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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]