Recently we (Antonio, Ann and Dylan) have been selected as the Faculty of Education and Health Sciences winners of the Team-Teaching Excellence Award. Despite these turbulent times, and thanks to the collective investment into this educational experience, we (the preservice teachers and us, teacher educators) became fully engaged in the planned structure and met the agreed expectations (i.e., teaching and learning contract). Our team-teaching experience began last Autumn semester in the context of the Professional Masters of Education for Physical Education where we taught a purposefully combined module “Curriculum and Assessment in Physical Education” and “Teaching Physical Education”.
Our combined teaching philosophy embraces a ‘practice what we preach’ approach whereby we teach pre-service teachers about instructional alignment through an instructional aligned approach. One of the lesson learned from a previous experience that informed this one was the importance of designing an integrated approach structured in blocks, where all instructional components are interconnected and informing each other. Our combine module approach occurred over three teaching days and was framed by a pedagogy of sharing responsibilities whereby its main elements and responsibilities (systematic approach to planning, ticket-to-class submission, prompted break-out rooms and reflection-in-action) were shared between the teacher educators and the pre-service teachers. The first day was an interactive online lecture which draws on the use of a flipped classroom approach (ticket-to-class submission), break-out rooms, and reflection tasks; the second day consisted of an online debate whereby the pre-service teachers in teams debated topics which arose from the online lecture; and the final day was a ‘reality chat’ whereby the preservice teachers had an opportunity to discuss the reality of enacting that week’s theme with a practicing physical education teacher, for example, discussions on the reality of formative assessment strategies or meaningful experiences. The ‘reality chat’ day was indeed the most ‘successful’ day of the week, and this was due to all our distinguished guests – thank you.
We are also grateful to the reviewing panel and their positive feedback, and to the Centre for Transformative Learning for their continuous support. It is time now to take a slow and critical approach to reflect about what we’ve done and achieved, share the lessons learned, and be aware that in the grand scheme of things, this awarded team-teaching experience may (or may not) have an impact on the preservice teachers’ physical education practice (we trust it will).
PESS News & Information 