Team Teaching

In many higher education institutions, including CityU, the usual pattern of teaching is still largely based on an individual lecturer bearing responsibility for students in a course module or unit, possibly supported by part-time staff tutors. At some levels of learning though, for example in postgraduate seminars, this model is replaced by a team teaching approach which involves a number of lecturers (usually between two and five) and possibly non-teaching professional support staff as well. To carry out effective team teaching requires a re-orientation on the part of individual staff members and departmental administrators.

What is Team Teaching

• In team teaching a group of teachers, working together, plan, conduct, and evaluate the learning activities for the same group of students. In practice, team teaching has many different formats but in general it is a means of organising staff into groups to enhance teaching. Teams generally comprise staff members who may represent different areas of subject expertise but who share the same group of students and a common planning period to prepare for the teaching. To facilitate this process a common teaching space is desirable. However, to be effective team teaching requires much more than just a common meeting time and space.

Why Should I Use Team Teaching?

• In view of the additional complexity which team teaching initiatives introduce into departmental organisation and in view of the time needed for staff to adapt to the new structures, it is relevant to ask what benefits accrue from team teaching. How, for instance, does team teaching benefit lecturers, part-time tutors, students, and departments as a whole?
• For Lecturers, who so often work alone, team teaching provides a supportive environment that overcomes the isolation of working in self-contained or departmentalized class-rooms. Being exposed to the subject expertise of colleagues, to open critique, to different styles of planning and organisation, as well as methods of class presentation, teachers can develop their approaches to teaching and acquire a greater depth of understanding of the subject matter of the unit or module.
• Part-time staff can be drawn more closely into the department as members of teams than is usually the case, with a resulting increase in integration of course objectives and approaches to teaching.
• Team teaching can lead to better student performance in terms of greater independence and assuming responsibility for learning. Exposure to views and skills of more than one teacher can develop a more mature understanding of knowledge often being problematic rather than right or wrong. Learning can become more active and involved. Students could eventually make an input into team planning.
• Team teaching aids the professional and interpersonal dynamics of departments leading to closer integration of staff.

In the following extract, the authors describe the instructional advantages of working in teams.

Team Teaching: An Alternative to Lecture Fatigue

Team teaching is an approach which involves true team work between two qualified instructors who, together, make presentations to an audience. The instructional advantages of team teaching include:

• Lecture-style instruction is eliminated in favour of a dynamic interplay of two minds and personalities.Lectures require students to act as passive receptors of communicated information, but team teaching involves the student in the physical and mental stimulation created by viewing two individuals at work. . . .
• Teaching staff act as a role models for discussion and disagreement.
• Teaching staff members demonstrate modes of behaving in a disagreement as well as exposing students to the course content.
• Team teaching makes effective use of existing human resources.Acquisition of additional expensive resources or equipment is not required to implement this method: only reorganisation is required to put the team into operation.
• Team teaching has the potential for revitalizing instructional capabilities through a process of dialogue.Team teaching begins with the recognition that the instructor/student link is critical and offers an approach that has been shown to stimulate and provoke, while expanding and enriching student understanding.
• Interest in traditional courses can be stimulated as students share the enthusiasm and intellectual discourse that the lecturers communicate.
• Team teaching is not boring. Students are drawn into the situation from the first moment.
• The effective use of facilities is possible.The impersonal nature of large lecture halls can be brought to life by an interactive and dynamic situation.
• Team teaching provides opportunities for interaction with the audience.