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Team Teaching

Team teaching, also known as collaborative teaching, is where two or more teachers take responsibility for the planning, teaching, and/or monitoring of the success of a particular group of students (Flanagan, 2001; Main and Bryer, 2005). Team teaching can and does have many forms. It may be as simple as two teachers sharing the same physical space, working on and from the same curriculum, collaborative teaching with the whole class or teaching where teachers take different combinations of students from the class for different lessons. It may also be shared resources and collaborative planning and sharing of assessment tasks between classes.

Mr. Klein, a teacher and principal of over 20 years, has had many experiences in the area of team teaching. One of these experiences was the combination of a year 5, 6 class with a year 6, 7 class. Together these teachers opened up the partition between their classes and worked in collaboration. Their planning was initiated at the beginning of each term with a collaborative expansion diagram looking at what they were going to cover. This formed a basis for their planning. For most lessons the classes worked as one. For specialist subjects like maths they did separate out, but for most lessons the teachers worked together and supported one another.

Benefits that Mr. Klein found in this team teaching role was it allowed better time management, there was a reduced planning workload, and better use of school resources. Having two teachers’ present in the classroom also meant that there was two times the expertise in a classroom. The reduced workload also allowed more time with the students. This idea is supported by Thousand & Villa (1990) when they discuss the interdependence between team teachers and how the combining of one's own expertise with that of other can result in better outcomes for students. He said it also gave flexibility to the classroom environment and while one teacher was teaching the other one could be...