For free: continuity and change by team teaching

Abstract

Team teaching is advocated in education to offer students multiple explanations to complex concepts and to improve teacher development. However, team teaching is typically associated with high staff cost due to the increased amount of teachers involved. The authors argue that team teaching can be conducted in a cheap way by including novice teaching assistants in the lectures and train them ‘on the job’. Additionally, novice assistants cause reflection on action and prevent a mechanization of the course. The authors use Brookfield’s four lenses to reflect on the application of team teaching in a Swedish undergraduate course on software modeling over three years, involving 3 teachers and collecting evaluation data from close to 400 students. The reflection shows that team teaching can be used as a cost-effective way to introduce novice teachers to a course, while at the same time receiving benefits from their participation in lectures and course development.