Team Teaching Response

Whenever I have heard the term "team teaching" or "co-teaching", I have always thought of what I have seen in my past experiences. These past experiences were primarily that of a student teacher working alongside of a head teacher; this was named "One Teach, One Support" in the text. The candidate teacher or student teacher would walk around and offer help to students and every once in a while they would teach a lesson. While we as students would accept help from the student or teacher candidate, we always looked upon the main teacher with more respect. After reading the two readings, I now know of the several options available to teachers wanting to team teach and how to properly incorporate team teaching that bests suits the class. One approach that I found interesting was that of "Station Teaching". I think this would be a neat way of teaching a subject that has many components. I envisioned this taking the form of teachers in several different classrooms teaching about one subject and every 15-20 minutes, the students would rotate classrooms to learn about a different aspect of that subject. However, with any team teaching model, there are potential obstacles that teachers should be aware of. One obstacle that seemed to show up several times is that co-teaching requires lots of pre-planning and communication. If two teachers are expecting to be teaching together, they must know where the lesson is going to go and who is responsible for what portions of the lesson. However, what I do find valuable about team teaching is that when there are conflicting views between teachers, it can become an opportunity for the teachers to respectfully debate the topic with the students observing. This shows the students that it is okay to have differing opinions from other people and how to properly discuss the issue through debate. I am not sure whether or not I will use team teaching in my practice. While it has its clear advantages, I think the difficulty would be finding a teacher who is willing to put forth more effort and time into planning lessons together. I also think it is pretty dependent upon whether or not the school can afford to have 2 paid teachers for one classroom. If I do use this model, I believe it will be more realistic to do it once a month.