Spring 2003

TEACHING IN TEAMS

Friday, April 4, 2003, 3:00 - 5:00 p.m.
Commonwealth Room, Newcomb Hall

James Childress, Hollingsworth Professor of Ethics and Director of the Institute for Practical Ethics and Public Life
Irene Oh, PhD candidate, Department of Religious Studies
Michael Smith, Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of Political and Social Thought and Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs
Adelaide Wilcox King, Assistant Professor of Commerce, McIntire School of Commerce
Barbara Wixom, Assistant Professor of Commerce, McIntire School of Commerce
Panel discussion organizer: Cristina Della Coletta, Horace W. Goldsmith / NEH Distinguished Teaching Professor and Associate Professor, Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

Many instructors recognize the value of collaborative teaching: by sharing different yet complementary expertise and by building upon one another's intellectual strengths, teachers engage in dialogues that creatively and critically intersect to produce new and deeper knowledge. However, many of us also understand that planning and carrying out a team-taught course can bechallenging.

• What are the most successful ways to combine multiple interests and methods in order to achieve new understandings that could not be derived from working alone?
  
• How can faculty members rely upon each other to enhance and diversify their teaching?
  
• How can they efficiently plan, coordinate, and assess their collaborative instruction?
  
• What can each team member contribute to the communal teaching process?
  
• How can heterogeneous approaches to a subject be unified in order to produce new ways of thinking about this subject?

Panelists will share ideas and generate answers to these questions by presenting different teamteaching models based on their own experiences with collaborative teaching. Participants are invited to share ideas and raise other questions.

James Childress and Michael Smith team-teach "Twenty-First Century Choices: War, Justice, Human Rights," a cross-listed course in History, Politics, and Religious Studies, funded by the College of Arts & Sciences "Topical Common Courses" program.
Michael Smith and Irene Oh team-teach a Political and Social Thought third-year seminar.
Adelaide Wilcox King and Barbara Wixom team-teach "Strategy and Systems," a McIntire School of Commerce core course.

Sponsored by the Teaching Resource Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professorships.