Team-Teaching in the Science Classroom

There are so many things that we love about team teaching but here are my top 5:

1. Discipline – I mentioned discipline above.  Having a partner teacher to help out when an issue arises is tremendous for the students that are in the process of learning and for the teacher who is not distracted from their teaching.  Think of all the wasted time that you spend on correcting a situation.  Even if you are a seasoned veteran and know every trick in the book there are still going to be times when you get taken away from what you could be doing.
2. Planning – I would imagine that most effective teaching teams plan together, but I’m proof that it doesn’t always happen.  My partner and I are totally in tune with the curriculum, sequencing, etc. that goes on in the planning of our daily routines.
3. ‘Our’ Kids – Every student in the class becomes ‘our’ student and we both feel the responsibility to do whatever we can to help any student in need.  There have been several times where I’ve had parent communication with a student that isn’t on my roster and vice versa.  We are both accountable for everyone in the class.
4. Content Knowledge – There are many times throughout any given day when my partner may interject knowledge of a particular subject that I am weaker in, or where I may have an anecdote about a particular piece of information that may hit a kid in a different way.  I think for this reason alone it should be at the top of any list of reasons to team teach.  Most days our students don’t even know who their teacher is.  All they know is that they have two very capable teachers to ask questions to.  Some learn better from me, and others from my partner.  It’s really awesome to see in action.
5. It’s Fun! – We have a ton of fun in the classroom together.  Those class periods fly by!  I know that there are financial issues involved, but I wish that everyone could get a taste of what team teaching is like.  It’s given me a lot of joy this year.

All of these things are well-intended, but do they yield results?  I’m proud to say that we just received our benchmark scores back from our semester I test and those team taught classes absolutely dominated our other on-level class.  One of the classes actually had a 100% pass rate!  This isn’t to say that our other classes didn’t perform well…they did.  These classes performed significantly better though.  The fact is that team teaching works for us.  When we analyzed students that historically have bombed these type of assessments we found that many of them scored much higher if they were part of our team teach classes.  You should have seen the look on some of these kids faces today when we told them that they passed a benchmark and may not have ever passed a benchmark in middle school before.  It was a great day!

I’d love to hear your comments or experiences about team teaching in the comments below.