learned how to maintain a calm, even tone; how to maintain consistency; and how to hold high behavioral, social, and academic expectations when working with children. Most importantly, this experience re-affirmed my desire to become a special education teacher. Upon graduating from college, I moved to Louisiana to continue my work in the area of special education through Teach For America.
In my first year teaching full-time as a special education teacher, I taught two students who had self-contained settings on their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), and nine students who had a combination of services including ICT and/or Special Education Teacher Support Services (SETSS). This meant that I learned quickly about the range of placements and supports available to students with IEPs.
In my second year teaching full-time, I taught a self-contained class of students who had classifications of emotional disturbance and/or behavior disorders. I worked with students in a classroom separate from that of their non-disabled peers, but I focused on transitioning them back to spend as much time as possible in general education settings.
After two years teaching in Louisiana and becoming certified to teach special education, I moved back to New York City. I began my graduate studies at Bank Street College of Education and continued my special education career teaching at KSES. In my first two years at KSES, I was the special education teacher in ICT kindergarten classrooms. This past school year, my third year at KSES and fifth year teaching, I was the special education teacher in a second grade ICT classroom. This coming year, I look forward to looping with some of my students with IEPs to the third grade.
Although I consider a fifth-year teacher to be relatively new to the teaching profession, I feel honored and thankful for the rich variety of experiences I have had so far working as a special educator. I have worked in self-contained classrooms, in SETSS settings, and in ICT settings. I have worked with students from kindergarten through eighth grade. This combination of experiences has opened my eyes to the wide range of services and supports available to students. I am grateful to have received training and exposure to many research-validated strategies and techniques, so that I have a variety of tools from which to choose when differentiating for my students. I am fortunate to have provided service delivery at multiple points on the continuum of services. These experiences have provided the basis for my knowledge about special education, and I look forward to all of the educational experiences that the future holds.
Note: All of the video footage you will see on this website was taken from the second grade ICT classroom in which I taught. Also, I want to give a special thank you to my wonderful general education co-teacher, Maria Leonardi, for her collaboration and support in filming so many lessons this year.
About This Website
This website is my Integrative Masters Project, the capstone project of my master’s program at Bank Street College of Education. Under the advisement of Dr. Sean O’Shea, I have been able to construct a website dedicated to ICT. On this website, you can discover:
- What ICT is
- How to effectively collaborate as co-teachers in an ICT setting
- What different models of ICT are available
- When the different models should be used
- Illustrations of the models through images, videos, and lesson plans
- The benefits of using multiple models in your classroom
By combining research-based ICT models with practical examples, I hope to provide you with a user-friendly, informative, web-based handbook that you can use to best support your students.
The home page that you are currently viewing is designed to give you an overview of the website. The ICT Models page more thoroughly explores what ICT is and what teaching models are available in ICT classrooms. Lastly, each model has its own dedicated page that goes into much greater detail about the particular model. The list of models can be found in the drop-down menu, “Explore the Models,” at the top of each page.
Why I Am Doing This Project
As an ICT teacher, I have been shown graphics of the six ICT models, such as the one illustrated below, many times in professional development sessions and graduate school courses. However, actually implementing each of the six models of ICT is very different from just being able to name them, or from understanding the arrangement and roles of teachers and students in each model. Although teachers may be familiar with the fact that there can be a great deal of variation among the models, teachers may be unfamiliar with how to capitalize on these options to best support their students, including knowing when to use each model, how to plan for it, and how to coordinate thoughtfully and effectively with their co-teachers. Finally, it can be very easy for a pair of co-teachers to get into the habit of using only a few models, and either forget about the rest of the models or not be encouraged to branch out and experiment with the benefits of the rest of the models.
I did this project to push myself to be more thoughtful with the different models of ICT my co-teacher and I used for each lesson. In particular, I wanted to get into the habit of thinking deeply about the pros and cons of each model for each specific lesson. I wanted to create an easily accessible resource for ICT co-teachers to use to think through the choices they are making about which models of ICT are most appropriate to use in which circumstances. I also wanted to create a more detailed example of each model, as opposed to just the simple picture graphic I was so frequently given (such as the one shown above). Although these graphics are useful as quick resources, they do not give the full picture of what is possible with each model or adequately convey the flexibility among the models that I detail in this website.
Integrated Co-Teaching Models 