The co-teaching professorship: Power and expertise in the co-taught higher education classroom

Matthew Hill

CO

Ferguson, J. & Wilson, J. C. (2013).  The co-teaching professorship: Power and expertise in the co-taught higher education classroom.  Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly, 5(1), pp. 52-68.  Retrieved Oct. 19, 2016, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ942564.pdf.

Summary:
In this article, Ferguson and Wilson discuss their experience co-teaching "an undergraduate reading methods course" for pre-service teachers.  They describe their experience organizing, planning, and carrying out the course, and address some of the two big issues that people in co-teaching experiences often encounter, id est, the fear of losing control or power over the class, or losing ownership; and the fear of looking bad in light of the expertise and experience of the other teacher.  They describe their methodology and experiences in detail and are very self-reflective about the whole process.  They came away with a very positive experience of co-teaching at the university level.

Evaluation:
I chose this article because it is one of the very, very few articles that discussed co-teaching at the university level.  In reality it has many things in common with other articles that describe methods and case studies of co-teaching, including the need to learn to work very closely with the co-teacher, the absolute necessity of extensive planning beforehand, and the initial discomfort.  However, in my opinion it suffers from the same issue as all the other things I viewed or read regarding co-teaching in higher education: it was aimed exclusively at pre-service teachers, aka, student teachers.  I never once came across an article that discussed co-teaching in subject areas where the purpose was to communicate content rather than teaching to teach.  Without exception, the only other context I found for articles on co-teaching was K-12 inclusion classes, that is to say, where special needs students were integrated into general education classes.  So while Ferguson's and Wilson's experience was indeed unique in that it finally talked about co-teaching in higher education, it still does not address the issue of co-teaching content to university students outside of the contexts described earlier.  This is a serious gap and should be addressed if co-teaching is to gain any traction at all beyond pre-service teaching, and this does not even take into account the difficulties inherent in co-teaching with librarians, who may or may not have the same level of education or classroom experience as a professor.