Team Teaching

     I have to admit that I love the idea of team teaching. When I first hear of the concept, I thought it was a way for teachers to really lighten their individual work load. I just assumed that it was like two teachers split the work down the middle or one teacher took advanced students and one teacher took struggling students. I enjoyed finding out that team teaching is about way more than minimizing teacher work, and that team teaching means more work for teachers. It is about developing more effective teaching styles and allowing teachers to experiment with new methods to find what works best for students. Team teaching is about collaborating with colleagues and making sure all teachers within a content area are on the same page.
     My favorite thing about reading the articles on team teaching is realizing that my master teacher is using those methods with me. He rarely calls me his student teacher. Tim lets his students know that I am a teacher and a huge resource for his students to use whenever I am in the classroom. I like that I am extra support for his students while he is teaching. This has cut down on questions during lessons and allows the flow of the lesson to be uninterrupted. I also really like when we do alternative teaching. Differentiating instruction is one of the more difficult aspects of teaching. It's hard to create one lesson to challenge every student in the class. Invariably, the advanced students are done early with the assignments and having them always silent read seems ineffective. I like that Tim and I alternate between diving deeper into the lesson with the advanced students and making sure the rest of the students fully understand the objectives of the initial lesson. Team teaching makes me wish that every classroom could have two teachers.