Let’s Do This Together: The Benefits of Teaching with Others

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 offers a powerful opportunity for overcoming pedagogical solitude while offering students wide-ranging intellectual, professional, and socioemotional benefits.

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.

The literature on team teaching in higher education lists a multitude of benefits for students. One set of obvious benefits derives from doubling the number of instructors: access to two disciplinary experts, access to two sets of feedback (mirroring the peer review process), greater diversity of perspectives, greater range of teaching techniques, and increased access to mentorship and research opportunities.

Students in co-taught courses can also reap a number of more subtle, metacognitive benefits stemming from witnessing two experts negotiating disciplinary norms, tackling complex problems from divergent perspectives, and dialogically enacting the messy process of academic knowledge production (often invisible to novices). As Kathryn M. Plank put it in her book Team Teaching Across the Disciplines (2011), “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). Team teachers model for their students the virtues of intellectual humility, risk-taking, and productive collaboration, leading to a more democratic, collaborative class culture.

Setting up a successful teaching relationship requires time and intentionality. While the process will be unique to each course and each set of instructors, we recommend following the five steps below to avoid common pitfalls resulting from misalignment and miscommunication. These steps are a distillation of our new Drexel Guide to Team Teaching, co-authored by the TLC and Pennoni College. Make sure to check out the full version!

STEP ONE: Preparation

1. Begin building a relationship by sharing your values and priorities as an educator: What are your proudest teaching moments, your favorite assignments, your pet peeves and anxieties? What attitudes do you want to cultivate in your students? What kinds of learning environment do you aspire to cultivate?
2. Continue the relationship-building process by discussing your teaching practice: How are your values and priorities actualized in your classroom? What does a typical class session look like for you? Are you primarily a lecturer? A coach? A community-builder? How much power are you comfortable sharing with your students? What is your approach to assessment?
3. Consider the academic and extra-academic identities you and your co-teacher hold. How might these identities affect your teaching dynamics? Is there a power imbalance? Will disciplinary or cultural differences require negotiation? Will neurodivergences affect your shared work (e.g., preference for structure vs. spontaneity; relationship with time, etc.)?

STEP TWO: Course Design

1. Begin by considering the students you will be teaching: Who are they? Why are they in your class? How many will you be teaching? What other situational factors should you bear in mind?
2. Develop your shared course learning goals. (You might be surprised to find this step creatively and intellectually stimulating, especially when working with a colleague from another discipline!)

3. Develop an assessment structure aligned with your goals.

4. Curate course content to align with your goals.
5. Co-develop course policies, or plan how you will co-develop them with your students.
6. Agree on a communication plan for the term.

STEPS THREE AND FOUR: Course Delivery and Assessment

1. Agree on your roles inside and outside of the classroom. Will you take turns playing the role of “expert” and “super-student”? Will one person be the coach while the other delivers content? Will you go back and forth in each class session? In some? Will you hold individual or small group meetings? Together? Separately? And so on.
2. Develop session plans for each class meeting.
3. Agree on an equitable distribution of labor when providing feedback, grading student work, responding to student queries, responding to crises, etc.
4. Continue finetuning the course structure and delivery in communication with one another and with your students.

STEP FIVE: Reflection

After a completed term, make time for debriefing and reflection. Take stock of what you learned (probably a lot!) from one another and enjoy relief from pedagogical solitude.