Ciletti, Lorenzo;
Baines, Ed;
Somerville, Matthew P;
(2025)
Co-teaching practices in Italian primary classrooms: a case for including the sociocultural framework in training teaching collaborations.
International Journal of Inclusive Education
10.1080/13603116.2025.2457461.
(In press).
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Abstract
Internationally, co-teaching is valuable for educating mainstream classes including children with disabilities. This educational provision typically involves a special education teacher (SET) and a classroom teacher. These ‘co-teachers’ are generally expected to collaborate in whole-class instruction. However, international research often illustrates that SETs independently support the classwork of disabled children while teachers handle whole-class education. This limited instructional collaboration is primarily attributed to insufficient time for co-teachers to jointly plan more elaborate, team-based instruction. To gain a nuanced understanding of co-teaching, this research was conducted in the relatively unexamined context of Italian primary schools, where SETs and teachers have considerable opportunities for collaborative lesson planning. The study drew on classroom observations of one SET-teacher pair and interviews with 31 additional SETs. The findings nonetheless echoed those elsewhere: the ‘Italian’ primary-school SETs instructed children with disabilities, and rarely collaborated with teachers for whole-class education. The interviewed SETs explained these results through their own and teachers’ limited knowledge of more complex co-teaching practices and the project management skills for co-planning these. The findings are interpreted according to a nuanced sociocultural framework linking co-teaching strategies and children’s learning. The findings suggest that this sociocultural framework could guide the training of SETs and teachers.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Co-teaching practices in Italian primary classrooms: a case for including the sociocultural framework in training teaching collaborations |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/13603116.2025.2457461 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2025.2457461 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Children with disabilities, co-teaching practices, sociocultural theories, support staff, support teachers |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Psychology and Human Development |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10206447 |
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