Supporting Ongoing, Collective Learning about Teaching Social Studies Inquiry and Argumentation
Co-teaching
Moving into the host teacher’s classroom, teachers co-teach the lesson they just co-planned. Teachers take turns lead-teaching and share responsibility for supporting student learning. When not lead-teaching, teachers sit alongside students and listen to students’ ideas, paying attention to what students are saying, writing, or doing and how they are making sense of the content. The teacher inquiry question for the day guides teachers’ noticings.
During co-teaching, anyone can call a Teacher Time Out (TTO) to pause the lesson, ask for help, discuss student thinking, and deliberate about possible instructional responses or next steps (see video examples below).* TTOs create a shared, public space for teachers to problem solve and reason about instructional practice together in the moment as their work with students unfolds. Students often enjoy witnessing teachers’ interactions and may also contribute to them, thus participating in the learning process.
Before leaving the classroom, teachers collect artifacts of students’ work to analyze during their debrief.
Examples of Teacher Time Outs
* For more on Teacher Time Outs, see these publications by mathematics education researchers who have been working on Learning Labs for many years:
Kazemi, E., Calabrese, J., Lind, T., Resnick, A. F., Lewis, R., & Gibbons, L. (2024). Learning together: Organizing schools for teacher and student learning. Harvard Education Press.
Gibbons, L. K., Kazemi, E., Hintz, A., Hartmann, E. (2017). Teacher time out: Educators learning together in and through practice. Journal of Mathematics Educational Leadership, 18(2).
Gibbons, L. K., Kazemi, E., & Hintz, A. (2025). Examining a professional learning routine to support educators to learn teaching with and from students. Cognition and Instruction, 1–29.
Ghousseini, H. Kavanagh, S., Dutro, E., & Kazemi, E. (2021). The Fourth Wall of professional learning and cultures of collaboration. Educational Researcher, 51(3).
