Written by Ellie Louson / Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash
Co-Teaching
Studios courses are interdisciplinary. Students and faculty benefit from interacting and collaborating with other disciplines. Working across disciplines is an opportunity for both discourse around your discipline’s approaches and methods as well as tensions between areas of expertise. It is helpful for students to be exposed to those conversations: it helps them not be siloed within their major and it reflects how they might serve on diverse teams in their career.
Interdisciplinary teaching comes with bureaucratic and logistical challenges for instructors. It’s important to engage your department leadership (chair, dean, ADTL) around the creation of a new course. Financial support and released time for new courses by units under resource constraints can be a challenge.
🔧Studies by the Spartan Studios project and other universities offering similar courses describe beneficial outcomes for students and faculty that might help motivate administrators. (see our Playkit Appendix, section 9).
- Early Spartan Studios prototypes were taught as overload and supported by a stipend.
- For sustainable courses, investigate whether a special topics course can be allocated as a co-taught experiential course with faculty and students from other majors.
- Another option is the “bring your own students” model where each instructor teaches a course from their own teaching appointment (with its own course code) and brings students from that discipline into the collaborative course (see “Attracting Students to the Course” in our Planning article).
▶️Select your instructor team. Think about the faculty members or other disciplines that would be a good fit for the course you have in mind. Courses with 2-4 faculty work best. What skills or learning goals could other disciplines bring to the table? Think broadly: real-life challenges and wicked problems are multifaceted and can benefit from solutions incorporating communication, marketing, packaging, the natural, social, or applied sciences, humanities, etc.
▶️Set, share, and examine expectations. As you plan your course, discuss your expectations around workflow and shared responsibilities both around and within your teaching time. Be explicit and transparent with each other about your estimated availability for the course, as well as your expectations for classroom management, responsibilities for particular topics, and managing external partnerships. This can be codified in a co-teaching agreement or remain informal; either way, be sure to avoid making assumptions about teammates’ expectations that can lead to misunderstandings later in the course.
▶️Meet regularly with your teaching partners both before and during the course. It’s especially important to touch base throughout the course’s run to make adjustments based on how things are going. We call this meeting a scrum (originating in rugby, and also by teams in fields like software development). You can discuss upcoming needs, reflect on the past week’s events, and assign tasks. A short regular meeting helps you surface issues and make concrete plans better than emails back and forth.
▶️Consider the identities of your co-instructors and students. Think about the different axes of diversity in the classroom: diversity across student backgrounds and cultural experiences and diversity across disciplines
🔧Hub scrum template with prompt questions for weekly reflection and planning.
🔧MSU’s Center for Interdisciplinarity (C4I) is a resource for interdisciplinary research and teaching.