On August 18th 2016 I gave a workshop to the 2016 class of Global Studies Teachers (Japanese English Teachers). These teachers were selected during the 2015 teacher selection process. During this, their first year as full teachers, they receive a wide variety of trainings throughout the year.

Why do we team teach?

A prominent feature of educational reform and development in Japan is the continuous use of the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) cycle.  With that in mind, the following reasons were given for team teaching in the classroom:

• Team teaching, like all activities within the school, is one way in which we seek have students succeed.
• Team teaching encourages positive risk taking by teachers. Here, positive risk taking means a willingness to expand on one’s range of teaching moves.
• Increased positive risk taking, along with follow up discussions and revisions made by teaching teams leads to teacher learning.
• Teacher learning leads to teacher confidence which in turn leads to increases in positive risk taking. This is an example of the PDCA cycle at work.

It is easy to see how the above can contribute to improved student achievement.

Who are ALTs?

ALTs can play a variety of roles in the classroom:

But beyond these roles it is important for teachers two understand both the contractual conditions that ALTs work under, and the personal/professional strengths of their team mates.

How do we team teach?

During the workshop there were five basic teaching moves that were presented as being essential to good team teaching. These are:

• Give your goals to the ALT before asking for his/her ideas.
• Say everything twice: Once to the ALT, once to the students.
• Use “the class” or “the students” in all your instructions.
• Show (the students how to do it), Include (students in doing it), Involve (students)
• Recast the ALT’s language so that target language is used.

These five basic moves were linked to 5 principles of effective team teaching:

• Teaching teams share the same goals.
• Teaching teams are open models.
• Team teaching provides a constant model.
• Team teaching is student centered.
• Team teaching is flexible.

What does team teaching look like?

Many team teaching lessons taught here in Japan follow a very similar pattern. Teachers almost never leave the front of the room and if they do, the teaching pattern usually has the lead teacher at the front and the ALT in the back, out of the way.

During this workshop teachers were asked to consider the use of a wider variety of teaching patterns. Examples of each of these was then given. In order to give the examples teachers were given sample lesson plans for Program 5 of the second grade book from the Sunshine English Course. The lesson plans and materials can be found below.

G2_P05_SB_docx Grade 2 Program 5 Performance Grade 2 Program 5 Profile For assessment