Team teaching is also referred to as co-teaching and collaborative teaching. The popularity of the method is spectacularly obvious and can be proved by simple evidence – it suffices to open any of Internet browsers and search for “team teaching” since you get almost 6 million web sites!

Is team teaching a recent approach or has is some history?

Team teaching actually has a long career ranging from the Socratic dialogue to public medieval disputations. There is information that team teaching (at least some elements of it) has been practised before the term itself appeared in the second half of 1950s. Interest in team teaching of universities and other higher educational institutions dates back to the 1940s. “In the early to late 1960s, team teaching was seen as a way to gain control of large group of students and as a way of directing a teacher's teaching method and strategy. Team teaching in elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools is commonly used to assist with the inclusion or mainstreaming of students with disabilities into general education classes. Team teaching is also promoted as a way to add diversity in the classroom, which ultimately helps the academic achievement of students.” (http://www.questia.com/popularSearches/team_teaching.jsp)

More detailed research on team teaching in universities and colleges was done some 24 years ago (Schustereit, 1980). There were two types of research:
(a) a study comparing classes taught by a team of instructors
(b) a study comparing three different approaches to teaching.

In research of the first type, evidence favouring team teaching was found. However, in several comparisons within these case studies, no significant differences were traced – one study even reported that classes taught by one instructor were more effective for some categories of students than for others.

For the second type of studies, evidence in favour of team teaching can be traced in one of three investigations. Schustereit’s belief is that “while the reviewed studies gave a plurality of support to team-teaching, a generalization that team-teaching is a superior instructional technique would not be justified based on the various studies” (Schustereit, 1980: 88). He also assumed that choice in favour of team teaching might not have to depend on enhanced abilities to stimulate student achievement – as long as the methods did not differ in effectiveness, choice might depend on the involved cost savings.

Johnson and Lobb (1961) defined team teaching as “a group of two or more persons assigned to the same students at the same time for instructional purposes in a particular subject or combination of subjects” (Johnson and Lobb, 1961: 59).