Co-Teaching Teams

Characteristics

See: How to be a great co-teaching team

'Wiki: how to be a great co-teaching team

Summary:

1. Familiarize yourself with the texts, required and recommended, for your session. Discuss among yourselves well in advance of your co-teaching session -- in person and online -- the most significant issues raised by the text. You will be the ambassadors, inquisitors, enthusiasts, challengers of these issues for the rest of the class. Every other student will have read the texts and reflected on them. Your job is to stir up, focus, crystallize, and provoke the class as a whole to engage the most important ideas, issues, ways of thinking, associated with this theme. We will each have prepared by doing our individual learning. The co-teaching team, together with the instructor, tries to create the conditions where our individual learnings emerge in a conversation that adds up to more learning achieved together than we could have accomplished alone.

2. Establish communication with other team members as soon as you can. A face to face meeting is recommended as early in the process as possible.

3. Discuss and organize strategies and questions for stimulating engaged class discussions of the issues raised by the texts; adopt from others and invent your own activities to increase engagement with key issues by the entire class.

4. Work with instructor in the forum topic thread for your teaching team.

5. Meet with the instructor a week before your class session.

6. Create a skeleton organizing structure for the session lexicon page before class meets, adjust and add to it during class meeting.

7. During class meeting: Co-teaching team members add words and phrases to the lexicon wiki page for this session, to be defined later; take notes for the Scoop and the mindmap; findrelevant websites and projects them on the screen and/or inserts URLs into the backchannel; facilitate discussion. Shift roles during your session. Fluidity in the moment and familiarity with the subject matter are more important than keeping to a script or trying to do any of the roles exhaustively. Try to have fun. So much of our activities are about cooperation. Here is an opportunity for competition -- can your team outdo the others in getting others engaged in discussion, can your team have the most fun while doing the wiki notes, mindmapping, Google-jockeying? During class discussion, identify 2-4 topics for further discussion in the forum and post your discussion suggestions in the appropriate forum topic within 24 hours of class.

8. After class: co-teaching team is responsible for inducing other students to flesh out wiki lexicon before next class meeting. Remind us of what we had learned last week by presenting a mindmap of last week's texts and discussion during the first 15 minutes of the next class meeting. Co-teaching team is expected to facilitate, provoke, add to, summarize this week's forum discussions and to suggest topic threads relevant to the week's theme.

9. Beginning of next class - 15 minutes for mindmap of last week" (http://socialmediaclassroom.com/host/vircom/wiki/how-be-a-great-co-teaching-team)