Positive Dimensions of Collaborative Teaching among Student Teachers25

learning achievement (Anderson & Speck, 1998; Bailey et al., 2001; Richards & Farrell, 2005) and teachers’ professional development (Anderson & Speck, 1998; Buckley, 2000;

Richards & Farrell, 2005). For students, team teaching provides a stimulating and exciting learning environment where students are exposed to alternative teacher perspectives, different teaching styles, and teacher personalities simultaneously (Buckley, 2000, p.13).

Team teaching makes it possible for students to work within small groups where two or

more teachers can engage in group discussion and have more interaction with their students (Buckley, 2000, p.13), and it enhances the function of evaluation/feedback as

“with two knowledgeable readers [of students’ papers], feedback can be doubled and alternative points of view can be discussed” (Anderson, 1991, p.10).

Regarding the field of language teachers’ education, collaboration is increasingly identified as a crucial aspect of teacher professional development. In a book providing readers with a sketching of strategies approaches to language teachers’ development, Richards and Farrell identify several advantages of teaching with a partner, which include (a) collegiality; (b) different roles; (c) combined expertise; (d) teacher-development opportunities; and (e) learner benefits (see Richards & Farrell, 2005, for more details).

Reviewing the literature concerning student teachers’ practices of collaborative teaching particularly, the researcher is informed of the three significant components which are combined together to promote the improvement of student teachers’ teaching practices.

Firstly, it is team teaching that provides student teachers with good peer support during the transition from the role of student to the role of teacher. It is worth noting that isolation is a challenge that can inhibit teachers’ learning if peers are not accessible to assist (Little, 1982).

Moreover, a community of peers is important not only in terms of support but also as a crucial source of ideas and constructive comments (Sykes, 1996). Working in a small group, student teachers learn new perspectives and insights from sharing new teaching ideas, proposing innovative approaches, and watching each other teach. In terms of professional development for language teachers, team teaching provides a ready-made classroom observation situation where student teachers share together teaching ideas or useful teaching techniques and can also facilitate the development of a teacher’s creativity (Richards & Farrell, 2005, p.161). Additionally, student teachers, being new and

inexperienced in the field of teaching profession, “can be observed, critiqued, and improved by the other team member in a nonthreatening, supportive context” (Buckley, 2005, p.12). The self-evaluation done by a team of teachers will be more insightful and balanced than the introspection and self-evaluation assessed by an individual teacher (Buckley, 2005). The process of team teaching can therefore be viewed as a meaningful process of professional development, supporting a “mode for developing [teachers] as more critically reflective learners” (Eisen & Tisdell, 2002). Except for these three components--support, ideas, and criticism--combined to promote the improvement of student teachers' practice, another two insights strike the researcher as particularly crucial for prospective teachers.

First of all, Buckley (2005) maintains that “sharing in decision making boosts self-confidence” (p.12). And there is strong evidence showing that collaboration among teachers promotes teacher efficacy and, further, that peer coaching holds particular promise for encouraging teacher development (Ross & Bruce, 2007). As Eick and Ware (2005) state that teacher “candidates’ early concerns as they begin to teach are expressed through their voracious need for feedback on how well they look, sound, and execute their lessons. They are initially less concerned over the substance of lessons, but first prefer to work on

attaining a modicum of technical proficiency and confidence in their role as teacher”

(p.192). It should therefore be noted that peer input might influence teacher satisfaction with the teaching outcomes, if co-teachers give praise explicitly linked to the quality of the teacher’s performance of their instruction (Cameron & Pierce, 1994). Germane to the concept of self-confidence is a teacher’s efficacy beliefs, described as “…the teacher’s belief in his or her capability to organize and execute courses of action required to

successfully accomplish a specific teaching task in a particular context” (Tschannen-Moran, Woolfolk Hoy, & Hoy, 1998, p.233), which has proved to be a powerful indicator to

reliably predict teachers’ teaching outcomes and students’ learning achievement. In light of Bandura (1997) sources of efficacy information, student teachers working collaboratively are exposed to the following sources which would in turn help enhance their efficacy beliefs. They are social persuasion (telling student teachers they are capable of performing a task), vicarious experience (student teachers’ impressions about the teaching task which are formed through watching others teach), and managing physiological and emotional states (strengthening positive feelings arising from teaching and interpreting them as indicative of teaching ability or reducing negative feelings arising from teaching, such as stress).

Another significant payoff of co-teaching early is that it serves as an especially effective means to make student teachers’ tacit knowledge explicit, allowing student teachers to make informed and well-calculated decisions for their daily teaching. While comparing teaching individually and teaching with a colleague, Knezevic and Scholl (1996) note:

The need to synchronize teaching acts requires team teachers to negotiate and discuss their thoughts, values, and actions in ways that solo teachers do not

encounter. The process of having to explain oneself and one’s ideas, so that another teacher can understand them and interact with them, forces team teachers to find words for thoughts which, had one been teaching alone, might have been realized solely through action. (p, 79)

In other words, because of the need to articulate one’s rationale for implementing

particular teaching method or activity, working in a team provides abundant opportunities for student teachers to express their ideas, which in turn helps them to become more aware of their personal beliefs. As they become cognizant of their own beliefs, they can then begin to “question those beliefs in light of what they intellectually know and not simply

what they intuitively feel” (Johnson, 1999, p.39).

2.2.3 Problems on Teacher Collaboration and Teacher Learning 2.2.3.1 Collegiality vs. individualism

The literature review above indicates that team teaching is of benefit to students’

learning and teachers’ professional development. Nonetheless, team teaching is not without problems. As mentioned earlier, one of the many advantages of team teaching is that teachers could benefit from new perspectives regarding teaching and learning from other teammates. However, the potential challenge accompanying with this benefit could also undermine team effectiveness. As Schamber (1999) points out that “Diversity among team members is a major benefit in allowing multiple perspectives in dealing with students and other issues, but it can also be very problematic in daily decisions and practices of

teaming—a double-edged sword” (p.18). Similarly, Buckley (2000) maintains that, among those disadvantages which may put collaborative relationship into danger, the most serious problem is “incompatible teammates” (p.13). As he writes, “Some teachers are rigid personality types. Others are wedded to a single method. Some simply dislike the other teacher. Others are unwilling to share the spotlight or their pet ideas or to lose total control” (Buckley, 2000, p.13). Therefore, it would be naïve to assume that collaborative teaching would always bring positive effect on teachers’ professional development. What’s more, how to maintain the tension between being an effective team member and retaining one’s privacy and autonomy is a crucial issue which many team teachers need to tackle with in the daily practice. In an attempt to analyze the relation between primary school teachers’ autonomy and collegiality and its impact on teachers’ professional development, Clement and Vandenberghe (2000) conclude that it is essential to strike a balance and maintain a healthy tension between autonomy and collegiality in the workplace for

promoting teachers’ professional development because in this way teachers can be afforded more space and freedom to adjust themselves in a collaborative context as they learn from comments of colleagues and respect each other’s professional decisions. According to the researchers, this healthy “circular tension” between teachers’ autonomy and collegiality

“cannot be created by enforcing collegiality through, for instance, the establishment of structural forms of collaboration. Further, teachers should be motivated to collaborate, if this collaboration gives rise to the creation of learning opportunities and an adequately adjusted learning space” (p. 98).

In a discussion of the non-beneficial aspect of teachers’ collaboration, Hargeaves (1994) also suggests that collaboration under contrived and structural conditions does not lead to teachers learning from their colleagues. Following the same vein, Avalos (1998) investigated the implementation of teacher professional groups (TPGs) in Chilli,

concluding that (a) collaboration is better when it is not contrived; (b) teachers need to develop their forms of collaborative operation; and (c) a balance between external

orientation and internal freedom to experiment new things is necessary. In other words, the most powerful collaborative efforts for teachers were those initiated by teachers themselves (Sawyer, 2002), rather than those proposed by outsiders (e.g., ministerial authorities of school). Based on Hargeaves’ comments as well as the findings from Avalos’ study, the notion of contrived collegiality has highlighten a most interesting possibility that

“blind-date” (Eisen, 2002, p.13)—strangers are matched by a third party, such as an administrator—could lead to a committed marriage or an one-night stand.

2.2.3.2 Support from Schools and Administrations

In an investigation of Australian teachers’ experience of collaboration (Johnson, 2003), while the majority of teachers reported that working in a team reduced their workload, around 40% of teachers voiced the negative impact of working collaboratively. That is, in

many cases, the need to meet more frequently with colleagues to discuss and plan collaboratively placed an added work burden on teachers. The results yielded from Johnson’s study is paralleled with Buckley’s (2000) discussion of the disadvantages in teaming in which he puts “Team teaching makes more demands on time and energy. There will be inevitable inconvenience in rethinking the courses. Members must arrange mutually agreeable times for planning and evaluation session. Discussions can be draining, even exhausting, from the constant interaction with peers. Group decisions are slower to make”

(p.13). Therefore, it is important for schools or administrators to take team teachers’ work intensification into consideration as team teaching demands those behind-the-scene affairs in the planning and evaluation sessions. For example, allowing release time for meetings and reducing teaching workload could critically determine teachers’ motivation to make collaborative efforts.

2.2.3.3 The Role of Teacher Education in Promoting Team Teaching

Discussing team teaching as one type of the pre-service teachers’ training activities, Wallace (1991) describes team teaching as a type of “shared professional action” (p.91) involving teachers’ collaboration to make it work. Compared to other teacher training activities such as planning and analyzing lesson plans, team teaching involves a high risk and cost in two aspects (p.89). Firstly, having an untrained teacher standing up before the class and teaching students is obviously wasteful and harmful to the clients. In other words, the students might be taught by incapable teachers. The second risk or cost is to the

trainees, the pre-service teachers per se, because “the trauma of being thrown unprepared into a full classroom situation is not calculated to ensure any kind of rational professional development, and has probably on many occasions led to the choice of another career”

(p.89).

Following the same vein, Welch (1998) points out that one pervasive problem in

implementing collaborative teaching in educational settings is lack of training (p.32). In an attempt to bridge the gap and prepare student teachers to engage in collaborative practices in the workplace, he asserts that teacher education programs must offer an exploration of various theoretical constructs, values, and definitions of collaboration. He further writes

“Teacher education programs must consider developing courses and field experiences that introduce principles of collaboration” (p.32) so that teacher candidates could apply newly assimilated knowledge or skills in the context of collaboration. These identified knowledge and skills include problem solving and decision making, communication skills, conflict management skills, awareness of micro- and macro-cultures, etc” (p.32). In acquiring these skills, student teachers become capable to participate fully in a collaborative partnership and can further grasp opportunities to improve their teaching practice.