Team Teaching

 

Team Teaching | Procedure, Types, Principles, Merits, Demerits & Objectives

 

Meaning of Team Teaching Method

The Team Teaching idea originated in USA in 1954 and it found its way to develop courses. It is a good innovation in teaching strategies. In simple words, team teaching strategies are simplest form where all teachers of a subject collectively teach a class in that subject. Team teaching is also called collaborative teaching or co teaching strategy. It is used for different subjects especially in middle grades with the help of different teaching method. To provide supportive environment, there are teams of two or four teachers working collaboratively to prepare lesson plans.

Team teaching improves student satisfaction and performance are mixed. Nevertheless, evidence suggests a number of tangible and intangible benefits to students, faculty, and institutions that engage in team teaching. Based on a literature review of team teaching literature, this report provides an overview of team teaching, summarizes some of its benefits, identifies some challenges, provides suggestions for best practices, and makes recommendations for supporting and engaging in team teaching.

Definitions of Team Teaching Method

1. According to Warwick, "Team teaching is a form of organisation in which individual decides to pool resources, interest and expertise in order to device and implement a scheme of work suitable for the needs of their pupils and the facilitates of their school."

2. According to Carlo Olson, "An instructional situation where two or more teachers possessing complementary teaching skills co-operatively plan and implement the instruction for a single group of students using flexible scheduling and grouping techniques to meet the particular instructions."

3. According to Shailian and Old, "Team teaching is a type of organisation, involving teaching personnel and the students assigned to them, in which two or more teachers are given responsibility, working together, for all or a significant part of the instruction of the same group of students."

Procedure of Team Teaching

i). Planning:- formulating objectives, writing these in behavioural terms, identifying the entering behaviour of the learners, deciding the details of the material to be taught, assessing duties to teachers, fixing up the level of instructions, selecting appropriate teaching aids, deciding ways and means to be adopted for evaluating the student performance.

ii). Organising:- determining the level of instruction, selecting the appropriate communication strategy, presentation of lead lecture by a competent of team, providing motivation or reinforcement, supervision of students activity.

iii). Evaluating:- asking oral questions, taking decision about the level of performance, diagnosing about difficulties of the learners and providing remedies, revising the planning and organising phase of team teaching on the basis of evaluation of the students.

Types of Team Teaching

Team teaching includes a number of different approaches. Some of the more common are:

1. Interactive team teaching:- Two faculty members present in front of the class simultaneously.

2. Rotational format team teaching:- Faculty alternate teaching the class. This rotational format has a number of variations depending on the subject matter and the number of faculty involved.

3. Participant-observer team teaching:- All participating faculty are present for all the classes, but only one is "teaching" at a time Roles that the other teachers could play as participating observer(s) are model learner, observer, panel member, or resource.

4. Team coordination:- faculty arrange and integrate a curriculum so as to maximize learning and connections using paired or linked courses, an integrated cluster of independent courses, or freshman interest groups. Though not necessarily team teaching per se, this curriculum-level approach to interdisciplinarity can help to achieve some of the expected gains of team teaching.

Types of Team Teaching

 

1)        A team from a single department

2)        A team from various departments of single institution

3)        A team from a single department of various institutions.

4)        Interactive team teaching

5)        Rotational format team teaching

6)        Participant-observer team teaching

7)        Team coordination

8)        Lead and support teaching

9)        Parallel instruction

10)   Traditional team teaching.

Guiding Principles of Team Teaching

Team teaching for a particular teaching subject is organized under the following basic principles:

1. Principle of pooling the resources:- Team teaching is based on pooling and best utilizing the available resources and expertise in the field of teaching.

2. Principle of joint responsibility and cooperation:- Team teaching is-organized to teach a specific group of students by-a team of personnel headed by a leader. It requires that all the members of the team share joint responsibilities and work together for achieving the ends.

3. Principle of attending the needs of the students:- Team teaching is organized according to the interests, abilities and needs of the learners. Since a team as a whole shares the teaching task in it, it provides better opportunities to take care of the difficulties and needs of the individual students.

4. Principle of flexibility in terms of grouping and scheduling:- Team teaching requires adequate flexibility in terms of grouping of the students in the form of large classes, small group or study at the individual level. It also needs flexibility with regard to time factors and scheduling. Here, the time needs to be adjusted according to the requirements of the teaching-learning situation.

5. Principle of appropriate selection of the team members:- Team teaching requires joint responsibility and such responsibility can only be undertaken properly if the members of the team are selected judiciously according to the needs of the instruction.

Objectives of Team Teaching

Team teaching is generally directed to achieve the following objectives:

1. To make the best use of expertise of a number of teachers.
2. To improve the quality of teaching by utilising and skills of more than one person.
3. To develop positive attitudes towards cooperation and group in teaching learning situation.
4. To help the students to satisfy the needs and solve the difficulties relating special content areas.
5. To develop the sense of shared responsibility in teaching and evaluation.
6. To minimise the scope of teaching wrong things to the students by any individual teacher.

Characteristics of Team Teaching

Team teaching has following characteristics:

1. It utilises the service of two or more teacher in the process of teaching the same class.
2. It is an instructional strategy rather than training strategy.
3. In team teaching a group of teachers are responsible for realisation of the educational objectives, rather than an individual teacher.
4. A team of the teachers of the same subjects work together to deal relevant content area to the same group of students.
5. It can termed as co-operative teaching, in which teachers plan together to pool resources, interests and expertise for teaching the same content for the same group of students.
6. Every individual teacher of the team gets an appropriate role in the instructional process in accordance with one's special competencies or area of specialisation.
7. The group of teachers involves have shared responsibilities in planning, organising, leading, controlling and evaluating.
8. In team teaching, the group of teachers has to jointly consider the needs of their pupils.

Merits of Team Teaching

1. It stimulates thought and discussion among teachers who are jointly responsible for a group of students.
2. A strong sense of involvement and responsibility develops among the students.
3. It gives adequate opportunities to students for free expression.
4. It affords opportunities to the students to develop human relations essential for social adjustment.
5. Teachers are motivated to work hard for the development of their professional proficiency.
6. Students get the opportunity to be benefitted by the special knowledge of the teachers constituting the team.
7. It makes proper use of the staff, equipment and the school building.
8. It helps in the maintenance of discipline as it makes the best use of the time and energy of the students.
9. It helps teachers to evaluate the work of one another and provides opportunities for improving one's own teaching.
10. It provides a flexible class size.
11. Teachers work in the totality of a situation.
12. It helps in the improvement of instruction.

Demerits of Team Teaching

1. In team teaching, numbers of teachers are not available according to requirement. It however, they are arranged, they have no enough efficiently and abilities.
2. For this method, a large hall is required which is hardly there in school.
3. This method is So it cannot be applied in every school. It cannot be advantageous for every student became there are many students who are economically poor.
4. There is a lack of coordination among there the teachers required.
5. A teacher can not teach his permanent experience as it affects his freedom.
6. This method requires new researches which may make up its shortcomings.
7. Traditional methods can not be used in this method.