New Approaches to Team-Teaching

Panelists: John Dobbins, Art; Michael Kubovy, Psychology; John F. Miller, Classics; Judith Shatin, Music
Panel discussion organizer: Cristina Della Coletta, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

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

• What are the most effective ways to design, coordinate, implement, and assess a team-taught course?
  
• What can each team member contribute to the communal teaching process?
  
• How can different approaches to a subject be unified in order to produce new ways of thinking about this subject?
  
• What does team-teaching accomplish that cannot be achieved otherwise?

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

John Dobbins and John F. Miller team-teach "The Age of Augustus," an undergraduate interdisciplinary course that examines the literature, art, culture, and architecture of the age of Augustus period (44 B.C. - 14 A.D.).

Michael Kubovy and Judith Shatin team-teach "The Mind of the Artist," a Common Course for the College in the Teachers for a New Era Program.

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