Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning
Team Teaching and Student Learning: A Rough-and-Tumble
Enterprise
Our knowledge of the world comes from gathering around
great things in a complex and interactive community of truth. But good teachers
do more than deliver the news from that community to their students. Good
teachers replicate the process of knowing by engaging students in the dynamics
of the community of truth. (Palmer, 1998, p. 115)
There's a messiness to team teaching that presents some
of its biggest challenges, but also some of its most promising opportunities.
Team teaching moves beyond the familiar and predictable and creates an
environment of uncertainty, dialogue, and discovery. And that is what learning
is all about.
Whether one is looking at classifications of critical
thinking, or definitions of deep approaches to learning, or models of cognitive
and ethical development (see Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Bowden &
Marton, 2004; Perry, 1968), the goal for student learning is a dynamic,
complex, and often unsettling place. In reporting on his study of what the best
college teachers do, Ken Bain (2004) says, "[P]eople learn by confronting
intriguing, beautiful, or important problems, authentic tasks that will
challenge them to grapple with ideas, rethink their assumptions, and examine
their mental models of reality" (p. 18).
Team teaching in itself is not really a teaching method
and will not make achieving these learning goals inevitable. The instructors
must still design a course and implement methods that challenge students to
"grapple with ideas" and "rethink their assumptions." But
team teaching does provide an ideal environment for this type of engagement, in
part by making it almost impossible to stick with a teacher-centered classroom
in which the teacher is the sole authority delivering knowledge to the
students. 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.
Almost by definition, team teaching encourages students
(and teachers) to view the subject matter from multiple perspectives. When
multiple teachers represent multiple perspectives on course content, they move
students away from dualistic thinking toward higher (and deeper) stages of
cognitive and ethical development. Students who enter a course wanting to see
the teacher as the source of the "right" answers are now confronted
with two or more teachers who have different views and sometimes completely different
methodologies. While this may create some anxiety for students, as we discuss
later, it also models for them how different perspectives come together to
construct meaning.
Perhaps the dearest example of multiple perspectives
comes in a common model of team teaching: the interdisciplinary course in which
faculty from different disciplines teach around a common topic or theme. The
next two chapters of this book explore two such courses. In chapter 1, Amy
Jessen-Marshall and Hal Lescinsky, a microbiologist and a paleontologist,
respectively, at Otterbein University, talk about their course,
"Origins," which uses the techniques and perspectives of two
different science disciplines to examine the question of human origins and
evolution. In chapter 2, Min-Ken Liao and Sarah Worth of Furman University
describe their course, "Disease and Culture," which examines the
social, cultural, and ethical impact of disease from the divergent perspectives
of philosophy and biology. As Liao and Worth say, "We believe this type of
collaborative and interdisciplinary interaction in and of itself is a powerful
demonstration to students that focused, interdisciplinary, team approaches
to the pursuit of knowledge are at the core of a liberal arts education."
If it is true that "the undergraduate experience,
often criticized as being fragmented, is challenged to develop more coherence
by introducing students to essential knowledge, to connections across the
disciplines, and to the application of knowledge to life beyond the
campus" (McDaniel & Colarulli, 1997, p. 19), then higher education has
been responding with greater emphasis on working across disciplinary
boundaries. Both of these courses are products of initiatives intentionally
designed to promote greater interdisciplinarity. "Origins" is part of
Otterbein's Integrative Studies Program, a core element of the university's
liberal arts mission, which "aims to prepare Otterbein undergraduates for the
challenges and complexity of a 21st century world" by emphasizing
"interdisciplinary and integrative skills, competencies, and ways of
knowing" (http://www.otterbein.edu/is/).
Likewise, Furman's general education program brings "a greater variety of
intellectual perspectives into meaningful
dialogue with one another, thus highlighting for students both the
complementarity and the uniqueness of departmental and disciplinary
voices" (Invigorating Intellectual Life, 2005).
This interplay of disciplinary voices is also evident in
an introductory science course offered in the 1990s at Indiana
University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (described in chapter 5). In this
course, taught by Ronald Duchovic and a team of faculty from different
disciplines in the sciences, "it quickly became obvious that each question
raised in the class discussion can be examined from the perspective of
multiple, discipline-specific paradigms." The goal was to help students
see the nature of scientific thinking and begin to understand how scientists
make sense of the world.
Seeing differences between different perspectives is an
important first step for students, but perhaps even more important is for them
to see the connections. For example, Jessen-Marshall and Lescinsky describe how
in their "Origins" class, "students will see how different
fields address common questions, using a variety of techniques that support the
validity of scientific tenets. This interconnectedness, often underappreciated
by nonscientists, is in large part what gives scientists confidence that their
understanding is correct." In a time when scientific literacy is becoming
more important, classes such as these can contribute to students' becoming more
knowledgeable citizens.
What these teachers are observing is a model of cognitive
apprenticeship. Team teaching can "provide a means of focusing more on the
process of learning instead of only on accumulating content knowledge"
(Shibley, 2006, p. 271). Or, as Duchovic says of his course, students get to
"hear a scientist think." When multiple instructors engage with each
other in the class, they make their thinking processes and intellectual
frameworks visible, thus encouraging greater metacognition on the part of the
students, and better understanding of how we know what we know.
While interdisciplinary teams are one way to encourage
this focus on process, it works for other kinds of partnerships as well. In
chapter 3, Robert Richter and Margaret Thomas of Connecticut College bring
together two very different sets of professional experience to the course
"Arts and Community." Richter, who holds a staff position in arts
programming, and Thomas, a faculty member in music theory, use the interplay of
their two roles to model the concept of community that is central to the course
topic.
Demonstrating yet another configuration, Mathew Ouellett
and Edith Fraser discuss in chapter 4 how an interracial team of teachers from
different institutions can facilitate students' understanding of race and
racism in social work in their course, "Racism in the United States:
Implications for Social Work Practice," in part by having a team of
teachers "modeling authentic collaboration across racial
differences." As Ouellett and Fraser say, "Perhaps the most
unanticipated outcome of our teaching has been the discovery that, from our
students' perspectives, observing our daily interactions and relationship as
colleagues was more important to their learning than the formal
curriculum."
In modeling the scholarly and professional processes of
their fields, these teams of teachers can also create a learning environment
where it is safe for students to confront intimidating subjects like science or
challenging topics like racism. Seeing their teachers learn from each other and
even disagree with each other models for students how scholars and informed
citizens within a community of learning can navigate a complex and uncertain
world.
Of course, none of this happens automatically. For
example, although Jessen-Marshall and Lescinsky constructed their course to
have pairs of labs exploring related topics from two different disciplinary
approaches, the connection between the labs that was so apparent to them was at
first lost on the students. They learned that they needed to make the connections
clearer and more explicit for students, even to the point of renaming the two
different labs part 1 and part 2 of the same lab to reinforce the connections.
Similarly, just watching teachers interact is not enough.
I once took class as a student in which team teaching consisted mainly of four
teachers arguing with each other in front of an audience of befuddled students.
The teachers may have enjoyed the intellectual interplay of different
disciplinary paradigms, but they apparently forgot that novice learners do not
always see or understand the structure of content knowledge enough to
appreciate this kind of dialogue.
In contrast, the classes described in this book all use
many reflective activities?journals, reflection papers, guided discussion?to
help students see the connections and grapple with complex and conflicting
ideas. The combination of modeling reflection for the students and having
students engage in their own reflection provides the kind of cognitive
apprenticeship that introduces students into a community of learning.
As the Furman University curriculum review committee
states, "Stimulating the mind for the pursuit of knowledge [is] a
rough-and-tumble enterprise" (Invigorating, p. 9). Learning is indeed a
rough-and-tumble enterprise and so is team teaching. But team teaching can also
create an environment that makes this exploration safe. One method is to work
actively to build community in the class. For example, Richter and Thomas's
class attended arts performances together, and Liao and Worth's students bonded
by baking cookies together to raise money for mosquito nets in Africa. But it
also helps students to see their teachers learning and questioning.
REFERENCES
Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A
taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom's Taxonomy
of educational objectives. New York: Longman.
Bain, K. (2004). What the best college teachers do.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bowden, J., & Marton, F. (2004). The university of
learning: Beyond quality and competence. London: Routledge.
Invigorating intellectual life: A proposal for Furman
University's academic program and calendar. (2005, September 10). Report to the
Furman Faculty from the Curriculum Review Committee.
McDaniel, E. A., & Colarulli, G. C. (1997).
Collaborative teaching in the face of productivity concerns: The dispersed team
model. Innovative Higher Education, 22(1), 19-36.
Palmer, P. J. (1998). The courage to teach: Exploring the
inner landscape of a teacher's life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Perry, W. (1968). Forms of intellectual and ethical
development in the college years. New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.
Shibley, I. A. (2006). Interdisciplinary team teaching:
Negotiating pedagogical differences. College Teaching, 54(3), 271-274.
Tomorrow's Professor: Team Teaching and Student Learning: A Rough-and-Tumble Enterprise
No comments:
Post a Comment