CO-TEACHING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: TEACHING COLLABORATION “BY EXAMPLE” – LESSONS LEARNT FROM SELECTED CASE STUDIES

Globalization has penetrated Higher Education leading to cross-cultural and international cooperation both among professors and between student groups. Furthermore, the emerging social recognition of an actual need for interdisciplinary / transdisciplinary problem solving has lead to increasing collaboration across disciplines in Higher Education. Collaborative teaching of two or more instructors with different disciplinary backgrounds enhances the possibility of interdisciplinary thinking and research. There is an increasing literature on collaborative learning, focusing on teaching methods that enhance collaboration among students. On the other hand, collaborative teaching or co-teaching or team teaching has also been explored, although not to the same extent as collaborative learning. However, collaborative teaching in Higher Education needs to be further explored.

Collaborative teaching is a new challenge in Higher Education, which is characterized by distinct disciplines and individual researchers and instructors. Team teaching teaches the way to work together for the same goal and towards collaborative societies in an increasingly individualistic world and academia. In this presentation, we will reflect on some of our experiences in collaborative or team teaching at the Higher Education level in Greece, and especially in Science and Technology courses, which include collaboration between instructors in the same department and for the same course, collaboration between courses from different universities / colleges, collaboration in multi-section courses. We will use personal reflections of the instructors (authors) in STEM fields – on the basis of a qualitative questionnaire, as well as students’ evaluations as sources of information, with the aim to explore challenges and benefits of co-teaching efforts, in the design, instruction, assessment but also at the administrative level . We will also discuss different types of collaborative teaching and their distinct strengths and weaknesses, as well as the lessons learnt in terms of effective approaches.