I have been excited to see a recent trend towards more co-taught and team-taught courses in the Upper School. Just this year we offered six different classes that had two or more teachers at the helm, including the social studies electives called Global Conflict & Social Innovation and The Anthropology of Chinese Art & Literature, and the English elective called Art & Society.

 

In addition, English teacher Anne Strobridge and history teacher Elissa Wolf-Tinsman have combined forces in the 10th grade, with the two teachers sharing the same roster in American Literature and American Studies respectively. (Ms. Wolf-Tinsman worked with Tom Thorpe in the same way last year.)

 

In these courses teachers support each other— and not just from the standpoint of bringing multiple ideas and sharing the workload. The interplay of their expertise and experience creates a highly dynamic classroom environment.

 

Students can witness teachers positively collaborating and can see and feel the benefits of cooperative learning environments. As one student noted, “I really appreciated the ways my teachers bounced ideas off each other. Sometimes they even disagreed on a point, and would show us how to handle having an academic debate.” I have enjoyed several such experiences in my teaching career and have found them to be tremendously rewarding from both a personal and professional standpoint. More importantly, I believe the experiences were highly beneficial for the students involved. In my first-ever attempt, I collaborated with an art teacher in a course called “Understanding the Contemporary World Through the Arts.” We were able to lean on each other in developing the class and picking each other’s brains for information. Truly, two heads were better than one, and we were able to synthesize some complex material and then represent that more effectively to our students.

 

Our efforts were rewarded with an invitation to present at a conference and an article write-up in a university journal on teaching. Not everything goes perfectly, of course. Teachers need to work out some of the details and logistics in unique and different ways, and sometimes the question of “who’s in charge?” can confuse the adults and/or the students. Who will grade assessments and how? What is the format for each lesson? How do teachers carve out the necessary time for planning?

 

And from a school perspective, we have to be realistic that we certainly cannot offer every course as a co-taught or team-taught effort. Purely from a business standpoint, we cannot cut our student/teacher ratio in half by putting two teachers in every room. That would not be financially feasible or sustainable. Indeed, we need to think carefully about what it means to be a full-time faculty member if some of a teacher’s assignment is in a collaborative effort. Right now, the examples are few enough that we can manage these issues, but if we decided to become even more innovative and bold with interdisciplinary, team-taught offerings, we will need to re-think how we structure some things.

Still, for me right now, the outcomes are overwhelmingly positive. Given our recent emphasis on collaboration as a key 21st century skill, it is good to see our faculty are setting positive models and collaborating effectively themselves.

 

Next year we will add at least three more co-taught courses, including the STEAM class Chris Roads and Katy Hills will offer in which students will design and build a tiny house, and the multi-teacher effort involved in our elective on Haiti, which will explore that country’s history, literature and language in support of our ongoing work with a rural village in that country.