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. 

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
• supports continuity and resilience

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.

Team Teaching in a Classroom

Here are some suggestions around how team-teaching within a single teaching session can be structured.

• Facilitating in-class activities or group work: colleagues circulate among students engaged on specific tasks offering support and input as needed. 
• Teach and Support: While one teacher is teaching the other is supporting the students in the class. The support they provide will depend on the needs of the students and the session. 
• Alternative Teaching: One teacher is leading the session with most of the students. The second colleague supports a smaller group, potentially with adapted or alternative materials.  
• Parallel Teaching: Splitting the class into equally sized groups allows the teachers to lead the session in smaller groups to maximise participation. This might be in two different spaces or the same spaces depending on the logistics of the space. 
• Station Teaching: Students can be taught in different areas or ‘stations’ whether that be with different teachers or independently, focusing on different elements of the subject at the different stations. Students will be able to rotate around the subjects to ensure they have covered all of the aspects of the learning.