Teaming is a method of grouping students so they share the same set of teachers for their core subject areas—science, math, language arts, social studies, and sometimes physical education and health. Most often, teams are created when an entire grade is broken into groups who share the same set of teachers.
—From Help! I’m Teaching Middle School Science, by C. Jill Swango and Sally Boles Steward, NSTA Press
On an ideal team, members work together to succeed, relying on each other’s strengths to score a goal, win a competition, or complete a project. When teaching teams succeed, educators, students, and parents all win.
“One of the advantages, I think, is the teachers can help students to make connections to other content areas,” says Mary L. Bigelow, retired educator and author of NSTA’s Ms. Mentor column and blog. “I taught life science, but my students came from three different English classes, so it was hard to make connections between English and science. In team teaching, where all of the students would have the same English teacher, you can say, ‘I know you know how to write a sentence; I know you know how to focus your writing; I know you’ve heard the word medusa in the mythology unit.’ I would have loved to make connections between environmental science and geography, but not all of my students had the same social studies teacher.”
Developing a winning team requires common planning time and coaching on what team teaching really is and how it’s used, according to Bigelow. “The biggest obstacle is when teachers don’t have common planning time. In a middle school I worked with, each teacher had an individual planning period every day, and three times a week, the four teachers on the team had a common planning period to work on team issues and activities,” she explains. “Sometimes schools throw teachers together with little or no collaborative professional development on what team teaching is (and is not) and on strategies for maximizing the experience.”
Working with other teachers can be difficult, too. Bigelow says, “Unfortunately, sometimes not all teachers may be very cooperative (at first). It takes a mindset. They may come with a different concept of what team teaching is. It boils down to common language. You have to come to a consensus of ‘What do we mean?’ or ‘What will this look like in our school?’ The bottom line is a commitment to helping students learn.”
For new teachers, joining an established team has both positive and negative aspects, according to John Haley, a ninth-grade Earth science teacher in South Paris, Maine. He has been on two different teams in three years. As a first-year teacher, he joined a team that had worked together previously.
“Existing members of the team did a really good job welcoming me in,” he comments. “They had everything lined up. That was a challenge and a benefit. Everything was handed to me, but on the other hand, everything I wanted to do as an integrated unit was sidestepped.”
When he moved to a team being formed with others who had team-taught, he was part of the process. “On the new team, we kind of got to put together our integrated units and think about how we as a group wanted to work,” he explains.
“Teaming is an ideal situation for new teachers because you have colleagues who have the same students,” writes Kate Leary, a seventh-grade science and math and science integration teacher. “This allows for team brainstorming and team problem solving to figure out which strategies will help improve student achievement, especially for challenging and unmotivated students.”
Built in Support
Team teaching can offer educators insight into their own work as well as their students’ abilities and difficulties. At her school in Jefferson City, Missouri, Leary explains, teams “use tuning protocols to analyze student and teacher work.” They are able to identify students’ strengths and weaknesses in other core classes and build on them. “Looking at teacher work…allows for teachers to get feedback on how clearly the assignment was written or how another teacher on the team might be able to integrate the assignment into his/her class,” she says.
“As a middle school educator, the positives of team teaching were outstanding,” proclaims Elizabeth Youngs, a Viera, Florida, teacher who team-taught for eight years at the eighth-grade level. “Four teachers had the same core of students, which allowed us to see who should not be in the same classes due to various problems, and we could move them around without creating hassles for guidance…At the middle school level, the students learned that we worked as a team in terms of assigning projects, homework, and test days. Many of the projects assigned were cross-curricular, so students quickly learned…each subject does not stand alone.”
“Science is not usually leveled according to abilities as in math or English, so a teacher can really run the spectrum of abilities and weaknesses in one class,” observes Donna Mathis, a seventh-grade Earth-space science teacher in Jacksonville, Florida. “When I look at my grades and find someone who is doing really well in other classes but poorly in mine, I ask [about] the kinds of activities students do in the other classes. My teaching style may not be the best fit for his or her learning style. Activities that may work in another class possibly could be worked into some of the things I do in my class.”
The team’s support and shared experiences can be especially helpful when a teacher is faced with a challenging student. “It was a time-saver to e-mail another teacher and ask, ‘Has Billy been turning in work’; ‘have you seen any changes in Matty’s behavior?’” Youngs says. “We could communicate with [each other] not only academic changes in the middle school child, but also personal and social changes.”
“One of my students had some fairly significant mental health issues. Another member of my team had prior experience as a special ed teacher,” recalls Lynn Ketcham, a fifth-grade science teacher in Pasadena, Texas. “She shared specific ideas which she had been using with this student in her class, which I began to use. This simple conversation about a shared student gave me some tools to make it through the year teaching this child and still enabling learning for the rest of the class. I don’t know that I could have made it without the support of my team, as together we dealt with this student (and several other challenging ones), sharing classroom successes or frustrations on a daily basis.”
Team teaching, when done well, also makes it harder for students to “pull one over on the parent,” notes Mathis, but students also benefit from a “commonality of procedures and policies” and have “less of a chance of being swamped with homework every night of the week (but only if teachers are communicating their workload to each other).”
The team approach also can impact parent-teacher interactions, for better and worse. A team can make it easier for parents to get a more complete picture of how their child is performing and reduce the tendency to dismiss complaints as bias against the student.
“We had a challenging student on our team last year whose mom did not understand what challenges we were having with the student in class,” says Leary. She describes the mother as “somewhat accusatory” about communicating and says she did not feel the teachers were doing what was best for her son. “By having all four team teachers communicating challenges and successes that the student was having, she could see we were working very hard to help her son be successful and that we were all very consistent in our expectations.”
Leary knows teaming can present special challenges with parents, too. “I used to have a difficult time during parent-teacher conferences because many parents and students were frustrated with one of my colleagues/teammates. They disagreed with her grading policy and how she had handled some situations, and they shared these frustrations with me at conferences. As her teammate, I didn’t feel I could question or go against her, but I also did not agree with her, so I couldn’t really defend her,” she explains. Having a strong relationship with her teammate could have mitigated the situation, though. Leary adds, “A solid relationship can handle conversations about differences in philosophies without people being offended. My teammate and I hadn’t built that solid relationship, so there wasn’t the groundwork set for me to have a conversation with her about these parent/student concerns.”
A team’s success is the result of its members’ ability to work together. They need to be open to colleagues’ ideas and willing to explore new possibilities.
“The key is letting each team grow in its own way,” says Haley. “They should be given the freedom to do things in different ways and take the team down different paths. I think if you end up on a team of people who are positive and willing to contribute, it can only be a positive experience…Every team I’ve been on has been positive. I’ve learned from my colleagues to create better learning experiences for kids.”