According to Walter Reed, professor of English and UACT chair, who will moderate the discussion, the difficulties of team teaching actually start with defining it. It ranges from three faculty members sharing responsibility, to one professor teaching for the first half of the semester and another taking over for the second half. While team teaching is not an uncommon occurrence, Reed said, because it is so tough to define, he does not know how many classes are actually team taught, and specific records on the subject are not kept. Its benefits to faculty, however, are easy to see.
Faculty tend to teach at a higher pitch in the presence of a colleague.
It's a way of pursuing interdisciplinary topics in a way that has more street credibility. It is often better, Reed said, for a class to hear from multiple experts on individual subjects than to get all their information from one professor trying to teach everything. Some of the possible panel topics include the joys and difficulties of team teaching, the recognitions and rewards derived from it, and the fact that teaching classes with other faculty members often requires as much work as teaching solo. While those are just a few possible avenues of discussion, Reed said the panel will be free form and could address almost anything having to do with the subject. There's a certain amount of confusion among faculty and it seemed like an issue that cuts across all the different schools at Emory.