Team Teaching

In education, also, the difficulty in making teams effective is conspicuous. The demise of team teaching provides ample evidence of the problems of teamwork. Team teaching began in the late 1960s with high hopes of success. It has, however, failed. Many studies, both in the UK and in the United States, have shown that only a fragment of the original team teaching edifice remains. It appears that teamwork in classrooms is more difficult to achieve than many had anticipated.

Indeed, looking at the history of teams in classrooms one could quite justifiably claim that classrooms provide an especially uncongenial environment for teamwork. Despite this, classroom teams have formed the subject of surprisingly little research.

The issue of effective teamwork in classrooms is more important now than it has ever been. Although team teaching may have had its heyday, a new kind of classroom team is emerging. The new teams are more widespread and more varied than those which arose from the move to team teaching. The new teams are generated principally from two main trends: the trend to integration of children with special needs, and the trend to parental involvement. The former results in personnel formerly associated with special settings (special schools, withdrawal rooms, etc.), moving to the mainstream classroom to work alongside the classteacher. The latter results in far greater numbers of parents working in the classroom than would ever have been the case previously.

Team teaching meant, of course, teams of teachers, and was often in response to a coordinated programme of introduction. But the new teams are emerging not in response to an ideal about teamworking. Instead, their emergence is in response to unrelated trends which in themselves are unconcerned with teamwork. Unlike team teaching teams they will comprise participants from very different backgrounds, with different ideologies, skills and interests.

The fact that the 'teamness' of these new teams is unrecognised - or at least unremarked upon - means that they stand even less chance of surviving than did the team teaching teams of the 1960s and the 1970s. The latter at least had the dynamics of the team as a central question to be addressed. It would be a pity if the new teams atrophied in the way that team teaching atrophied due to inadequate attention to the working of the team. If that happened, it would mean that the ideals behind the new developments - parental participation and the integration of children with special needs - would be rejected, and worse, rejected for the wrong reasons. Teams can be made to work, but team members need first, to recognise that they are part of a team, and second, to employ strategies which will maximise their chances of success.

In order to devise those strategies, it is necessary to examine the dynamics which so often seem to be responsible for the attrition of teamwork. It is necessary to examine the the case that the new collections of people in classrooms are, in every sense, teams. We should examine documentary evidence for the existence of the new teams. We should examine the dynamics of teams generally. We should examine case study data about the kinds of tensions which exist in the new teams. We should examine a model for analysing 'team personalities', and will provide guidelines for the effective working of classroom teams. Over the decade 1980-90, many adults moved into the classroom to work alongside the classteacher. The new teams have emerged by stealth, almost unnoticed. There was no fanfare, no top-down initiative which inspired the creation of these new teams, as there had been for team teaching. In practice, this has resulted in a change from systems of withdrawal to a range of new team teaching arrangements; in these new arrangements, remedial teachers are working alongside mainstream colleagues and are now often designated support teachers.