VSC and Co-teaching

According to recent policy memorandums and guidance (State of South Carolina Department on Special Education, September 2020), co-teaching has specific traits and co-teachers have specific responsibilities. According to SCDOE guidance documents co-teaching is defined as -

 … teachers working together with groups of students; sharing the planning, organization, delivery, and assessment of instruction (academic and/or behavior), as well as sharing physical space. Unlike inclusion, co-teaching is a model of instructional delivery that includes two or more teachers co-planning, co-instructing, co-assessing, and co-managing (the Four C’s) to meet the needs of all the students in the classroom. It describes a method in which two or more educational professionals work together to teach, in the same physical space, a common group of students. Both professionals are responsible for planning, assessing, managing, and instructional delivery. As the term suggests, this is a cooperative pursuit, without an implied hierarchical relationship between the professionals.

While VirtualSC has methods of collaboration with teachers from Sponsor Schools, including discussing differentiation, teachers would not be able to meet some of the defined necessities of a co-taught environment, such as:

• two or more teachers teaching all students in the classroom
• two or more teachers responsible for a behavior management system
• assessment creation/management
• instructional planning and design
• sharing the same physical space (through content presentation and lectures)

When enrolling a student at VSC, it is important for Sponsor Schools to note the differences innate in our programming and presentation styles, and the responsibility of the Sponsor School to provide services to and FAPE to the student. As a result, a true co-teaching environment (as defined in official state guidance) is not able to be implemented for students enrolled in the VSC program.