Team Teaching Tips for Foreign Language Teachers

erely provide lesson plans that demonstrate which teacher will speak on what topic or lead a particular activity (Wiltshier and Honma 1999). Others discuss the philosophy and history of team teaching exploring the cultural background and the challenges faced by team teachers from different countries (Shimaoka and Yashiro; Ministry of Education, Science, Sports and Culture 1994). Unfortunately, few articles offer practical step-by-step guidelines to establishing a successful team, perhaps because there is a fear that following a prescriptive formula might in fact restrict the team and cause them to fall into strict use of fossilized patterns (Smith 87).

In the Classroom: Team Teaching Tips

The Golden Rule: Never take anything for granted; explicitly discuss everything.

"When expectations are unclear or vastly different, this essential rapport quickly breaks down" (Horwich par.15).

Clear communication on the part of both members of the teaching team is essential to the success of the relationship and the realisation of your teaching objectives. Communication is perhaps rendered more difficult for teams made up of teachers from different cultural backgrounds which value radically different communication styles (Kobayashi 168). Nonetheless, it is essential that you do your utmost to keep this in mind and endeavour to respect and understand one another.

Talking things through at every stage will help you define your individual roles within the team. This is essential in developing a better understanding of one another's teaching philosophy along with the personal and cultural factors that have shaped it and affect its practical applications. Honest discussion also clears up any potential misunderstandings before they have the chance to hamper the flow of a lesson and ensure that you are taking equal responsibility for staying on course towards your established objectives. These meetings will help ensure that you are both feeling comfortable and productive within the team.

Sometimes, despite your best intentions, you have doubts about the strength of your team. In these situations, frank discussion with departmental management about pair reassignment, or if this is not possible, problem solving with your assigned teaching partner and above all maintaining a professional demeanour, may help diffuse potentially unsatisfactory pairings.

Personal conflicts, whether they are gender-based, cultural or personal have no place within the classroom. Despite your differences of opinion, each teacher should remain respectful and professional towards the other in the classroom. Students will be quick to pick up on any tensions and may try to exploit them. In the classroom, the most important people are the students: teachers should set aside personal difficulties and make teaching their number one priority.

Step-by-step Tips: Planning

You first need to work together to analyse your individual strengths and abilities and determine how these can be used within your team context. Remember to consider what skills each of you bring to the classroom. For example, is one better at drawing or singing? Does one of you have better handwriting on the blackboard? Does one of you have more experience with a particular school setting or group of students? Have one of you worked with this particular textbook before?

Work out how you complement one another and how you can facilitate improving your partner's skills in various areas (voice projection and articulation/diction, pacing, giving instructions, teacher-student interaction etc.). Ideally, both partners will take an active part, to a greater or lesser extent, in all aspects of the teaching and not fall into a rigid pattern of acting/teaching only within 'partner 1's domain' and 'partner 2's domain'.

Once you have explored your skill-set as a team, you can begin to set goals for the term and the year. You'll need to consider what goals both of you want the students to achieve so that you can plan lessons according to a timetable.  If your school sets department-wide tests, you'll have to discuss goals with the teachers working within the same grade.  In situations like these, homogeneity of teaching approach and materials used is critical to ensuring fairness to all students.

Making your timetable (of tests, assignments, presentations, homework), setting objectives together and making sure the other is well aware of the long range agenda, is a wonderful way of determining what, when and how you can each contribute to the team. It also helps ensure that your teaching is focused and dynamic. It is difficult to successfully guide students through a lesson, a chapter, or a term, unless you both know what you will be exploring along the way and where you want to end up.

Eye Contact and Signalling

Maintaining eye contact with each other is critical in the team teaching classroom. You'll often need to signal each other for transitions to new activities, communicate when to bring activities to a close or modify an activity. Try to keep an eye on each other at least every few minutes. There are often times when Teacher A can 'signal' Teacher B using eye contact about a situation happening near Teacher A. This is particularly useful for classroom management, but is also helpful in pacing and for assisting students who may have questions or need help. In language classrooms where some translation is performed, maintaining eye contact with your partner is a good way to ensure smooth transitions between L1 and L2 instructions.

Circulating in the Classroom

One of the benefits of having two teachers in the classroom is that you can increase the teacher's physical proximity to a greater number of students and thus, hopefully, keep a greater number of students more actively engaged in the lesson more of the time. It may be necessary for you both to stand at the front to address the class for various activities, but this limit

《Team Teaching Tips for Foreign Language Teachers》