Browsing by Author "Wallinmaa, Venla"

The aim of this thesis is to understand co-teaching. In this study the differences in the definitions of co-teahing and co-teaching in the past and today is examined. The thesis presents the history of co-teaching in Finland and looks at the two concepts of co-teaching used in Finland, samanaikaisopetus and yhteisopetus. The study presents co-teaching approaches that illustrate the practical implementation of the method. In addition, the thesis introduces national curriculums of Finland and a few school-spesific curriculums insights on co-teahing. Finally, the benefits and challenges of co-teaching are presented. The study is a descriptive literature review. National and international peer-reviewed studies and published literature based on them were used as sources. The literature review was based on the most important reliable source materials in the research field, which were significant to the research problem. There are diverse definitions of co-teaching. Researchers define concepts of samanaikaisopetus and yhteisopetus in different ways and some use them as synonyms for each other. Co-teaching has been studied marginally and the definition of concepts is not uniform. The most common difference between the definitions was whether the representatives of the same professional group teaching together were considered as co-teaching or not. According to some of the sources, only teams with a special teacher met the criteria for the definition. In the Finnish National Core Curriculum co-teaching is only used as a concept of special pedagogy. The benefits of co-teaching were the professional development of teachers, the sharing of ideas, peer support, the improvement of well-being at work, and special and general education coming closer to each other. Challenges were encountered in different problems of a common planning time, as well as the lack of teaching facilities and the lack of administrative support. The concept of yhteisopetus was considered to illustrate the teaching process better than samanaikaisopetus. Based on the results of the research it seems that the concept of yhteisopetus has been created as a better alternative to the concept of samanaikaisopetus.