Team Teaching: a "junior" Partner's Perspective

Linda Turner

University teaching is still a fairly new experience for me, and most colleagues will be able to empathize with the range of emotions, which are evoked when it is our "first time around". In the fall of 1999, I had the privilege of joining well-seasoned Social Work Professor Sandra deVink-Leblanc in a bout of "team teaching" for the Department.

The course, ScWk 3013 Field Instruction I (A) is held full days twice a week for ten weeks, in preparation for the students entering field placements. The course is pivotal within the professional years of the Bachelor of Social Work Programme, as the content provides an orientation and apprenticeship to the profession, while fostering a spirit of cohesion and mutual understanding among the students. In this article, I will describe what I learned from that experience, with the hope that the sharing may stimulate reflection and discussion with other faculty who have also been part of a teaching team, or who would like to explore the possibility.

I am using the adjective "junior" to denote a self-assigned status, because the course had been taught by Sandra on four previous occasions, with other "partners". This meant that the course content had already been developed and refined, offering the temptation to simply repeat the established format and activities.

The problem, however, with teaching a course exactly as someone else has designed it is that a sense of incongruence may develop which is detrimental to the quality of the teaching. It becomes a challenge to provide an invigorating, personalized and impressive teaching "performance" when we are using someone else's "lines". With this in mind, it was very helpful that Professor deVink-Leblanc recognized the need to encourage and invite changes to the course outline which would reflect my own experiences, techniques and interests in order to create a better "fit" between the course content and my delivery of parts of it.

The process of preparing to teach classes as a "team" reminded me of the findings of a research project I conducted a few years ago on job-sharing. The study determined that communication, flexibility, and support was all essential to a co-operative working relationship. Throughout the team teaching venture, we needed to meet regularly to discuss and prepare the class agendas. We also needed to remain open to last minute changes or challenges, which could arise, based on the group's issues and interests of the day. The opportunity to "debrief" and check with my partner on highlights of the day's class was extremely valuable as well. Another activity that helped the course to be a success from my perspective was an initial "poster sharing" with the whole class in which Sandra and I prepared drawings to metaphorically represent our hopes and our fears, specific to the issue of team teaching. Another valuable component was the opportunity for me to be solely responsible for the class for a couple of sessions, thus permitting the students to experience me in that role as well as within the partnership.

While I was able to maintain a sense that my opinions, ideas, and perspectives held as significant a place in each class as Professor deVink-Leblanc's, I am not sure that this would be a given in any team teaching partnership. In another partnership in which the "junior" member felt inferior in any way to the "senior" member, the tendency would be for the former to defer to the latter's "expertise" and remain in the background. Fortunately, this experience was one in which the expectations were not that I would take a "back seat" in any way, thus establishing the opportunity to be a co-leader and co-presenter.

Team teaching is admittedly a venture which entails a great deal of work and cooperation between partners (Wenger & Nornyak, 1999). In this, my initial formal experience, regular and ongoing communication, mutual respect and high flexibility contributed to a highly satisfying and productive partnership. References are available from the author upon request.

Teaching Perspectives Spring 2000

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