Oct 30, 2026
5 Ways to Get Started with Coteach for EL K-5
Today, we're going to get practical and show you 5 ways you can get started with Coteach!
Jonathan Ben-Isvy · 3 min read
Oct 30, 2026
Today, we're going to get practical and show you 5 ways you can get started with Coteach!
Jonathan Ben-Isvy · 3 min read
In our last post, we introduced you to Coteach for EL K-5 – why we built it, the real-world challenges teachers face in creating access to high-quality, rigorous curriculum for all learners, and a few ways to use Coteach to prepare for instruction. Today, we're going to get practical and show you 5 ways you can get started with Coteach!
Thoroughly knowing your lesson texts is perhaps the most important thing you can do to deliver a highly effective literacy lesson. Of course, we read the texts we teach — but teaching them well means understanding each text's role in the lesson: which excerpts to focus on and why, how they align to the learning targets, what questions to ask when students get stuck, and how multiple texts interconnect. Just as importantly, you'll want to anticipate where students might struggle to make meaning so you can build the onramps they need to access the reading. Try these prompts with Coteach:
“Which texts are students working closely with in this lesson?”
“What are the big ideas of each text and/or excerpt that I need to target to teach this lesson well?”
“What misconceptions or unfinished learning might keep students from accessing these texts today?”
“What prerequisite skills do my students need to access these texts?”
Building scaffolds and extensions is the logical next step after internalizing your texts. EL Education often has guidance built in, and Coteach can help you find it quickly. Alternatively, you can work with Coteach to build scaffolds tailored to your students' specific needs — share the unfinished learning you're seeing, and Coteach can translate that into targeted support. Just as important, though often overlooked, Coteach can help you build extensions for students who are ready for an additional challenge. Try these prompts:
“What strategies can I use to ensure that students reading below grade-level can access the lesson texts?”
“Provide scaffolded entry points for each lesson activity while maintaining the cognitive demand.”
“Some students are ready for additional challenge. Help me create an extension activity aligned to the lesson learning targets that deepens their thinking.”
EL Education provides strong recommendations for supporting your MLL students. Sometimes, though, students need supports that are more tailored to their needs, interests, or level of language acquisition. This, too, is a place where Coteach can help! Give these a try:
“Create scaffolds for each lesson activity at each level of language proficiency: Entering, Emerging, Developing, Expanding, and Bridging.”
“What sentence stems will support multilingual learners with this activity?”
“Create a graphic organizer for multilingual learners for each lesson activity that includes visual supports.”
High-quality curricula like EL Education provide such a wealth of content that pacing can be a challenge at both the unit and lesson levels. The hard part is knowing where to trim or combine without sacrificing essential learning targets. Coteach can help:
“I'm missing [number] days of this [number] lesson unit due to testing & assemblies. How can I adjust my unit pacing without sacrificing core unit learning targets?”
“Which activities in this lesson are most critical for meeting the learning targets, and which can be condensed if I'm short on time?”
“Combine lessons __ and __ into a single 45-minute lesson without sacrificing the learning targets in each. Preserve the activities that are most critical.”
So far, we’ve focused on teachers, but Coteach also supports school leaders. After all, even leaders with deep content expertise can’t know every lesson at every grade level. Coteach can help by surfacing each lesson’s learning targets, what a strong lesson looks like, and how to give actionable feedback. Try these prompts:
“What should I see students doing in an exemplary version of this lesson?”
“I observed the teacher doing ____. What celebrations can I give? What actionable next steps can I suggest?”
“What key instructional moves & best practices should I see when I observe this lesson?”
“Create a check-list and feedback form aligned to these look-fors. Include celebrations and actionable next steps.”
We’ll close with a reminder that you, the educator, are the expert in the loop. If a response isn’t quite right, refine it, add detail, or ask for more. The best interactions with Coteach often come from this kind of back-and-forth, just as they would with a trusted colleague.