Effective Interaction With Audience. With the advent of mass media, especially film and television, students
have become accustomed to seeing top professional performers and to judging presentations in form, if not con-
tent, by the artistic standards of performing specialists. Professorial lectures suffer by comparison. It is no use
protesting that no such comparison should be made between entertainment and education. Comparisons are
made, consciously or unconsciously, particularly by the neophyte student.

Favorable Competition With Media. The team approach, because it is aimed directly toward enhanced perfor-
mance, answers directly to the competition of the media and appeals to a broad spectrum of viewers. To objec-
tions that professors are not performers and therefore cannot compete with media presentations, they can. We
have done it.

Implementation

How is a team put together? Team teaching cannot be accomplished by administrative fiat, but administra-
tion must encourage this innovation. Performing talent, far from being a scarce commodity among higher edu-
cation faculties, lies dormant and unrecognized often by students, colleagues, and even by potential team
members themselves.

The quest for teams may be initiated in many ways. Friendship is often the basis for professional relation-
ships, with the confidence that comes from respecting and understanding another person translated into a com-
fortable interchange before an audience, in class or on television. Compatibility is not measurable by individu-
als’ teaching reputations or styles. In fact, the unsung individual may blossom in the new setting and challenge
of team taught courses.

However, when team teaching is first attempted, there may be an experimental quality to the course. A
school’s administration, with the responsibility for maintaining academic integrity, will be taking a risk by insti-
tuting team teaching, as they would when instituting any new approach. But with team teaching, the risk is
lessened through arrangement for a possible split of the team-taught course into two separate courses--should
the team fail. Simply, administration should assign the team to two separate sections taught in the same place,
at the same time. When video team courses are arranged, it is best advised that the potential team work togeth-
er “on camera“ in practice sessions under the direction of a media individual--experienced and capable of objec-
tively assessing the potential team.

How does the team actually work in practice? While students are most aware of the stimulation and repar-
tee, underlying the interplay is a well-developed common structure. Both instructors must agree upon perime-
ters of the course. Within those limits the instructors are free to exhibit the compatibility and responsiveness
created within the performing atmosphere.

Visual placement is as important as in staging a play. In the classroom, experience has shown that placing
a lectern at each end of the stage is distracting to students, for they find themselves in a situation not unlike that
of watching a tennis match. Somewhat less clumsy is moving both lecturers to stage center behind a single lec-
tern. We have found, however, that in a classroom setting one instructor is designated as the lead, for the day,
and as such will occupy center stage, while the other may well remain at stage left, or right. The instructor at
the center gives the students a focal point; and the distance of the second instructor from the lead instructor al-
lows for space to accentuate expressions of conflict, agreement, additions, or amplifications.

Evaluation.

Proof that the team teaching format has worked comes not only from the instructors’ self-judgment, but
from students’ written evaluations. What do they say? They say they like it! So successful was the approach
that news of the course technique circulated. Student demand for more team taught courses exceeded available
courses. Faculty and administrators, many of whom came to the class with ingrained skepticism, came away as
converts to the new approach to teaching.

In addition, the unexpected benefits of renewal and revitalization of the professorial participants carried
over into single presentation classes, accelerating the quality of individual presentations and the use of new or
different approaches learned from the opposite half of the team. =

 

\AS COLLEGE
Sandra L. Quinn | EI ree
Sanford B. Kanter ARGHIVES
San Jacinto College

 

 

For further information, contact the authors at SJC, South, 13735 Beamer Road, Houston, Texas 77089.

 

Suanne D. Roueche, Editor
December 7, 1984, Vol. VI, No. 34
INNOVATION ABSTRACTS is a publication of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, EDB 348, The University of Texas at Austin,

Austin, Texas 78712, (512) 471-7545. Subscriptions are available to nonconsortium members for $35 per year. Funding in part by the W. K. Kellogg
Foundation and Sid VW. Richardson Foundation. Issued weekly when classes are in session during fall and spring terms and monthly during the summer.

©) The University of Texas at Austin, 1984
Further duplication is permitted only by MEMBER institutions for their own personnel. ISSN O199-106X