Overview

This is a brief introduction to team teaching that contains a curated, annotated list of teaching resources. It can be used to begin the process of developing a team taught course or to support faculty who have already embarked on team teaching. (Note: While this resource is designed for instructors of Hub specialty courses, i.e., Cross-College Challenge, Social & Racial Justice Courses, Hub Cocurriculars, and Interdisciplinary Courses, it can also be useful for faculty across the University. Some of these resources require users be signed into a BU account. See this resource as a Drive Document.) 

What is Team Teaching?

Team teaching, also referred to as co-teaching, can take many forms, from a course designed and led by a full-time faculty member, in which graduate students act as discussion leaders and graders for multiple sections, to an upper-level seminar in which two faculty co-lead throughout the semester. Deborah Meizlish and Olivia Anderson (2018) provide a useful taxonomy of team teaching models in their Guide. Regardless of context or model, team teaching requires the cooperation of those who will play a role in the student learning experience. 

In this resource, we focus on the “co-facilitation” model of team teaching, which Meizlish and Anderson (2018) define in the following way:

The instructors collaboratively plan all elements of the course, from selecting readings and creating assignments to structuring individual class sessions that they jointly guide and facilitate. [. . .] Instructors share grading responsibilities and coordinate on how to provide feedback and guidance on student work. (p. 3) 

In co-facilitative team teaching, there is, by design, no formal lead instructor, and faculty must develop efficient ways to share the responsibilities of course design and teaching. Co-facilitation is built into some BU courses, including Cross-College Challenge courses, which are co-led by faculty from different disciplines.

Why Team Teach?

The reasons for team teaching depend largely on the specific model. In the co-facilitation model, and in the specific context of BU Hub specialty courses, there are a host of benefits for students and for faculty. In Cross-College Challenge (XCC) and some Hub interdisciplinary courses, which are not only co-facilitative, but interdisciplinary, students benefit from seeing the ways in which their two professors bring discrete disciplinary tools and knowledge to bear on a real-world problem. Students learn where and how disciplines overlap, where they diverge, and how combined disciplinary lenses can lead to new ways of thinking about a problem. (For a definition of interdisciplinary, see below.) If, as in XCC courses, students must themselves work together in a team on a semester-long project, they may be able to combine their own disciplinary knowledge with that of their peers or their professors, thus enacting nascent interdisciplinary research. Research on interdisciplinary co-teaching suggests, at the minimum, that students develop their ability to see connections across disciplines (Halverson, 2021).

Faculty also benefit. As Kathryn M. Plank argues in Team Teaching: Across the Disciplines, Across the Academy (2011), “At its best, team teaching creates a community for better student learning, a community for faculty to learn from each other, and a community of knowledge that transcends disciplinary ways of knowing” (p. 11). Regardless of its form, team teaching works against “pedagogical solitude,” a stubborn characteristic of the university classroom (Shulman, 1993). 

Co-facilitative team teaching typically brings an array of challenges, both pedagogical and administrative. In the latter case, challenges include departmental support for team teaching. In the former case, the following are common challenges: 

• Co-facilitation can require more work from individual faculty, as partners design together and cannot rely solely on past teaching methods. 
• Interdisciplinary co-facilitation often requires negotiation around disciplinary methods and expectations. 
• For students, who are most familiar with the current dominant model of one lead faculty member per course, there can be uncertainty about the role of each faculty member, as well as about issues like grading. 

Building a Teaching Partnership

In co-facilitative team teaching, faculty take time to build a relationship that accommodates overarching considerations such as teaching style and disciplinary background, as well as the everyday work of teaching, e.g., planning classes and responding to students. This becomes more important in courses that require students to work in groups on semester-long projects, as is the case in XCC courses. As Mathew Oullett and Edith Fraser write about their team teaching experience, “In true team teaching (meaning when both instructors are present and participate equally in every class meeting), there is no room for divas or divos. Students have a kind of radar that picks up instantly any kind of sustained split between teachers” (2011, p. 8). In general, teaching teams should carefully agree on their expectations of one another.

Designing a Syllabus for Team Teaching

The suggestions below provide a basic series of steps to co-design a course and are based in the research on course design, and the research on team teaching.

1. Agree on student learning outcomes (SLOs) for the course. What do you want students to be able to do and to understand by the end of the course? What do you hope they take with them and learn to transfer to other situations? Align/arrange any Hub area learning outcomes with course learning outcomes.
2. Use backward design to create a sequence of major assignments and class activities to be posted on a course calendar.
3. Agree on the balance of labor during classroom sessions (see “How to Choose a Co-Teaching Model” below).
4. Agree on the ways in which the course will take advantage of the disciplinary backgrounds of faculty as well as of students. Note, instructors may also discuss the ways in which aspects of personal identity, e.g., gender, may affect their teaching partnership. See Jessen-Marshal and Halard Lescinsky (2011) for commentary on the impact of gender on team teaching in the sciences.

• • How will the instructors bring their disciplinary modes of inquiry to the subject of the course and to teaching activities? 
  • How will students understand the benefits of interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary teaching? Unlike interdisciplinary teaching, which deliberately combines approaches from different disciplines, multidisciplinary teaching may set out different and parallel approaches to a problem. (For a full definition of interdisciplinary, see below.)
  • What are the disciplinary strengths/interests of each teacher?

Appendix

All Annotated Resources

A Note on the Term Interdisciplinary 

To define interdisciplinary teaching, it is helpful to first define interdisciplinary research. The National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2005) defines interdisciplinary research as “a mode of research by teams or individuals that integrates information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines or bodies of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding or to solve problems whose solutions are beyond the scope of a single discipline or area of research practice” (p. 2). Key to this definition is the deliberate action of integrating or combining the information, data, techniques, tools, perspectives, concepts, and/or theories from two or more disciplines into one mode of inquiry. Interdisciplinary research differs from multidisciplinary research in the following way: multidisciplinary approaches may examine the same problem, but they do not deliberately combine disciplinary modes of inquiry. Interdisciplinary research can eventually lead to a new discipline, as in the cases of biochemistry and neuroscience (NC State Research Development Office). 

In the context of teaching, interdisciplinarity maintains many of these characteristics, but also adds the dimensions of modeling interdisciplinary inquiry. When scholars from different disciplines team teach, students learn how combined disciplinary lenses can illuminate new ways of thinking about a problem. Students can learn where and how disciplines overlap, where they diverge, and what it means to use combined modes of inquiry in examining a single problem.

To resolve any problems accessing these materials, please contact askedtech@bu.edu.
Created: October 2024
Lead Writer: Ben Keating, CTL; Editors: Deb Breen, CTL, Eric Jarvis, BU Hub.