8/30/2023 0 Comments Heather thomas modelWill team teaching finally take off over the next decade with the help of organizations like Public Impact and ASU? Only time will tell. There’s also a major possibility that new generative AI could vastly streamline the time teachers spend on activities such as planning lessons, developing assignments, and grading-thereby freeing up more time to work in teams. Potential solutions could include optimizing master schedules using services such as Abl or Tegy and leveraging tools like Google Docs and Google Slides to facilitate more efficient collaboration. If US teachers were scheduled for fewer hours of teaching each day, in line with other countries like Australia, Denmark, and Japan, they could dedicate more time to coordinating with their colleagues.īut in the absence of additional funding, schools will need to explore innovative ways to make team teaching more efficient and sustainable within existing cost structures. The most straightforward solution is to increase school funding so schools can hire more teachers to share the teaching workload. But the only solutions with any hope of lasting will be those that can break the constraints on teachers’ time. Then, when teachers are overwhelmed by their myriad responsibilities, attempts at collaborative teaching often regress into isolated teaching practices.Īre there ways for team teaching to overcome these challenges? I believe so. In contrast, because team teaching moves away from compartmentalized structures towards more fluid approaches, it demands more time for coordination. They create buffers and predictable interfaces between different teachers’ classrooms by keeping classes compartmentalized and making the handoffs between classrooms clear. Many of the features of conventional schooling-like course sequences, credit hours, class rosters, bell schedules, and classrooms separated by walls-serve to reduce the need for coordination among teachers. But in order for the organization to survive, the priorities that evolve within the organization to guide resource allocation decisions must ensure that any new innovations the organization considers pursuing will conform to its cost structure.ĭrawing on the insights of these scholars, my sense is that team teaching doesn’t stick because it violates the practical constraints on teachers’ time. Christensen posits that new organizations set out to assemble resources and processes in service of delivering envisioned value propositions. This idea dovetails with some of Clayton Christensen’s observations about organizations in The Innovator’s Solution. Labaree makes the case that “the most deeply entrenched school practices - the ones that have proven to be hardest to budge, like age-graded classrooms and teacher-centered instruction - strike a balance between what we want our schools to do and what those schools can realistically accomplish.” By implication, practices that struggle to gain traction-such as team teaching-fail because they don’t maintain this balance between goals and practical constraints. In a recent article for Kappan, education historian David Labaree offers a compelling explanation for why conventional approaches to classroom instruction are hard to change. So, why hasn’t such a promising practice truly taken flight? As Cuban suggests, team teaching has long been seen as the antidote to the inflexible, individualistic teaching within age-graded, self-contained classrooms. Education historian Larry Cuban, in a blog post from a few years back, traced the ebb and flow of enthusiasm for team teaching from the 1950s to the 1970s. Yet, despite the potential benefits of team teaching, it’s a practice that has struggled to gain widespread adoption, even though it’s been around for decades. I struggled as a first-year teacher, and I would have relished the opportunity to work side-by-side with more experienced teachers so I could observe their methods and have a second adult present to navigate difficult classroom situations. For a number of years, I’ve been encouraged by one potential solution to this challenge: team teaching-in particular, the Opportunity Culture work by Public Impact found in hundreds of schools, or ASU’s Next Education Workforce initiative.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |