Abstract
In the higher education (HE) landscape worldwide, team teaching has become increasingly common. The growing prevalence of team teaching in HE has mainly been driven by the necessity to cope with larger classes, workload requirements, and the complexity of delivering multi-disciplinary courses or to provide a more stable quality of course portfolio over time. Whilst there are advantages of this teaching model, team teaching is not without challenges to team teachers. Managing individual differences within teams has been identified in the extant literature as one of the most significant challenges in team teaching. This study maps the contours of practice that surround individual differences in team teaching, focusing on the contradictions arising from individual differences and their resolutions. Adopting a sociocultural activity theory perspective, this research explores contradictions arising from team members’ individual differences and how team teachers resolve these contradictions. Data include in-depth interviews with 16 academics who have team taught successfully in multiple disciplines at two Australian universities. Three main types of contradictions arising from individual differences were found. Contradictions may relate to academics’ content knowledge expertise, academic autonomy, role ambiguity, and power hierarchy within a teaching team. Findings reveal these team teachers adopted multiple strategies to resolve contradictions and work together on their shared object of student learning. Findings challenge the common view in the existing literature that values homogeneity in teaching teams and sees contradictions as detrimental to team teaching. The study has multiple implications for research on team teaching and for academics and institutions embarking on this teaching model.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
Not applicable.
Code availability
Not applicable.
References
Anderson, R. S., & Speck, B. W. (1998). “Oh what a difference a team makes”: Why team teaching makes a difference. Teaching and Teacher Education, 14(7), 671–686.
Bacharach, N. L., Heck, T. W., & Dahlberg, K. R. (2008). What makes co-teaching work? Identifying the essential elements. College Teaching Methods & Styles Journal (CTMS), 4(3), 43–48.
Baeten, M., & Simons, M. (2014). Student teachers’ team-teaching: Models, effects, and conditions for implementation. Teaching and Teacher Education, 41, 92–110.
Bakken, L., Clark, F. L., Thompson, J., & Thompson, J. (1998). Collaborative teaching: Many joys, some surprises, and a few worms. College Teaching, 46(4), 154–157.
Bennett, R., & Kane, S. (2014). Factors affecting university teaching team effectiveness in detached working environments. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 38(3), 400–426.
Bye, L. A., Jenner, P., & Graham, W. (2021). The dynamics of social capital in first-year teaching teams: A comparative case study analysis. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 45(3), 297–311.
Dang, T. K. A. (2013). Identity in activity: Examining teacher professional identity formation in the paired-placement of student teachers. Teaching and Teacher Education, 30(2013), 47–59.
Dang, T. K. A. (2014). Paired-placements in Teacher Education: A Socio-cultural Activity Theory Perspective. Unpublished PhD thesis, The University of Melbourne, Australia.
Dang, T. K. A. (2017). Exploring contextual factors shaping teacher collaborative learning in a paired-placement. Teaching and Teacher Education, 67(2017), 316–329.
Nguyen, M. H., & Dang, T. K. A. (2021). Exploring teachers’ relational agency in content–language teacher collaboration in secondary science education in Australia. The Australian Educational Researcher, 48, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13384-020-00413-9
Daniels, H. (2001). Vygotsky and pedagogy. Routledge Falmer.
Dörnyei, Z. (2007). Research methods in applied linguistics: Quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methodologies. Oxford University Press.
Edwards, A. (2017). Revealing rational work. In A. Edwards (Ed.), Working relationally in and across practices: A cultural-historical approach to collaboration (pp. 1–22). Cambridge University Press.
Engeström, Y. (2001). Expansive learning at work: Toward an activity theoretical reconceptualisation. Journal of Education and Work, 14(1), 133–156.
Engeström, Y. (2008). From teams to knots: Activity-theoretical studies of collaboration and learning at work. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press
Game, A., & Metcalfe, A. (2009). Dialogue and team-teaching. Higher Education Research & Development, 28(1), 45–57.
Gast, I., Schildkamp, K., & van der Veen, J. T. (2017). Team-based professional development interventions in higher education: A systematic review. Review of Educational Research, 87(4), 736–767.
Hsieh, H.-F., & Shannon, S. (2005). Three approaches to qualitative content analysis. Qualitative Health Research, 15(9), 1277–1288.
Ilyenkov, E. V. (1977). Dialectical logic: Essays in its history and theory. Progress.
Krammer, M., Rossmann, P., Gastager, A., & Gasteiger-Klicpera, B. (2018). Ways of composing teaching teams and their impact on teachers’ perceptions about collaboration. European Journal of Teacher Education, 41(4), 463–478.
Lantolf, J., & Thorne, S. (2006). Sociocultural theory and the genesis of second language development. Oxford University Press.
Leont’ev, A. N. (1981). Problems of the development of the mind. Progress.
Lester, J. N., & Evans, K. R. (2009). Instructors’ experiences of collaboratively teaching: Building something bigger. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 20(3), 373–382.
McKenzie, S., Hains-Wesson, R., Bangay, S., & Bowtell, G. (2020). A team-teaching approach for blended learning: An experiment. Studies in Higher Education, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2020.1817887
Minett-Smith, C., & Davis, C. L. (2020). Widening the discourse on team-teaching in higher education. Teaching in Higher Education, 25(5), 579–594. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2019.1577814
Money, A., & Coughlan, J. (2016). Team-taught versus individually taught undergraduate education: A qualitative study of student experiences and preferences. Higher Education, 72(6), 797–811.
Perry, B., & Stewart, T. (2005). Insights into effective partnership in interdisciplinary team-teaching. System, 33(4), 563–573.
Robertson, M. J. (2017). Team modes and power: Supervision of doctoral students. Higher Education Research & Development, 36(2), 358–371.
Roth, W.-M. (2012). Cultural-historical activity theory: Vygotsky’s forgotten and suppressed legacy and its implication for mathematics education. Mathematics Education Research Journal, 24, 87–104.
Schmulian, A., & Coetzee, S. A. (2019). To team or not to team: An exploration of undergraduate students’ perspectives of two teachers simultaneously in class. Innovative Higher Education, 44(4), 317–328.
Shibley, I. A. (2006). Interdisciplinary team-teaching: Negotiating pedagogical differences. College Teaching, 54(3), 271–274.
Stake, R. (2006). Multiple case study analysis. The Guilford Press.
Tsui, A., & Law, D. (2007). Learning as boundary-crossing in school university partnership. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23(8), 1289–1301.
Vangrieken, K., Dochy, F., Raes, E., & Kyndt, E. (2015). Teacher collaboration: A systematic review. Educational Research Review, 15, 17–40.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.
Yamagata-Lynch, L. (2010). Activity systems analysis methods: Understanding complex learning environments. Springer.
Young, M. B., & Kram, K. E. (1996). Repairing the disconnects in faculty teaching teams. Journal of Management Education, 20(4), 500–515.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge Monash Education Academy, Monash University, Australia, for funding this project. This project was a research grant awarded to the first two authors of this paper. Sincere thanks to the team teachers participating in this study. We thank the anonymous reviewers from Higher Education for their suggestions and constructive feedback.
Funding
This research project is funded by Monash Education Academy, Monash University, Australia.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Not applicable.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Ethics approval
This project has received ethics approval from the Monash University Human Research Ethics Committee with Project ID: 8802.
Consent to participate
Yes.
Consent for publication
Yes.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher's note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Dang, T.K.A., Carbone, A., Ye, J. et al. How academics manage individual differences to team teach in higher education: a sociocultural activity theory perspective. High Educ 84, 415–434 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00777-6
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-021-00777-6