Over the last three years, there has been no end to the amount of stress and uncertainty piled upon teachers at all levels of education. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, good teaching has always required a lot of hard work, energy, and creativity.
One approach we have deployed that helps make our own teaching lives better is a particular model of co-teaching that we think others might also be able to take lessons from, even if co-teaching isn’t for you.
There are many ways to co-teach and collaborate across courses, including guest speaking, pairing assignments across multiple classes, or taking turns leading units in a course.
For example, recently Adrienne guest lectured to another professor’s graduate theory class on feminist and queer theory, and Laura’s Producing and Directing students are producing scripts written in another professor’s Creative Scriptwritingclass to create projects featuring original music by students in our department’s Recording Industry Practicum course. These are all examples of teaching-related collaboration.
Our method of co-teaching is different, though.
How we co-teach our classes
Laura is a non-tenure track creative production faculty member and Adrienne is a tenured research faculty member in the Department of Media Studies and Production at Temple University, a large, public university in Philadelphia.
We both have expertise in emergent/new/digital media and are each able to contribute something different to a class with a shared vision. We started co-teaching specifically to design a class that required both of our areas of expertise.
We regularly co-teach a graduate class that guides master’s students through the process of designing research-informed creative projects for their degree completion requirement. For this to work for our teaching load, we also co-teach an undergraduate class we had both taught separately before called Mobile Media.
We share leadership of all elements of our co-taught classes: designing the overall course vision and structure, delivering lectures and leading class discussions, and grading assignments. The image below shows how we share course content delivery.
In practice, this requires that our two classes have staggered start times on the same night, so that both of us can be together with one class at the start of the evening (5:00 – 5:30 pm) and together with the other class at the end of the night (7:30 – 8:00 pm).
We are currently teaching online via two simultaneous Zoom meetings, although the strategy worked just as well when we taught the two simultaneous classes in two in-person classrooms in the same building and we moved between them. Memorably, one year we got all our steps in as one classroom was in the basement and one was on the third floor!
This method of co-teaching—whether teaching in person or teaching online via Zoom—allows us to have instructor presence every week with both classes, and it allows our students to see us as collaborative co-leaders of their class.
Co-teaching in this way is not easy. It requires us both teaching one additional class every fall, as we split our teaching credit hours so that we don’t exceed the teaching caps outlined in our university employment contracts. But we love it and choose to do it for several reasons.
Co-teaching makes our classes and department better
Co-teaching allows us to teach classes that we couldn’t otherwise teach—at least not as well—if we were trying to teach them alone.
Merging our focus areas in research and production allows us to design projects that are inspired by both. For graduate students, this means they can take a class that gives equal weight to research assignments, hands-on production projects, and ongoing assignments that ask students to reflect on how research informs their creative design work and how their creative design work informs the way they approach their research papers.
For undergraduate students, this means they get to work on creative projects that ask them to respond to scholarship through their creative production work and to explain their design choices and how research inspires their work through reflection papers.
Co-teaching pushes us to reflect on how we do things
Co-teaching requires us to reflect on our own teaching practice. When we first designed our co-taught classes, we examined policies within our separate syllabi for other classes. While some policies were similar, our policies on attendance and late work were very different. We talked through how and why we designed our policies the way we did, and we co-developed the strategies that would work best for the classes we would be teaching together.
Such critical examination is also not a one-time thing. Ongoing reflection allows us to create classes that are revised and upgraded each semester.
The process of co-teaching does not fundamentally change our individual teaching styles. Rather, it invites us to rethink, through explaining and discussing with a fellow faculty member, our current teaching practice. It also allows us to share strategies, learn with and from each other, expand what works, and reimagine what can be improved.
Co-teaching makes teaching less lonely
Leading a class can be both highly social and isolating all at once. It can be incredibly valuable to be able to turn to a co-teacher to vent, celebrate, and reflect on things that happen in class.
Being able to ask “Does this assignment prompt make sense?” or “Is this grading rubric fair?” is something we can ask colleagues normally but not with the degree of engaged investment co-teaching allows.
Grading in our field can be subjective in many ways, so having someone who can confirm if we are applying everything fairly is important. And in class, being able to fill in for each other allows each person to take a breath, physically and metaphorically, during the 3 hours of continuous teaching.
Co-teaching inspires us to try new things
We have found methods that work for us, like prerecording video lectures and then focusing class time on discussion. We have learned teaching strategies from each other, such as using Slack for asynchronous communication, instituting email hours, and trying out new platforms for creative production like Oolipo and Artivive.
We have also discovered new strategies together. Moving classes online during the pandemic inspired many teachers to reflect on their teaching practices. Because we had already been co-teaching before our university shifted online, we were able to continue those co-learning strategies in this new context. For instance, we reflected on strategies for breakout rooms with Google Docs, “maker day” activities, and techniques for organizing our university’s learning management system.
Things that help us stay organized for our co-taught classes also inspire how we set up our individual classes.
What not to do when co-teaching
While there are many benefits to co-teaching, we would be remiss to not mention that there are times you may want to not co-teach and there are co-teaching methods that may be more frustrating than valuable.
Don’t co-teach with someone you don’t like. You will have to spend a lot of time together, and you will be making shared decisions and sometimes speaking for each other as co-leaders of the class. If you don’t trust someone, don’t co-teach with them.
Don’t co-teach if you are not willing to see your co-teacher as an equal or if you suspect that they will not see you as an equal. Co-teachers are not teaching assistants or graders. Co-teachers are not bosses.
Don’t co-teach if you are not willing to reflect on and potentially change how you do things. Co-teaching requires ongoing critical reflection. You will be working with someone who is different from you without trying to change them to fit your mold or change yourself to fit theirs. To have a course that is truly a shared vision, you will need to reevaluate how you operate and be open to change.
If you aren’t quite ready to share a class with another person yet, consider taking small steps like inviting a colleague to guest lecture or pairing an assignment between your class and another class.
Final thoughts
We had worked together often for five years before we started co-teaching. We are careful to treat each other as equal co-teachers and co-leaders who share the vision of our courses and equal responsibility for all parts of them.
While we come from different areas of expertise—and are separate humans who naturally don’t always see things the same way—we are also co-leaders who learn from each other’s perspectives and present a unified experience for students.
Finally, co-teaching is fun! Just like other forms of teaching, co-teaching gets easier with practice. The first semester is the hardest, and after that, you learn strategies that work for you both, for the students, and for the class. Co-teaching can be challenging, but the rewards are a greater sense of community, ongoing learning opportunities, and improved teaching and more enjoyment of the craft.
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