Jared Weinstein would heartily agree with the old adage “two heads are better than one,” especially when it applies to a class he is taking that is taught by two instructors.
“What’s great about it is getting more than one opinion, more than one point of view on your assignments from professionals coming from different disciplines,” said Weinstein, a fourth-year student at Columbia College in Chicago. “It’s a fantastic course, with great critiques from the professors.”
The course is Advanced Commercial Studio/Art Direction, which teaches the commercial art business, including how to resolve the conflicts that frequently arise between photographers and art directors. The course, taught during spring semester, is open to graphic design and photography majors.
Designer Kay Hartmann and photographer Peter LeGrand are the teaching team. They agree that teaching the course as a team makes for a much livelier class than one taught from a single perspective.
It is one of several Columbia courses that team two or more teachers in a classroom to give students a broader learning experience. It also represents a trend in college teaching.
Other courses at Columbia that are team-taught by instructors in different subjects include one on television camera techniques and acting; a copywriter/art director class; and a journalism/art class focusing on magazine production. A course planned for spring 1996 will team guest fashion designers with instructors of fashion photography and fashion merchandising.
“Having the same course taught by two different professors, giving two sides of the subject, gives you a better idea of the diversity you’re going to face in the real world,” said Weinstein, 21. “Kay sees the more technical side, the client side, and Peter sees the more artistic side.”
The two work smoothly together, interacting with each other and the class, and supporting and assisting one another, he added.
Team teaching has been around for at least several decades, said Jeanne Baxter, chairwoman of the educational foundations department at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. At the college level, she has seen it evolve from two teachers in a classroom sharing the work to an interactive and interdisciplinary collaboration among two or more teachers. The evolution in elementary and high school has followed similar lines, she said.
At Northeastern some of the more innovative forms of team teaching are found in the College of Education.
A course in educational psychology, for instance, teams instructors from two institutions.
The other institution is Mozart School, an elementary school on the Northwest Side of Chicago, and two of the three-member team are teachers there. The Northeastern team member, who developed the course, is Elaine Koffman, assistant professor of education in the educational foundations department of the College of Education. (Koffman is expected to be promoted to associate professor in September.)
All educational foundations courses are required for students training to become teachers. At Mozart, the students observe the teachers working and have discussions with them.
Koffman believes that everybody benefits from her team system. “It helps my students see what a real school environment is like: They get the benefit of the classroom teachers’ experience, and they get real, current, practical examples of the kinds of things we discuss.”
The team-taught class permits the classroom teachers to participate at a different professional level, she said. “For me, it makes it easier to connect theories and research with reality for the students.
“Having people with disparate teaching styles makes a class more interesting, and for the instructor, you get a chance to discuss classroom strategy with your colleagues and a chance to see somebody else’s teaching style.”
Another team-taught course employs distance learning with interactive television. A master’s degree course called School Supervision is led by Baxter and Steven Brown, coordinator of the administration leadership program.
During spring semester the course was held at three sites simultaneously: Northeastern, Oakton Community College in Skokie and the Illinois Student Assistance Commission in Deerfield. (The commission, which administers student loans, is in a state-owned building that includes conference and training rooms.) The sites are connected by interactive television, and the students and two teachers, who usually teach at Northeastern, can communicate with one another simply by speaking; they are heard and seen by one another on television monitors.
“The students tell us that the strength of the course is interaction among the instructors-that we bring two different perspectives, which they find very helpful,” Baxter said. “The biggest learning experience for us in teaming is that our interaction evolves a variety of teaching strategies.”
Plans are to expand the class to six sites on the North Side and in the north suburbs in fall, Brown said.
At DePaul University’s Loop campus, a required course in the Graduate School of Business is team-taught. The course, Effective Communication, is taught by an exceptionally large team. In spring it was led by two professors, who are assisted by five other school faculty and 18 fellowship assistants. Those numbers vary slightly each quarter. There are two three-hour classes per week, each with more than 100 students.
Lee Freitag, 26, an MBA candidate, completed the course in December. He believes that the techniques he learned helped him get hired by a financial institution. “I benefited by improving my communication skills,” he said. “I used the techniques I learned in the course in the job interview.”
Freitag praised the team approach. “It’s great because you get a variety of different teaching styles and enthusiasm levels,” he said. “It’s interesting to not know what to expect from any given class and to be exposed to a mix of personalities.”
The main instructors are Joel Whalen, an associate professor of marketing, and David Drehmer, an associate professor of management, who also is a clinical psychologist. An instructor when Freitag took the course was Laura Pincus, an attorney who teaches business law. Her role in the class has been reduced, however, because of other commitments.
The teachers each bring a particular expertise to the class, Freitag said. Whalen focuses on the communications aspect, emphasizing techniques in selling yourself in interviews or in corporate settings. Drehmer brings psychological aspects of communication into the class, teaching stress release, how to overcome nervousness when speaking to a group, and organizational behavior. Pincus concentrates mainly on the ethical aspects of business communications.
Drehmer believes that team teaching works well in this course. “But team teaching,” he commented, “is one of the most wonderful experiences I have ever had and one of the most terrifying. I know what is going to happen in the class, but I don’t know how things will unfold. And since I don’t have control as I would in my own classroom, it becomes a little frightening sometimes.”
A major aspect of the success of team teaching is planning, he added. “Team planning is the secret of the course.”
At the University of Illinois at Chicago, team teaching is used consistently in the Honors College, which offers a variety of courses in all undergraduate divisions to students with B-plus or better averages.
Good team-taught courses can open new perspectives on even familiar themes, said Howard Kerr, dean of the Honors College. “This is true, not only for the students, but for the faculty. Team teaching with instructors from different disciplines gives students a concrete example of the relationship between different fields of knowledge.”
Team-taught courses that the Honors College has offered include the Science of Humanity, taught by a historian and an English professor; Understanding Ourselves, Understanding Others, taught by an anthropologist, a social scientist and a political scientist; and the Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics, taught by a professor of women’s studies and history and a professor of African-American studies and English.
Kerr observed that team-taught courses tend to be less lecture and more discussion. “That’s why they have to be rigorously planned,” he said, “so they won’t become bull sessions. One of our courses was so rigorous that after it ended a student remarked to me, `We’re ready for anything after this.’
“I think that the movement toward team teaching is growing stronger, partly because of the call for interdisciplinary education.”
He sees the movement as a healthy trend-“but maybe not in brain surgery,” he said with a chuckle.
