Team Teaching: Benefits, Challenges and Approaches; TPA Lesson Plans

I found the depth of the TPA lesson plans to be rather extensive, this obviously facilitates deep consideration of exactly what is being taught in any given lesson as well as how said lessons can be effectively measured and assessed. My biggest concern, however, is that it seems that there is a lot of room for lessons to be overthought and over-prepared. While I understand needing to teach with a specific purpose in mind, and to have an idea of how you are going to get there, planning every single minute of that lesson seems ill-advised and makes readjusting that plan as needed more difficult. This also seems to leave very little room for students to reflect on what they have learned in the time they have spent in the classroom. On the other hand, without a format such as the TPA lesson plan, one would run the risk of having no direction whatsoever for their lessons, leading into tangents, digression and probably over-teaching.

                In the two articles on team teaching I found particularly interesting the aspect of having one of the two team teachers act as an “exemplary student” by centralizing themselves in the classroom and acting in a specific way. The benefits of this would be extraordinary! Just taking the few examples of roles suggested in the article (which was certainly not an exhaustive list of all the ways one could take advantage of such a set up), you could have the non-active teacher step into whichever role best fit the subject matter or flow of the classroom. Imagine the benefit of having a “devil’s advocate” in the room to act as a catalyst for discussion, and even to act as someone within the discussion group who can bring them back on track!

                The other article presented many aspects of team teaching that I remember seeing as a student in grade school myself. I do not feel that all of those presented would be as effective as others (the one about having the other teacher take a small group aside is one that I have never been a big fan of, for the reasons listed in the article), but many of them could be used in various different ways to insure differentiation of teaching style, classroom management, and efficiency of learning as well as many other aspects.