Oh the woes of team teaching. I was one of the idealistic young grad students who believed that team teaching could work wonders. Of course this was all theoretical because I had never actually taught this way. Now, six weeks into the semester I would like to give my pre-semester self a smack down. Who in the world thought that four people of varying interests, specializations and disciplines would be able to team teach a humanities class that every student in the University is forced to take. I guess the theory of the damn thing was much more excited then the reality. To wit:
1. None of us, and I will excuse myself here because I am the newbie, can succinctly state, or for that matter do we discuss, what the goals of this class are nor how we hope to achieve them.
2. It is now frankly obvious that not every discipline is concerned in the least bit with pedagogy. I would like to sit my brilliant but clueless collogues down for a two hour discussion and workshop on the pedagogical impetus of small groups, class discussion and all things not lecture based. There are, in fact, other ways in which information can be taught.
3. If you demand that students engage with the material, teach them the language and the tools with which they can do this. Lecture and reading do not guarantee that students “get” the material. We too often assume our students minds have been taken over with dry rot from too much TV and empathetic social integration. But I think that students are a lot smarter then we give them credit for, and are in fact quite capable of critical thought if one would give them the tools to do this.
4. When team teaching one instructor should not ambush another to try to play out their own political agendas. Not that I do not welcome and love intellectual discussion, but over a pint like civilized people, for the love of god we are not philistines!
So team teaching has pretty much been a bust. I had high hopes, but the reality, like so much else in the real world, is a far cry from theory. I think that team teaching and that this class could work, if only we could get through the administrator crap, get some teachers together who want to teach, teach them to teach and them gives them goals to teach to.