Team Teaching Tips for Foreign Language Teachers
Rebecca Benoit
rebeccabenoit@hotmail.com
Bridget Haugh
brihaugh@hotmail.com
Introduction
This article seeks to provide team teachers with specific tips on how to function effectively as equal partners working together in the same classroom. These step-by-step tips are a basic guide to help you establish a dynamic team so you can experiment and find the approach that works best for you. For teachers who have never had a chance to team teach, or have perhaps avoided doing it for a variety of reasons, perhaps this article will help allay fears and give teachers a sense of what exactly team teaching 'looks like' within the class.
From our work team teaching with one another and others in a variety of contexts (elementary, high school, junior high school, and international schools) in Canada, Mexico and Japan, we've had the chance to experience everything from wonderful to disastrous team teaching relationships. Based on these experiences, we have assembled a brief series of tips to help you and your classroom partner.
Background Literature
Team teaching, in the most general sense, encompasses a wide variety of arrangements. One specific form, which has become quite prevalent in recent years, is having two teachers in the classroom teaching simultaneously. This is becoming more and more common throughout Japan and in other Asian countries. Each year on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme alone, nearly 6,000 Assistant Language Teachers (ALT) come to Japan to assist Japanese Language Teachers (JLT) in foreign language classrooms (Horwich par. 22). Recently, Hong Kong launched a programme similar to JET called the Native-speaking English Teachers Programme (NET) Programme that also employs team teach
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