Collaborative teaching offers valuable opportunities to explore topics and themes that cut across departmental and disciplinary boundaries and to build shared learning environments for Carleton students that provide them entry into topics from different disciplinary perspectives. Faculty members have also commented frequently how meaningful they themselves find these pedagogical collaborations. Carleton is eager to foster a variety of approaches to such collaborations.
There are many ways to engage in collaborative teaching. This site begins by describing a variety of formats for faculty course collaboration, and then ends with a re-imagining of how we can make traditional team-taught courses (two or more faculty teaching the same course at the same time) feasible for a greater number of faculty members. The models listed below under “Collaborative teaching” are just some ideas, including ones that have been offered in the past or are offered currently. We assume that the pedagogical creativity of Carleton’s faculty will imagine additional ways to collaborate as well.
In general, we will use the Curricular Innovations Grant (CIG) funding to incentivize broad exploration of cross-disciplinary collaborative teaching possibilities. They will not be the sole priority, but we do wish to encourage more exploration of alternative models of collaborative teaching while also lowering the barriers to team-teaching. Faculty are encouraged to seek funding for new collaborative teaching efforts through the Curricular Innovations Grant, but also to enquire with the Office of the Provost about other funding sources if the timing for planning is out of cycle for the CIG process.
A faculty member who is hoping to collaborate with another faculty member is encouraged to start planning their collaboration well in advance. If a Curriculum Innovation Grant is desired to support planning and design of the collaboration, the deadline for submitting a proposal is the last Friday of January. More information on these grant opportunities is listed on the Provost’s Office website. When in doubt about available resources or about how to launch a new collaboration, faculty should always contact the Provost’s Office. If a department or program is planning to request a visitor in one of the following three years and would like to make collaborative teaching possible for one of its faculty members (see description below), the Office of the Provost will consider approving a visitor for more courses than might otherwise be needed. That said, these requests are due in the Provost’s Office in November each year.
A. Collaborative teaching models
The models listed below are not the only possibilities. If you have ideas or plans for collaborative teaching that do not align with the options below, please do let the Provost’s Office know.
I. Side by Side Courses Two (or more) faculty members teach courses on a thematically related topic during the same class period. Faculty members can switch between the two classes, undertake common projects between the two student groups, share guest speakers, plan common outings, etc. This kind of collaboration requires significant planning. Each instructor would be responsible for evaluating student work in the course for which they are the instructor of record.
A variant of this model consists of two separate courses on related topics that periodically convene for a common session during the term.
II. Twin Courses Two or more faculty members teach concurrent course sections on the same topic with the same syllabus. There could be a shared lecture once a week featuring one of the faculty members focusing on the topic through their disciplinary lens.
III. Paired Courses (co-requisite dyad courses or optional trailer courses) Two faculty members offer related courses in the same term at different times, but students must enroll in both sections. The two courses may, but also may not award the same number of credits for students. They may also include examples in which students are not required to take both of the courses.
For the following two models, collaborative teaching occurs, but on a much less intensive basis. Therefore, participating in such collaborations does not normally award teaching credit to the faculty member/s who do not have primary responsibility for the class.
IV. Episodes with Experts One or more faculty members design a course in which one of the faculty members has primary responsibility for overseeing the course and grading, while other faculty members come into the class on a rotating basis for guest lectures/discussions or collaboratively planned sessions. These kinds of arrangements can be quite sustainable or replicable as lead instructors can shift over time, thus, possibly lessening the burden on all faculty members involved to fit such collaborations into their regular rotation of courses.
V. Project-Based Collaborations Examples have included: two courses working on a common project and two courses sharing final presentations in a kind of symposium setting.
B. Team-Taught Courses (Two or more faculty members in different academic units co-teach a course in which all instructors are present for every class session in the same space.)
In this set of guidelines, there are three types of team-teaching processes, all of which assume that the faculty members are not in the same department: one that would not involve replacing a faculty member in their home department/program, and two that would involve hiring a replacement. All of them would require approval from the department chair/program directors. In all three examples, once they have the required approvals, each faculty member would receive full teaching credit. We will continue to prioritize team-teaching opportunities across departments and divisions, while noting that there are several examples of team-teaching within departments/programs. The latter are not included in these guidelines and would require approval of both the department chair/program director and the Office of the Provost.
The Provost’s Office will monitor the costs involved in all of these options to ensure that we can address any additional fiscal implications that might develop.
I. Team-teaching in which only department/program approval is required:
In this first case, if a team-taught course (two or more instructors teaching the same class at the same time in the same space and consistently present in class) is likely to enroll at or near 20 students (for two faculty) or 25-30 students (for three faculty), the collaboration requires only that the faculty members seek approval from their department chair/program director and notify the Associate Provost who oversees the curriculum of the collaboration in a timely manner. In such cases, iterations of the course would not require further approval from the Provost’s Office and would involve full teaching credit for each faculty member, but would continue to require approval from the relevant department chairs/program directors and notification of the Provost’s Office. Exceptions to the enrollment guidelines articulated above may be made for team-teaching involvements that require spaces with a lower maximum capacity or those whose enrollment maximums are not set by the faculty themselves (e.g., OCS programs). [Note: in cases in which team-taught courses do not reach enrollment thresholds – generally 10 per faculty member, consultation with the Provost’s Office will be required for subsequent offerings.]
For the following two team-teaching scenarios, departments/programs must submit a description of a proposed team-taught class and the implications for visiting hiring when the department/program submits requests to hire visiting faculty.
II. Cases in which faculty (and their department chair/program director) will need permission of the Provost’s Office
In the second case, we have a structure that allows for authorization, but on a different schedule. However, it requires that departments include team-teaching opportunities in their long-term planning. This example of team-teaching requires longer-term planning so as to factor it into requests for visiting faculty. For instance, a department/program would have to submit the request for team-teaching when it submits its requests for visiting faculty in the fall.
If the team-taught course requires that we hire a replacement for only one course per faculty member (i.e., if only one faculty member’s course needs to be replaced), the course may be repeated every other year; if the team-taught course requires hiring replacements for two classes, then it could run every three years, etc. This creates a certainty that the course can run again with fewer bureaucratic hurdles. Authorization to move forward with such an arrangement would be particularly advantageous in any year in which the department/program is hiring a visitor anyway who could help with backfilling a faculty member’s participation in a team-taught course. This is why long-range planning is particularly important here.
If a department/program does not otherwise require visiting faculty in any given academic year, it may still submit a request for a team-taught course when requests to hire visitors are due. Such requests will also require a description of the proposed team-taught course and its implications for staffing.