Team Teaching

Bobbie J. Greenlee

Team teaching, conceptualized and developed at Harvard University in the mid-1950s, calls for teachers to work together to plan, teach, and evaluate a common group of students. Initiated in 1957, a team project sponsored by Harvard University and Lexington, Massachusetts, Public Schools, attracted worldwide attention and influenced the design of school buildings. A great many schools were designed to accommodate team teaching and featured large, open classrooms or spaces with collapsible partitions. Many of these school buildings, however, were poorly utilized, and some of these facilities were reconverted into self-contained classrooms with hard walls. Many early team-teaching efforts were abandoned or modified because of the presumed failures of the open-space architecture. Team teaching seemed unsuccessful because teachers were poorly prepared to take advantage of teaming, and support from administrators was lacking. Functional divisions of curriculum and student tracking have characterized the bureaucratic organizational structure of schools. This structure promoted teacher ...

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