Team Teaching

Purpose of team teaching and advantages of team teaching

Team teaching offers an opportunity of a better education to a large group of students through a team of teachers.

Purpose

1. The goal of team teaching is improvement of teaching through a better utilization of a group of teachers.
2. Team teaching utilizes teacher’s specialized expertise, interests, instructions, skills, time and energy.
3. It ensures effective planning as well as meticulous instructions.
4. It ensures preparation of lessons, materials and other aids to create motivation among the students and to create better learning situations.
5. The team concept itself increases the possibility of variety in instruction based on pooled talent of teachers.
6. Beggs has observed that team teaching provides realistic treatment of individual differences and meeting their needs through identifying and diagnosing them.

Aspects of team teaching:

The theoretical design for team teaching is based on the co-operative planning but there are many other aspects of team-teaching such as

1. Role differentiation of team members.
2. Regrouping of students.
3. Rescheduling of time.
4. Redesign of teaching space.
5. Common time for planning.
6. Integration of learning in meaningful way.
7. Development of resource centre.

Team Organization

Team organization is based on hierarchy whose basic unit is the teacher.

The teacher’s experience and specialty are the criteria of joining the team.

Typically, from Std. III to std. VIII teachers take responsibility for the instruction of 75 to 240 students of similar age and grade.

The clerical and secretarial needs of the team are cared for by the clerical staff as

Team Leader   -> Senior Teacher  -> Junior Teacher -> The Clerical Staff and Secretarial Assistance

Types of teams

(a) Single subject Team

(b) Interdisciplinary Team

(c) Hierarchical Team

(d)  Synergetic Team.

Approach:

In all these different types of teams, generally the approach is as follows

1. There are 3 to 7 teachers as team members.
2. There is different level of responsibility of teachers.
3. Junior teachers look after the supervisory work
4. In the classroom, teachers protect the professional autonomy of each other.
5. The programme is organized in such a way that talent of all teachers is utilized.
6. Class size depends on flexible scheduling approach
7. Team teachers make effective use of audio-visual aids.

Minimum essentials of team teaching

Most of the authors suggest that the minimum essentials for team teaching appear to be as follows

1. Proper selection of teachers for constituting a team is needed.
2. There is need of common planning time.
3. There is a need of feeling with shared responsibility.
4. There should be adequate room facility.
5. Schedule arrangements should be flexible and purposeful.
6. There is a need of carefully planned, objective based instructions and evaluation.