Team Teaching

Lee Schulman’s term “pedagogical solitude” captures a pervasive problem in academic teaching: many of us teach in isolation, with few opportunities for intellectual or creative exchange with fellow educators. Team teaching presents a powerful opportunity for overcoming pedagogical solitude while offering students wide-ranging intellectual, professional, and socioemotional benefits. This comprehensive resource is designed to facilitate team teaching at Drexel University, guiding instructors through five key stages of successful pedagogical collaboration: preparation, design, facilitation, assessment, and reflection.

Teaching with others can take many forms: inviting guest lecturers or practitioners to a class session; creating course-to-course relationships where separate classes led by separate instructors pursue shared goals; tag-team teaching, where instructors take turns leading course modules; supplementing lecture courses with TA-led labs or discussion sections; and, finally, full-fledged team teaching, where equal co-instructors co-design and co-deliver a course together. While this toolkit focuses primarily on full-fledged team teaching as defined above, we hope our recommendations will be useful to instructors involved in many other forms of pedagogical collaboration. We encourage all colleagues who share their classroom spaces with others to consider how our recommendations might be applied in their specific contexts.

Benefits of Team Teaching: Student Perspective

The literature on team teaching in higher education lists a multitude of benefits experienced by students in team-taught courses:

• Multiplying access. Most obviously, having two (or more) instructors in the room multiplies student access to disciplinary expertise, feedback opportunities, potential mentorship/research opportunities, potential recommendation letter writers, and so on. With multiple instructors in the classroom, students also enjoy a greater range of teaching techniques and perspectives, which can lead to more alignment with student preferences and more overall engagement in the class.
• Metacognitive benefits. Students in team-taught courses gain metacognitive benefits by witnessing experts negotiate disciplinary norms, tackle problems from divergent perspectives, and dialogically enact the messy process of knowledge production that too often remains invisible to novices. This process of “lifting the veil” gives students a more accurate understanding of how academic experts go about the work of navigating cognitively and ethically complex questions. As Kathryn M. Plank (2011) put it in Team Teaching Across the Disciplines, “The interaction of two teachers—both the intellectual interaction involved in the design of the course and the pedagogical interaction in teaching the course—creates a dynamic environment that reflects the way scholars make meaning of the world” (p. 3).
• Articulation of value. The process of designing a course together forces instructors to consider the value of the learning experience they are curating together. Consequently, team teachers are better positioned to articulate the value of their course to students, which, in turn, can help boost student motivation and engagement.
• Modelling. Facilitating a course together is an opportunity to model meaningful academic collaboration: curiosity, vulnerability, humility, transparency, intellectual risk-taking, perspective-taking, power-sharing, creative connection-making, and so on. Witnessing these qualities in their instructors can help students develop their own successful peer collaborations and build a more democratic, participatory learning environment.

Benefits of Team Teaching: Instructor Perspective

While much writing on team teaching focuses on benefits to the students, many instructors find teaching with a colleague refreshing, inspiring, and even transformative. Faculty engaged in team teaching initiatives report a number of gains:

• Lifelong learning. Most obviously, team teaching gives instructors the opportunity to experience the pleasures of being a learner.
• Metacognitive benefits. Much like students, instructors in a team teaching course experience a number of metacognitive benefits. Inviting another person into the classroom necessitates articulating the (often unspoken) assumptions underpinning our work–disciplinary as well as pedagogical. As a result, in addition to learning new content and new teaching strategies, team teachers gain a deepened understanding of their own epistemological, methodological, and pedagogical priorities.
• Feedback on and appreciation for the labor of teaching. Negotiating every aspect of course design and delivery–from big-picture items like course principles and goals to small logistical details like grading turnaround times–allows instructors to appreciate the full extent of the intellectual, social, emotional, moral, logistical, physical, and creative work we are called upon to perform as educators. Teaching together also offers an opportunity for receiving and giving formative feedback on our classroom habits (e.g., the length of time we give students to think about questions before jumping in with answers), teaching artefacts, and pedagogical craft.
• Transformation of learning environment. Last but not least, team teaching offers instructors the opportunity to move beyond rigid disciplinary norms into more experimental, dialogic forms of knowledge-making. As Twine, Parks, and Yasuda (2023) report, “our non-expertise generated a more fluid, dynamic, and open learning environment – one that prioritized and valued collective historicizing, multi-modal investigation, and critical inquiry. This space enabled students to broaden their repertoire of methodologies and research practices” (p. 7). Team teaching, especially when conducted across disciplines, creates a new kind of classroom environment where faculty move back and forth between the roles of expert and novice, modelling for students the joys of dialogic, open-ended, collaborative learning.

While its potential benefits to instructors and students are numerous, team teaching presents a number of challenges. Students might find themselves overwhelmed or disoriented by the disruption of familiar disciplinary norms. Lack of clarity about authority and/or lack of cohesion in course content, policies, methodology, communication, assessment protocols, etc. can engender feelings of anxiety, resistance, and even hostility. Teaching partners who fail to approach their collaboration with self-awareness and intentionality can end up replicating (and modelling) harmful power dynamics, especially when working across status or identity differences. For all of these reasons, investing time and thought into the teaching partnership can make the difference between a frustrating team teaching experience and a transformative one.

Check out the Step-by-Step Guide to Team Teaching