The Potential of Team Teaching
- Profile of Team Teaching in Finland
There are considerable opportunities to integrate CLIL teaching into Finland’s higher education system. The opportunities and challenges of a Team Teaching approach are here discussed in the context of business management, and health care/social work.
Traditionally, different subjects, whether they are content subjects or all-round education subjects, have been distinct entities with their own slots in the curriculum and study schedules. It is not an easy task to bring together teachers from different subject fields in curriculum planning as there are many attitudinal and practical problems to be overcome. Teachers are proud of their own subjects and find it important that their own subject has a salient and visible position in the curriculum. To avoid these problems, teachers should cooperate from the very beginning and define the objectives for both subject content and language. Team teaching methods should also be included in teacher training.
In the field of business management, project-based cooperation between institutions of higher education and enterprises is increasing rapidly. Team teaching would offer a flexible way of meeting the needs of participating companies. The language needs that companies have are closely connected with their professional field and by means of CLIL a real context would be created for language learning.
Most universities and several University of Applied Sciences in Finland have specific language centres in which language teaching has been concentrated. It would be worth discussing whether this development of establishing expertise organizations for languages is useful in vocational and professional education. The close contact between content subjects and languages should be maintained and team teaching is a very efficient way of strengthening this contact. Language centres might also have the necessary resources to provide training in the implementation and methodology of CLIL.
There are students with a very good knowledge of the target language (primarily English), which is based on good results in secondary school education, and students who enter higher education from vocational education, where the use of foreign languages is weaker. The idea of CLIL may be an important motivating factor for these students. Team teaching would be a way of focusing on the needs of each individual student; some students may need more attention with regard to language, other with regard to content subject. Of course, separate brush-up or revision courses will also be needed to reflect different needs.
In the field of health care/social work, team teaching is very important as a tool of improvement of language skills. The need to improve language skills of those who already are working in the field of health care and social work is also important, so that they can both work with, and take care of people from other cultures. Team teaching could well be used as a didactic method for updating education. It could also be used as a didactic method for undergraduate education, particularly to improve communication skills. However, some type of updating of language skills might be required before getting involved in team teaching to ensure mutual understanding between teachers and students.
Overall, internationalisation, European expansion, increasing immigration and an ageing population (associated to a reduced number of nursing graduates) are trends that cannot be ignored. It is therefore important to consider how education can be more closely associated to professional needs through CLIL based approaches.
