In Urbandale Middle School, special education and English language instructor teams up

with classroom teachers to deliver lesson plans in an effort to remove their school from a
statewide watch lists. The first year of using team teaching to seventh grade students has been a
success. The teachers are finding the approach beneficial. School data shows students receiving
instruction in co-taught classes saw significant improvement in their test scores compared to
those in non-co-taught classes (Barton,2009).

Though faculty members who team teach acknowledge the amount of work and resources
it takes to orchestrate a double (or triple, or quadruple) act, many seem to have positive feelings
about team-teaching, especially if there are shared interests and similar levels of investment in
the course material. Cities professor Gary McDonogh said that team-teaching gives the
opportunity to “represent a broad range of issues and perspectives and allows familiar topics to
be recast into new lights." McDonogh team teaches a number of courses, such as the Senior
Seminar for the Cities major and Introduction to Latin American Latino, and Iberian Peoples and
Cultures with History Professor Ignacio Gallup-Diaz. Team-teaching also gives students the
opportunity to see colleagues disagree (Guida,2008).

The Pine Tree Independent School District Foster Middle School's principal on
Wednesday said he plans to keep using a teaching model designed to create smaller classes into
the 2010-11 school year. Teaming, or pairing core academic teachers so they have the same
students throughout the day, has been in place for the school's gifted and talented students since
the 1990s, Principal Sedric Clark said. The school expanded the concept this year to all students.
It was first use in fifth and sixth grader (Lane, 2010)..

"Limiting teachers with a certain number of students ... it tends to help student success,"
Clark said. "The teachers have the same planning period. They can schedule parent conferences
together and meetings with students. They work together to identify student strengths and
weaknesses. The students are more focused because the teachers are more focused." (Lane,
2010).

Janice Royal, a sixth-grade history teacher, said teaming also helps the teachers coordinate
classroom lessons (Lane, 2010).

Team teaching can have a highly positive impact on student learning outcomes,
largely due to the increased opportunity for student participation that team
teaching provides. The presence of more than one instructor in the classroom
increases the occasions for student-teacher interaction (Wadkins, Miller, and
Wozniak, 2006).

Because team teaching encourages a variety of perspectives on a topic, students

are more likely to feel they can make valuable contributions to class discussions
(Anderson and Speck, 1998).