Blog Post #3: Team Teaching

I love the idea of team teaching! In high school I took an honors humanities class that was team-taught and it was truly an unforgettable learning experience. I found the team teaching approach to be engaging because it created a dynamic and interactive learning environment. As a student, I never considered the amount of work it takes to make the team-teaching method work in the classroom; however, as highlighted in the two articles, team teaching requires a lot of planning and collaboration. As a teacher candidate, I would love the opportunity to work in a team teaching environment because I think the constant collaboration with another teacher would consistently push me to learn and grow.  

In Melissa Leavitt’s piece, “Team Teaching: Benefits and Challenges,” the commandment I found to be most interesting was “thou shalt model debate with thy neighbor.” Our most recent classroom discussions have revolved around the fact that effective classroom discussion can work in many different ways. I really like the fact that team-teaching provides educators with an opportunity to model to their students what high-level, intellectual debate looks like among colleagues. In today’s world, it is extremely valuable for students to learn what successful debates and discussions look like, because students are often surrounded by the idea that discussions and debates hinge on hostility. For example, last night after the State of the Union address various people were commenting on the main points of Obama’s speech. Two of the commentators, who differed in opinion, quickly became so heated and hostile towards one another that they actually started yelling. If students are going to learn what it looks like to participate in a democratic society, then they must be taught explicitly what that process looks like. The team-teaching approach is an excellent way to model the discussion process to students and I particularly like the article’s emphasis on describing respectful debate as “professional disagreement” that is both “expert and collegial.”