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Co-taught classrooms offer increased opportunities for differentiated, engaging and effective instruction. However, the inclusion of another professional in the classroom may collide with teachers' taken-for-granted perspectives on what a teacher, a student, literacy activities or a classroom in early literacy instruction are or should be. Aiming to shed light on the relationship between such perspectives and students' learning outcomes in co-taught classrooms, the present study takes a step back to investigate figured worlds (Gee, 2011) of the social practice of early literacy instruction, as held by homeroom teachers. In-depth individual interviews with six homeroom teachers in classes with very strong versus very poor reading development in first and second grade are investigated using a discourse-analytical approach. The extremes are found to differ in their understandings of students, teachers, classrooms, activities, organizational structures, instructional differentiation, and student engagement. Juxtaposing understandings of all of these elements shows that there are fundamental differences between those extremes in terms of their figured worlds of early literacy instruction as a complex social practice. This finding suggests that an awareness of homeroom teachers' figured worlds is required when discussing the potential for enhancing student learning through co-teaching.
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