Team Teaching

Team teaching is the practice of two or more colleagues sharing the teaching responsibilities for a programme, module, or session for the same cohort of students. This will include planning, organising, delivery, and assessment. 

For new and redeveloped programmes the expectation is that compulsory modules will always be team taught. 

Why is Team Teaching important

Team teaching allows teachers and educators to work together and complement one another’s skills and strengths. 

The main driver behind team teaching is sustainability of the student experience -- modules do not have to stop if one colleague is unavailable, the module is sustainable.

In addition team teaching: 

• brings additional ideas and perspectives to design decisions
• makes provision for different teaching styles to cater to different learning styles and needs
• explores and exposes students to differing perspectives
• allows teachers to share teaching practice and reflect on effective approaches
• enables colleagues to share the teaching load

Team Teaching across a Module

Team teaching across a module is already a normal practice. In this, colleagues share ownership of module design and delivery and work together to ensure consistency, innovation, and shared ownership of quality.  Roles may change over the course of the module and it is likely that teaching responsibilities focus on strengths and specialist areas.

Team-teaching across a module supports coherence across sessions (shared standards, aligned assessment and feedback), resilience (cover for absence, peaks in marking), and continuous improvement (multiple perspectives, spotting gaps and duplications). Moreover, the visibility of colleagues working together towards shared objectives models the expectation we have that students themselves will develop their collaborative skills.

Some considerations for team taught modules include: 

• Agree a common lesson architecture: a repeatable weekly pattern e.g. Discover → Explore → Apply → Reflect, so that students don't have to re-orientate themselves.
• Shared module design: agree the 'story' of the module so that topics and assessment build sequentially and signposting continuity where colleague's materials and activities are linked and have a bearing on each other.
• Adopt Shared Canvas Conventions: agree the layout for module materials, linked resources storage and weekly navigation conventions to minimise confusion. Agree a standard communications channel - e.g. using Canvas announcements, can help students to understand what is expected and minimise the opportunity for information to be missed.
• Using a student discussion/query board in Canvas: to help colleagues remain involved, and review developments, even if they are not present in a given week.