by Elizabeth Roach— Dean of Teaching and Learning, St. Andrew’s School, Middletown, Delaware—
Why is co-teaching so important and powerful for teachers and why is interdisciplinary work so essential for students in the 21st Century?
First, why is co-teaching so important and powerful for teachers?
From the very beginning, everything Emily and I have done has been done through conversations with one another. Without question, these conversations have been the most interesting, exciting and inspirational collaborations of our teaching careers—these moments are real and enduring and rich and deep and always invigorating. We design the syllabi together; we prepare for class together; we talk about and assess each class every day; we read each written assignment together; we write our feedback together; we write our comments for each student together; we brainstorm new ideas together.
As a faculty, we have always been urged to visit other teachers’ classes—both at St. Andrew’s and at other schools—because we know that seeing someone else teach and talking about teaching are important ways to develop as a teacher yourself.
But they don’t compare to the co-teaching experience. When you co-teach, you are, by definition, engaged in professional development every single day. All of our professional development goals are enacted when we co-teach a class, particularly when your co-teacher is from a different department. Yes, it is time intensive and expensive in terms of faculty sustainability. But, my argument is that all our goals for professional development are actually met in co-teaching. Here are some of the reasons why:
- it forces teachers out of complacency and the isolation and protected domain of their classrooms
- it facilitates innovation; teachers talk through new ideas together and are more willing to take risks; teachers start to think in new ways about their own subject and pedagogy
- it invigorates the overall curriculum, pushing us to ask new questions about our disciplines, connections between disciplines, our teaching, our assessments
- conversations about curriculum and teaching are more authentic because co-teachers share the same classroom every day, participate in the same class discussions and know the students well and in the same way within the context of their shared class
- it eliminates “time” as the reason why we don’t do more professional development; instead, professional development is already built into the curriculum and the schedule
- it’s ongoing, deeply resonant and requires follow through; it’s not a once-or-twice-a-semester, fly-by interaction; teachers practice and enact professional development every day, throughout the year
- it moves us to think about pedagogy through a broader lens, not just in terms of our own discipline.
- it also requires ongoing, shared observation and experience that is deeply grounded in rigorous scholarship, separate from pedagogy; we know and share the intellectual project for each class we teach
- it invigorates and feeds us as scholars every day as well as every year as we design and redesign our course and curriculum
So, what’s in it for the students?
We know that much of the research and discussion today centers around the need to prepare young people to enter the 21st century global world with skills of critical thinking, written and oral argumentation and collaboration. An interdisciplinary course both teaches and enacts all of these skills.
As teachers, we try to model for our students both collaboration and scholarly disagreement in the way that we teach and think about the issues and questions we are studying.
In our Humanities course, we don’t teach our material as “English” or “history.” Instead, our work is fully integrated every day for the 80 minutes that we teach. This means that our students are learning and practicing how to think about the boundaries between the two disciplines all the time: sometimes these boundaries are clear, and the students must delineate between the questions they ask about and of literature and the questions they ask about and of primary and secondary sources, and sometimes they need to reconsider and push the boundaries of each discipline to see how the disciplines merge and blur.
This sophisticated approach requires cognitive brain power. Students are not just lining up what historians and novelists do; rather, students are engaged in an ongoing conversation about the relationship between history and literature. As freshmen and sophomores, they start to see what that conversation looks like in their separate English and history classes, but by their senior year, they actually fully participate in those conversations. They move beyond observation—such as, oh cool, these sources are talking to one another—to articulating an argument about the conversation among the different sources.
The best and most interesting and exciting work that scholars are doing in their fields today engage the work and practices of other scholars. We want our students in Humanities to both see what the best scholarly conversations look like now and enact those conversations themselves in class discussions and through written argumentation in their papers.
We know that we learn the most when we’re thinking about what we don’t know or when we take what we know and use it in a new way. An interdisciplinary course does both of these things for both the teachers and the students. We, as teachers, must constantly push ourselves to think about a discipline outside of our realm of “expertise,” and we are constantly thinking about our own field in a new way. Likewise, students are engaged in the same learning process when they take what they’ve learned in English and history courses, integrate that thinking and then rethink and refine what they have learned before.
This model of teaching and learning could be developed across the curriculum, not just in English and history. In addition to the benefits I’ve already touched on, collaborative and interdisciplinary work enables our students to get more comprehensive feedback from two teachers who discuss the student’s work, share observations, confirm each other’s assessment, and push each other to be specific and thorough and timely in their feedback. Furthermore, double periods and team teaching allow teachers to be more patient in class discussions and more comfortable with silence, allowing the students to drive and take more ownership of the discussions as they unfold and build more slowly and thoughtfully and authentically.
But perhaps, most important, interdisciplinary work, we think, is tied intrinsically to issues of citizenship. As our students become adults, it will be essential for them to enter the world able to think and argue in responsible and far-reaching ways. They will need the tools to explore the most complex questions of social and political import, questions that are not narrowly defined by disciplines. When they make important decisions in their lives, they will need to consider the interplay between competing and complicated claims; they will need to be responsible and thoughtful and layered in their approach to these issues and questions.
Finally, the feedback we are getting from our former students in college is powerful testimony of how interdisciplinary courses and thinking are central to their learning experience in college and in their approach to professional careers. We have received insightful reflections from alumni who make the case for interdisciplinary courses and co-teaching from their position as college students and young adults entering the complex world of the 21st century.
