1+1 is more than 2 – The many benefits of team-teaching!

Abstract

Team-teaching is an opportunity for opening the doors and sharing our teaching practice with other colleagues and experts. The presence of two teachers in the classroom naturally results in active observation, personal reflection and peer collaboration, which allow us to better understand our strengths and weaknesses as teachers. Some examples of the benefits that team-teaching can bring to your professional development are a more reliable and fair evaluations, the provision of multimodal feedback to students, the modelling of collaboration strategies for our students, more flexibility to adapt to new teaching environments and openness to continuous improvement. This workshop will (1) introduce different co-teaching models based on teacher presence (team-teaching/station teaching/parallel teaching) and teacher roles (lead/lead, lead/support, content/language), (2) contextualize the models, considering benefits provided by each and, most importantly, (3) outline the practical steps necessary in order to set up a successful teaching collaboration, including planning, communication, classroom management, and assessment. Examples from the literature and the presenters’ own experience will be provided and participants will be invited to contribute actively to the discussion by sharing their points of view and personal background.