What Ever Happened to Team Teaching?
by
John Beineke
June
2001
One’s first teaching experiences often linger. And the accuracy of such memories could be called into question. This may be the case with my first two years of teaching seventh grade on a multidisciplinary team with three other teachers. I was the social studies teacher and along with my colleagues in science, language arts, and mathematics we taught 120 students during four instructional periods and had a common planning period. (For a look at a description of my first year of teaching, see “Diversity and Room 106” on my web site.) The experience was a good one, but I think I can take the rose colored glasses off and say that team teaching had an important and lasting impact on me as a professional. And while this experience of twenty-five years ago was not in the era of high stakes testing, my view ¾ based on anecdotal and unscientific data ¾ is that more student learning took place as a result of team teaching than if we had not been in such an instructional arrangement. While not wishing to overplay the “top ten list” craze (although I did go to Ball State University just like David Letterman), I think there are ten good reasons why team teaching can still be considered a good educational practice. In no order of preference, they are:
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Team teaching builds in its own mentoring system with almost daily peer review by colleagues. We know that mentoring is important component of professional growth. During my team teaching days my fellow teachers and I were together in large group instruction, field trips, and frequently in each other’s rooms. One could not escape receiving assistance and advice and even providing it on occasion. The concept of a “learning organization” can actually occur with such constant interaction.
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Life itself is interdisciplinary. Problems today are seldom solved within one discipline or one arena of subject matter. Team teaching demonstrates the truism of this fact.
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Accordingly, professionals in almost all fields work together to solve problems and make progress. With the isolated nature of teaching a major barrier within the profession, team teaching provides the venue and the time to work together ¾ just as other professionals do.
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Team teaching models collaboration for students. When teachers are working together in the planning, delivery, and evaluation of instruction, it is noted by the students. When we ask them to take part in collaborative learning, we have already shown them that we practice it ourselves.
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The potential for reinforcement and review of subject matter is quite high in team teaching. For example, when the language arts teacher is teaching about Charles Dickens with short the story “A Christmas Carol,” the social studies teacher can be undertaking lessons on the industrial revolution, while the science and math teachers incorporate relevant complimentary material into their courses. (This is an actual example from my own team teaching days that proved quite successful. See the ASCD publication Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Design and Implementation edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs.)
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In addition to collaborating on subject matter, teachers within teams can share successes, concerns, and challenges they may have about students. As noted above, teaching can frequently be a solitary profession which can mean that teachers do not have the opportunity exchange notes about students. Common issues that might help struggling students can emerge in team teacher meetings.
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Team teaching can provide an effective transition for students who are moving from the elementary grades into middle schools. The fact that a number of students are within a team and in many of the same classes on a team can be helpful as students make the shift from self-contained classrooms to independent classrooms. But variations within team teaching can occur not only in middle schools, but also in elementary schools and high schools.
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Planning is essential for effective teaching. And to succeed with interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teaching, common planning time is needed. Team teaching with a shared planning period provides this crucial element.
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More effective use of instructional time can take place within team teaching. Most teams are given four traditional class periods and the freedom to block them out to best meet the instructional needs of the teachers and students. Often science teachers need more time for experiments. Field trips are easier to plan. Large group instruction, in the school auditorium for example, to show a video once rather than four times during the day to individual classes makes for efficient use of instructional time. And special features can be added like exploratory experiences for middle level students or a “Quiz Bowl” review session for the entire team of students.
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Finally, while tracking is controversial, there are times when grouping students for academic reasons is necessary. Such times would be for common projects, advanced mathematics instruction, and remedial work in all subject areas. Such grouping should be viewed as temporary to address a specific instructional issue, not to cluster of students in a permanent fashion and certainly never a label to place upon students
So why don’t we see more team teaching today? There are several reasons. It takes time, it calls for a certain disposition on the part of the teachers, it means that administrators and teachers will need to be risk-takers, and it requires flexibility and collaboration. These are dimensions of schooling and teaching that are often and easily listed, but much more difficult to put into practice.
And, teacher educators or school district administrators may not be advocating team teaching or practicing it. I quickly perused three introduction to education textbooks on my shelves and found that two do not mention team teaching at all and one gives team teaching two brief paragraphs.
Is team teaching a distant memory of how things used to be ¾ or is it an effective model that has been forgotten, but can serve the students of today? Let’s find out.