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A Methodology for Team Teaching a Course with Industrial Experts

One way of bringing experience into the classroom is for faculty to partner with engineers in the field. The advantages to the students, the faculty and even the collaborating industrial partners are numerous, however preparation time for such endeavors often can be limited and the logistics complex. To ease the development of this type of experiential learning, a process for such collaborations is needed. In this paper, a template for a team taught course where university faculty partner with practicing engineers is provided. Using this template, a methodology that includes best practices, guidelines, and activities is developed which can be used by faculty to more easily integrate practice into their classroom. A checklist for selecting appropriate industrial projects with the collaborating partners is also included. To illustrate the usage of this methodology, a case study of a course partnership between industrial experts and Kettering University Mechanical Engineering faculty is provided. Introduction

Team teaching is, by definition [1], “a method of coordinated classroom instruction involving a team of teachers working together with a single group of students”. The team teaching approach has been around for years and is a strategy used at many different levels in many schools. A strong team includes a variety of different teaching styles, and personal chemistry between the team members is arguably one of the most important indicators of success.

One method of team teaching is to have faculty raise comments from the floor during presentations. Lindauer [2] chose to formalize faculty interaction by employing a discussant format, wherein each of the faculty was assured of ten minutes at the end of the other's lecture. The advantages of the discussant format have proved to be numerous and have addressed matters of both form and substance. Relative to more ad hoc team teaching approaches, the discussant format disciplines faculty by encouraging them to prioritize comments and limit the pursuit of tangential issues. The format also proves valuable in reviving student interest toward the end of class sessions. Changing faculty members an hour into the lecture revitalizes the class, enabling key points to be conveyed more effectively. Because discussant comments are prepared during the lecture instead of beforehand, they possess a dynamic quality.

Robinson and Schaible [3] suggested that the optimum team size is two members. The complexity of a team size beyond this inhibits good collaboration. The teammates should agree from the start that the first time teaching together is a trial run and there should be no hard feelings if the chemistry isn't right.

A case study where three professors decided to integrate their teaching and the content of three separate courses into one period of time is documented by Bakken et al [4]. This work provided an example of integrated curricula for teacher education and the team

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Dong, Y., & El-Sayed, J. (2009, June), A Methodology For Team Teaching A Course With Industrial Experts Paper presented at 2009 Annual Conference & Exposition, Austin, Texas. 10.18260/1-2--5034