Joint Initiation and Joint Feedback: Connecting Collaboration with Pedagogy in Co-teaching

How teachers ask questions and give feedback to student responses is an age-old topic that pervades educational research, especially empirical work that examines classroom interaction. Focusing on the understudied context of co-teaching, and a virtually unexamined dynamic with two teachers with equal roles and skills sets, this study looks at how co-teachers can jointly accomplish the initiation and feedback work in IRF sequences. Two collaborative practices, joint initiation and joint feedback, are identified and described in context. The discovery of these practices reveals that co-teachers with equal roles can jointly occupy not only the same IRF sequence, but also the same component of the sequence. Beyond uncovering some interactional characteristics of this type of collaborative interaction, the findings of this study also carry important implications for pedagogy. First, the instances of joint initiation show how co-teacher collaboration can enhance the progressivity and the pedagogical effectiveness of question-answer exchange during instruction. Second, the practice of joint feedback reflects some of the distinct advantages of having two instructors in one classroom, which include making feedback more salient for learners, creating more opportunities for one-on-one teacher-student interaction, and increasing the likelihood of spotting and addressing problems in student understanding

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