Evaluation of the use of team teaching for delivering sensitive content – a pilot study

Abstract

Many programmes in further and higher education contain sensitive areas of content, such as diversity, racism, power and privilege, breaking bad news, counselling, sex education and ethical decision making. Team teaching may be a useful method for delivering sensitive areas of course content. This article presents a pilot study that was undertaken on the use of team teaching to deliver the ethical decision‐making component of a continuing professional development (CPD) module for trained nurses. The findings of the pilot study are presented and mapped against different models of team teaching from the literature, and they indicate that students found three key benefits of team teaching for this sensitive content area: the value of having differing perspectives; the way in which team teaching enhanced small group work during the teaching session; and the value of team teaching in the development of students' cognitive skills.