Published, Edinburgh Evening News, 26 April, 2011

I am a big fan of ‘team teaching’. So what do I understand that term to mean and why do I support its underlying philosophy?

Teaching is actually quite a solitary profession where there is often a lack of opportunity to reflect and evaluate our own performance. We can find ourselves teaching a similar curriculum year after year, often in the same school (perhaps even in the same classroom) over a long period of time. There is an inherent danger in this scenario of becoming isolated from our peers and finding ourselves in a comfort zone where we stop taking risks with our teaching styles, start playing it safe and resultantly become a little complacent by going through the motions of teaching. In other words, the risk in isolation is that we stop thinking about our teaching and instead become slaves to routine. The result of that is, of course, not a lack of quality necessarily but definitely a lack of dynamism and a real opposition to change. I have known teachers go through their entire career without being watched by another professional. Their classrooms become their own personal haven of safety, their own world in which they are the director of their own destiny.

Yes, we now have a fairly rigorous system of inspection, but even during that period, not all teachers will be appraised and each school is only inspected once every seven years on average. Yes, we are now in a period where self-evaluation is a central tenet of each school’s development plan, the purpose of which is a greater degree of self-reflection, but these evaluations tend to be teachers’ reflections and views of the whole school rather than of their individual performance. Many teachers are terrified by the prospect of being watched by another professional and yet their fear is largely unwarranted in almost every single case. It is their isolation which creates this fear and actually undermines their ability to learn from others.

Team teaching is used in the very best of schools as an attempt to stop this isolation, to create a safe and purposeful environment for professional dialogue and exchange of ideas. Team teaching is where two or more teachers work together to create a learning experience for a standard number of pupils. This is largely non-threatening for each of the teachers involved but creates the dynamism often lacking in teachers who have retained a singular approach to their teaching. Teachers who do take the opportunity to team-teach often find it revelatory, motivating and a spur to becoming truly reflective once again.

So, at first sight, Edinburgh City Council’s decision to introduce ‘team teaching’ into some of its schools could be interpreted as forward thinking, enlightened and a bold step into a more dynamic period of education.

However, the decision is, in my view, absolutely nothing to do with an enlightened approach to education. Team teaching in some Edinburgh schools will not be team teaching at all. The proposal is that in some of our over-subscribed schools there could be classes of fifty pupils being taught by two teachers in one large space. This would be a retrograde step, and a total disaster for the pupils, teachers and schools involved. It may be dressed up as a new way of thinking but is actually about cutting costs.

What chance that in a year or two some of the under-subscribed schools go through another period of threatened closures as a result of this new policy.

I become increasingly irritated by councillors who purport to have the best interests of Edinburgh’s pupils at heart but whose first question will always be, “Ah, but how much will that cost?” The country really cries out for someone to say, “You know what, we’re trying our best and this solution is the best we can come up with in our current financial predicament.” In many ways, that would be music to my ears. I could see the logic of reduced budgets resulting in uncomfortable choices about how and where and when we teach. I don’t like it when politicians use spin to conclude that they are doing pupils a big favour by this new “team” spirit approach, because it is nothing of the sort.

True team teaching is aspirational and has advantages for all. The team teaching initiative recently announced for some of our schools is about cost cutting, streamlining and has no educational benefit. Indeed, it may prove to be unmanageable and a disservice to the pupils who are unlucky enough to find themselves in a room of fifty pupils trying to gain the attention of one of two teachers. It is not a sensible approach and each of us should be trying to dissuade the powers that be from pursuing it. There has to be a better solution to over-subscription than this. If some schools currently have “accommodation issues” but can house fifty pupils in one space, can that one space not be partitioned into two? It’s not rocket science. Solutions are available; the issue just requires planning, joined up thinking and keeping educational benefit at the centre of the decision making process.

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