Professors Score Big With Team Effort

When Daniel L. Hartl was an undergraduate, one of his professors broke his leg and lay in traction for the rest of the semester. Guest lecturers finished the class, and Hartl calls it one of the best courses of his college experience.

Now the Higgins professor of biology, Hartl doesn’t need to break a leg for his students to have a team-taught experience. He is one of four professors of the new Life Sciences 1b, “An Integrated Introduction to the Life Sciences: Genetics, Genomics, and Evolution.” Along with its 1a counterpart, “Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and Cell Biology,” the life sciences course joins a handful of offerings where students are taught by not one but two, three, or four instructors.

One recent popular offering featured University President Lawrence H. Summers and Bass Professor of Government Michael J. Sandel matching wits in Social Analysis 78, “Globalization and Its Critics,” and many science and Core courses currently tout a double professor byline.

Team teaching is not new to the Courses of Instruction handbook, but offerings will likely increase as a result of the ongoing curricular review, which has recommended the implementation of interdisciplinary “portal” courses. Come fall, an introductory humanities course will be co-taught by Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language Louis Menand and Cogan University Professor of the Humanities Stephen J. Greenblatt.

Having multiple players behind the podium during a semester means less lecturing but more pre-class coordination for each professor. Despite the workload, professors say team teaching provides the kind of peer review usually only available for their research. Students say their team teachers’ different lecture styles are refreshing and the courses generally present a coherent narrative while exposing the complexities of academia.

PICKING TEAMS

Teaching teams play differently: members will either take turns giving lectures on their areas of interest or jointly present each lecture.

The impromptu group-taught course that Hartl had as an undergraduate fits under what outgoing Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby, who has co-taught a Core course on Chinese history, calls “tag-team” teaching. In contrast to collaborative teaching, tag-teams take turns being in the lecture hall.

“It tends to work less well when somebody shows up one day, somebody else shows up another day,” Kirby says. “Tag-team team teaching seems to work less well than truly collaborative team teaching.”

Kirby’s former teaching partner, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Peter K. Bol, has played on both “tag” and “collaborative” teams. Over the years, the expert on early China has headed Historical Studies A-13, “China: Traditions and Transformations,” with several different colleagues. Bol calls it a “division of labor” approach in which he leads the first half of the class through the first two millennia and then passes the baton to a modern scholar.

This spring, he collaborated with Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations Michael A. Szonyi for Chinese History 126, “Cognition and Culture in Local China,” and the two of them alternated by weeks, while also participating in each other’s lectures.

Bol attributes the difference in models to the more interpretative nature of the latter course.

NAME OF THE GAME

With two or more professors lecturing about their specialties, students are exposed to the breadth of those fields.

“It’s important for students that they can make their own judgment, it’s easier for them to do that if they see historians disagree,” says Associate Professor of Japanese History Mikael S. Adolphson, who teaches Historical Studies A-14, “Japan: Tradition and Transformation,” with History chair Andrew D. Gordon ’74. “History is probably one of the best fields to team teach.”

Team-taught humanities courses are often divided chronologically.

“It’s a little better to do this kind of thing with a team,” says Menand, who will lecture on modern texts in the new humanities course while Greenblatt covers early modern texts.

Group-taught science courses are usually divided topically, however.

Senior Lecturer on Molecular and Cellular Biology Robert A. Lue says the communal efforts of teaching science parallel those of researching it. “Science today is really an effort of...a community of scientists from multiple fields,” he says of the mission behind Life Sciences 1a.

While Amy T. Wu ’09 says her 1b course could have been taught by one professor, it was evident that each professor had his or her area of expertise.

Each professor provides another source of advising. “I liked the idea of more than one professor, because there was more than one person I could go to to ask questions,” Wu says.

With more professors, students may be more likely to find a professor with whom they can establish rapport.

“If there’s one professor and I don’t like him, too bad for me,” says Amy P. Heinzerling ’08, who liked both her Earth and Planetary Sciences (EPS) 8, “History of the Earth,” instructors. “If there’s two professors, there’s more of a chance that I’ll click with one of them.”

TEAM PLAYERS

Team teaching is about more than halving the lecture load, Gordon says. “What’s important about it is that both professors participate in each other’s portions,” says Gordon. “The whole is more than the sum of the parts.”

Although usually only one professor lectures at a time in a team-taught course, success depends on team communication. “The faculty have to commit to doing this—this is not something where you can be half-hearted about it,” says Lue, who met every week with his Life Sciences 1a teaching partners for nine months to plan out their course.

Backstage planning seems to correspond to more shared time in the lecture hall.

Harvard College Professor and Professor of Psychology Marc D. Hauser, who team-taught Science B-29, “Evolution of Human Nature,” attended all lectures taught by Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology Richard W. Wrangham.

“Over time it got more fine-tuned and the lectures overlapped nicely,” Hauser says.

The non-lecturing Life Sciences 1a faculty dispersed throughout the lecture hall while their colleague was speaking. Hartl not only attended 1b lectures but followed 1a lectures via the web. “When people agree to teach a course as a group, they need to make a commitment that they’re going to watch the other professors’ lectures at least on the video to know what’s in them,” the biologist says. “I watched every video and took notes just like an undergraduate.”

Even as their time behind the podium is cut short, professors say team teaching can require more work outside of the lecture hall than teaching solo.

Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology William D. Fixsen, who started out on a team and has co-taught Biological Sciences 50, “Genetics and Genomics,” acknowledges that “it is quicker and easier to do it on your own,” but team teaching is not without its time benefits. “When you do it solo, you have full autonomy and full control but you also have full responsibility, and you can’t afford to say, ‘I need to be away on a week for a vacation,’” he says.

But team teaching can free up time for professors to attend to other academic obligations. “Given that we’re always invited to give talks, it allows us the freedom to go away,” says Hauser, whose team attends 85 to 90 percent of each other’s lectures.

TEAM SPIRIT

The constant presence of colleagues is the defining feature of team teaching for faculty members.

“If you’re standing up giving a lecture to the students and it’s not good, you’re probably less embarrassed than if you’re standing up in front of colleagues and it’s not good,” Gordon says.

His teaching partner takes notes when he speaks. “We both have the lecturer’s point of view and the audience’s point of view,” Adolphson says. “When a colleague tells you what he’s hearing you say in lecture and gives you feedback, each of the lectures is maybe a notch better in team teaching.”

Colleagues are a valuable source of feedback because “students might be afraid to criticize you,” Hartl says.

Just as their published work is peer reviewed, professors’ teaching is peer-evaluated when they are part of a team.

“It certainly can breed a little bit of competition, which is healthy,” says Hauser. “We want to see who can get across the best lectures.”

Team teaching can be a training ground for those starting out as professors. “If it’s a team in spirit, I think that it’s a tremendous experience for faculty to be brought into, to see exactly what happens behind the scenes,” says Fixsen.

If there are any glitches between professors, they are mostly logistical. Adolphson says that he and Gordon alternate responsibilities as course head, and sometimes e-mails are addressed to the wrong professor.

The “only caveat” for Bol’s class was organizational, says a student.

“Sometimes they weren’t always on the same page for administrative type stuff,” Benjamin E. Click ’06 says. “It made it much more difficult to organize when there’s two of them.”

TEAMWORK

With different professors presenting their interests, it is important that the course has an overarching theme, professors say.

“We’re telling a story, we’re telling the same story, but just telling different parts of it,” Hartl says.

Fixsen says one team-taught class shouldn’t be three mini courses. He and his colleagues “make sure students are hearing a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and not three middles or three beginnings.”

Transitions and overlaps—what Bol calls “points of mutual reference”—are worked out in meetings about course direction and lecture content.

“We didn’t just schlep into the classroom and give lectures,” Hartl says of his 1b team. “We knew exactly what was happening when.”

For faculty teaching courses that are many years in the running, debriefing in the early years helped streamline the course content.

“Even if you’re teaching the same region, you have to have a red thread tying everything together,” Adolphson says. “If you don’t have that, there’s a big danger that you will get lost.”

Ensuring a common theme means that team-teaching professors agree to agree, even when they disagree.

When a disagreement occurs over lecture material in Science B-29, Hauser and Wrangham discuss after class and send a clarification e-mail if necessary. “We are one voice, if there’s a problem, we come back with one voice,” Hauser says.

The professors in EPS 8 had “little back and forths” over such issues as dating an event to 20 millions years or 35 million years ago, Heinzerling says, without much disagreement over major concepts. If they diverged, the professors would inform the students that the issue was still contested.

“You don’t want to walk away thinking, ‘oh, what my professor is saying is the absolute truth,’” she says.

Students said that stylistic variations between professors, however, worked to invigorate the courses.

“With two different lecture styles, it breaks things up, students have something new to look forward to,” Adolphson says. “The new style and new format recreates the energy you have at the beginning of semesters.”

Dongbo Yu ’07 says that Gordon and Adolphson definitely had different emphases, but he was comfortable with the way they conducted their lectures.

Nevertheless, variations should not be too extreme. “It works well when the dynamics of the faculty and the energy levels are comparable,” Hauser says, adding that it would be ineffective if one person were “super dynamic” and the other a “sleeper.”

In Government 1093/Biological Sciences 60, “Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Human Nature,” Sandel and Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences Douglas A. Melton acheived this collegiality. “It was a happy medium where they could understand each other’s perspective and let us try to resolve it,” Douglas T. McClure ’06 says of the interaction between his professors. However, both Heinzerling and McClure say they would have liked to hear more of Melton’s opinions during the discussions, which were mostly led by Sandel.

A WINNING TEAM

Because the Committee on Undergraduate Education Guide does no ask students about the merits or faults of their team-taught experiences, Lue and his team distributed their own evaluations. He says that 76 percent of the students felt that team teaching was a strength of the course and 50 percent affirmed that the course had increased their interest in the sciences.

“It was an enormous amount of work and what made this work was that it was so fulfilling,” Lue says. “The team is amazing, we really have tremendous—no pun intended—chemistry.”

—Staff writer Lulu Zhou can be reached at luluzhou@fas.harvard.edu.