Abstract
There is an abundance of studies that suggest that the use of co-teaching strategies in higher education courses can enhance instructors’ professional development, mainly by providing a space for transfer of methodologies and tools, as well as critical reflection on one’s teaching practice. However, little has been said about the actual processes through which co-teachers learn from each other. This study analyzes the opportunities of professional growth afforded to seven professors by eight co-taught courses, over two academic years, in the fields of Education and Translation and Interpreting. Specifically, it examines how professional relationships between co-teachers fuel teacher learning, the specific learning processes generated, and the areas of professional development impacted. To do so, 11 reflective teacher diaries were coded and analyzed, and further evidence was collected through focus groups interviews with students of some of the co-taught courses. Results suggest that comparison with the co-teacher is the main force behind participants’ learning on co-teaching; furthermore, such comparisons enable three main learning processes: reflection, negotiation and transfer, bearing mainly on teaching methods and materials and use of technology. Finally, there is evidence that occasional or ongoing team teaching (two instructors simultaneously in class) can enhance the effectiveness of co-teacher comparisons.
Highlights
At a time when higher education programs are increasingly competence-based, instructors are expected go beyond a transmission model of education and promote student-centered methodologies and instructional practices
To gain initial insight into the extent to which the data supports the hypothesis that co-teaching is beneficial for faculty professional development, word frequency and text coverage analyses were run in NVivo
This section discusses the results of this study, with reference to previous findings on co-teaching, as well as the larger framework for professional development provided by O’Meara and LaPointe Terosky (2010), and the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model of required teacher knowledge (Mishra and Koehler, 2006)
Summary
At a time when higher education programs are increasingly competence-based, instructors are expected go beyond a transmission model of education and promote student-centered methodologies and instructional practices. Ellis (2019) make reference to the knowledge and the qualification paradox as a key issue in quality assurance for universities, pointing out that institutions dedicated to the furthering of knowledge and acquisition of qualifications in their students at the same time pay little attention to knowledge and qualifications about teaching and learning in the staff that they hire This might be the result of the prevalent focus of institutions on research production rather than quality of teaching, reflected in the criteria applied by national quality assurance agencies such as the ANECA in Spain (Strotmann and Custodio Espinar, 2021), and international. More experiential formats like peer observation (Martínez Vargas et al, 2018; O’Leary and Savage, 2020; Ridge and Lavigne, 2020), lesson study (Lewis and Hurd, 2011; Murata and Lee, 2021) or co-teaching can provide an effective alternative or addition to current professional development programs in higher education
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