Index Terms—Pair
teaching, pair lecturing, team teaching, reflective practice,
reflection-in-action, constructive alignment, teacher development.
Pair lecturing
enables a more thorough reflection-on-action since the teaching experience is
shared with a pair professor. It also allows
deeper reflection-in-action, incorporating student interaction into the lecture
plan while keeping the assessment methods and the teaching activities
affiliated with the course objectives.
A quick search on
the phrase “pair teaching “using Google
or Scholar gives many definitions.
According to Pair
Teaching – an eXtreme Teaching Practice by Roy Andersson and
Lars Bendix
Pair Teaching, is
working with a partner who can help and support you during some or all of four
fundamental values: Feedback, Communication, Respect, and Courage.
Pair Teaching is
highly repetitious or frequentative and covers some specific practices. The
objective of cooperation is to support the improvement of student learning.
The partner is
supposed to help verify the whole process of going through all of the stages of
the learning cycle – and carry on doing it.
In the general
remarks, we read about the eXtreme Programming concept.
The Pair
Programming practice of eXtreme Programming uses the model of a driver, who
does the work and takes care of the details, and a navigator, who observes,
comments, asks questions, makes suggestions and,
in general, takes care of the big picture. Additionally, it recommends
switching between the roles of driver and navigator within a pair. There is
also the suggestion that taking turns should apply to the practice of Pair
Teaching.
The considerable standard definitions of Pair Teaching have
absolutely nothing to do with the real setting of teaching in pairs (some of
the hits deals with teaching pairs). Pair Teaching is not a well-known and
well-defined concept. Searching instead for “team|group|collaborative teaching”
gives the impression that these are the words or phrases that are frequently
used because of its recurrence popularity.
However, by
insisting on the use of Pair, we want to stress the difference between two
people solving a task and a group of people building a product (student
learning) and for which they might make use of PT or collaborative teaching.
The
cost-effectiveness of Pair Programming is observable, in part, because the two
activities (writing the code and reviewing the code) are carried out in
parallel. In point of fact that there is no tradition of accurate reflection on teaching in PT, we have to rely more on the
benefits to justify the added costs of two people presence. Furthermore, the
pair will also be able to take care of larger groups than one person.
Teaching a course
together seems to have more benefits than drawbacks.
In conclusion,
teaching should not be a solitaire activity, but something that is done in
pairs. Done the right way, Pair Teaching can bring many benefits that
compensate the additional costs.
Some of these
benefits are immediate and explicit – like having someone to brainstorm with,
someone who can help “sort out” your ideas, the possibility to handle larger
groups of students and the ability to step in for each other in the case of
absence. However, most paybacks are more long-term benefits.
Alternatively,
“hidden” glitches – like communicating information, assuring quality aspects,
educating colleagues are significant. It is important to put an accurate value
also to these benefits when judging if Pair Teaching is cost-effective or not.
REFERENCES
- Andersson, R., Bendix, L., eXtreme
Teaching, in proceedings of 3: ePedagogiska Inspirationskonferensen, LTH,
Lund, May 31, 2005.
- Andersson, R., Bendix, L., Towards a
Set of eXtreme Teaching Practices, in proceedings
of the 5th International Conference on Computer Science Education, Koli,
Finland, November 17-20, 2005.
- Andersson, R., Bendix, L., eXtreme
Teaching – a Framework for Continuous Improvement, to appear in Journal of
Computer Science Education, 2006.
- Beck, K.: Extreme Programming
Explained – Embrace Change, Second Edition, Addison-Wesley, 2005.
- Boyer, E., L., Scholarship
Reconsidered. Priorities of the Professoriate, The Carnegie Foundation,
1990.
- Hedin, G., Bendix, L., Magnusson, B.,
Teaching eXtreme Programming to Large Groups of Students, Journal of
Systems and Software, January 2005.
- Kolb, D. A., Experiential Learning:
Experience as the Source of Learning, Prentice-Hall, 1984.
- Pair teaching in preservice teacher
education P Medgyes, E Nyilasi - Foreign Language Annals, 1997 - Wiley
Online Library
- Medgyes, P. and Nyilasi, E. (1997), Pair Teaching in Preservice Teacher
Education. Foreign Language Annals, 30: 352–368. doi:
10.1111/j.1944-9720.1997.tb02358.x
