Team Teaching

Team teaching, conceptualized and developed at Harvard University in the mid-1950s, calls for teachers to work together to plan, teach, and evaluate a common group of students. Initiated in 1957, a team project sponsored by Harvard University and Lexington, Massachusetts, Public Schools, attracted worldwide attention and influenced the design of school buildings. A great many schools were designed to accommodate team teaching and featured large, open classrooms or spaces with collapsible partitions. Many of these school buildings, however, were poorly utilized, and some of these facilities were reconverted into self-contained classrooms with hard walls. Many early team-teaching efforts were abandoned or modified because of the presumed failures of the open-space architecture. Team teaching seemed unsuccessful because teachers were poorly prepared to take advantage of teaming, and support from administrators was lacking.

Functional divisions of curriculum and student tracking have characterized the bureaucratic organizational structure of schools. This structure promoted teacher isolation and detachment, forcing them to work both physically and intellectually separate from their colleagues with limited professional sharing. Influenced by organizational theory literature from the corporate sector, authentic teamwork, collegial interaction, and collaborative decision making are associated with successful school improvement and have become prominent in the literature on school reform. Team teaching has become a major element of school organizational and curricular reform.

The team-teaching approach is being promoted partly because of increased expectations that all students meet standards of learning performance through inclusive practices. At the same time, professional standards adopted by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support Consortium, and the National Staff Development Council endorse working collaboratively, fostering relationships with school colleagues, and creating time for teachers to work together.

The middle school movement of the 1980s promoted school restructuring from individualized teaching in junior highs to middle schools organized around team teaching. The influential report, Turning Points, released by the Carnegie Council on Adolescent Development, urged school restructuring around organizational cultures that are characterized by collaborative inquiry, teacher teaming, and collegial sharing. In 2000, 79% of middle school principals reported that they had teams, up from 57% in 1992.

The restructuring of high schools to smaller learning communities includes interdisciplinary teaching teams and planning periods designed for teacher collaboration. Teacher teaming in high school can ease student transition from middle school and ensure that instruction for English language learners and special education students includes high-level concepts in content area studies.

In elementary schools, the team-teaching approach is being advanced because of special education mandates for inclusion classrooms and as a way to provide developmentally appropriate educational experiences and individualized instruction that will benefit all students. Teacher teams with multiage groups of students, looping, and coteaching distinguish staffing models that are changing the elementary school norm of the self-contained classroom-based teacher.

In essence, teachers in teams seek to accomplish collaboratively what self-contained teachers seek to accomplish independently. It shifts the role of instruction from the individual to a team. Team teaching must include basic elements: (a) long- and short-range curriculum planning by all team members, (b) coteaching, (c) team assessment of instructional sequences and entire instructional program, (d) students regularly [Page 1006]connecting with all team members, (e) team responsibility for evaluating student progress, and (f) unselfish sharing of classroom materials and space.

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