July 18

Lessons team-taught = lessons learnt

Team-taught “lessons”, in my experience, occur at the end of term, when only half of the students turn up and so you join classes with another teacher and take it in turns to lead games.  The fact that we don’t tend to do much team-teaching in the grand scheme of things is one of the reasons my boss is against our trainees team-teaching on the course as he argues that each classroom experience we provide them with should be as close to the real thing as possible.

I can see where he’s coming from and team-teaching is not actually part of the course we offer, but an opportunity to team-teach came up on the schedule of my TP group.

We can all learn something from team-teaching.  For students, as long as there is a clear division of roles within the lesson, their team-taught class should feel natural and contain all the learning opportunities it would have being taught by just one teacher.  They may even benefit more from the lesson, as one teacher could monitor students whilst the other is spending time setting up the next activity.

As a tutor, I realised that I had effectively presented the trainees with a similar teaching environment to the one mentioned above – although they had to plan the lesson in advance and provide clear aims and learning objectives, it felt like an “end-of-term” lesson.  Perhaps if I was to encourage team-teaching again in the future, I would like to see it happening in a “stricter” classroom environment – to see how the two teachers cope with the situation.

The teachers learnt a lot about their own teaching styles: one teacher mentioned that she noticed a different approach to writing lesson plans than her colleague and they had to collaborate to produce one which suited them both; whereas the other pair wanted to teach a phonological aim, but found it would be impossible when they discovered just how different their accents were.

What are your experiences of and thoughts on team-teaching?

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Posted July 18, 2011 by Teresa Bestwick in category Miscellaneous

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