Teaching Partnership: A shared journey toward long-term faculty growth

Abstract

The authors of this article participated in a semester-long teaching partnership programme that offered the opportunity to examine our own teaching and to dialogue with other teachers, both within the dance discipline and across campus, about teaching. This reflective account of our partnership experience in the dance discipline identifies four partnership conditions that encouraged greater collegial interaction and support. The conditions include: shared respect with no hierarchy among participants; a willingness and desire to move beyond 'safe' feedback; commitment for a significant duration of time, with frequent interaction and a high degree of personal investment from each partner; and participation, non-judgemental viewing and questioning that facilitates self-reflection and self-advisement. These conditions helped create an atmosphere that allowed us not only to improve our teaching and expand our personal knowledge about the discipline, but also to change the way we perceived and interacted with one another. This in turn gave us the opportunity to examine the process of teaching with more depth than is often present in a more conventional peer interaction. A climate of trust was established, pointing our conversations beyond teaching methodologies to frank and open discussions about our teaching identities, philosophies, challenges and triumphs. What resulted was a rare collegial exchange that provided profound enrichment within our professional lives.