Team Teaching!

Team teaching is pretty fantastic. I think the Leavitt article did a swell job of covering the important aspects of team teaching. I thought that I had never experienced team teaching when we first talked about it in class but then I realized that I had had the opportunity in high school to do such; I took a class called "American Experience" which smooshed together our junior year history, English, and religion courses. It was really cool because it was a two hour block of three teachers getting up and teaching together - literally team teaching (I don't know why I thought I had never come across it before). It was nice to see the three different perspectives on whatever we were learning. Religion and history obviously intersect pretty well, regardless of beliefs - both teachers were able to discuss, civilly, their beliefs about what happened at different times in religious history. The class was mainly based on American history, but it was interesting to hear about the different ways religion shaped what was going on at the time.

When I first started reading the Leavitt article, I was apprehensive about team teaching: these are my children and I want to teach them how I'd like. But team teaching teaches them even more than I could on my own. The article is right: teaching students how to have civil debates, I feel, is just as important as teaching them the subject matter in the first place. I think having a teacher pose questions to get students' minds going is also great. I've been a student for far too many years and I've had plenty of classes where I'm not sure what questions to ask; they might be there in the forefront of my mind, I'm just not sure how to phrase them properly. Having somebody else there to help ask questions is quite helpful. After finishing the article, I'm convinced that I'd like to team teach sometime in the future, maybe after I get my feet wet in actually knowing how to teach...