Collaborative teaching in an intensive spanish course:: A professional development experience for teaching assistants.

Abstract: This pilot project was designed to provide professional development to teaching assistants (TAs) and improve undergraduate instruction in an intensive Spanish course through the use of collaboration and experiential instruction. TAs improved their teaching strategies, learned techniques to solve classroom problems, and reported satisfaction from relationships with students and one another. Difficulties for the TAs included finding common planning time, pacing the material, presenting a united front toward students, and handling a high level of novelty in the situation. Undergraduate students in the course reported positive attitudes toward Spanish language and culture and an increase in their ability to use Spanish for communication. Introduction Nontraditional courses offer both opportunities and challenges to universities seeking institutional and curricular change to improve instruction. For a number of years in the recent past, Florida State University offered a nontraditional summer Spanish intensive course that covered three semesters of basic coursework in one semester. Students enrolling in the intensive fulfilled their language requirement by meeting every day for four hours. The original implementation of the course was nontraditional in the aspect of scheduling, but retained a traditional approach to curriculum and instruction. The curriculum had condensed the standard sequence of grammar instruction from the text into 12 weeks and offered peripheral communicative activities. Three teaching assistants (TAs) taught the course consecutively without any collaboration, each one assuming sole responsibility for four weeks of instruction. The learning environment was primarily teacher dominated, and instruction mirrored the regular classes, which were also traditional in approach. This traditional structure within a nontraditional time frame failed to adequately address either opportunities or problems within the situation. Because instructors were assigned sequentially to each section, they were not required to work collaboratively, nor were they able to learn new strategies from one another. Also, the TAs found it difficult to maintain student involvement in grammar instruction for a period of up to four hours a day. The nature of grammar instruction is such that mastery of one skill is required as a foundation for the next skill, and frequent recycling of the material is necessary for learning, with time in between for students to internalize the linguistic material. Due to the condensed nature of the course, the intervals that allowed for the processing and internalization of sequential material were not available to students. The sequencing problems had been addressed in the original implementation of the course by giving students time to work on their homework during the class. However, this solution resulted in a loss of instructional time. Rationale for the Course Coincidentally, shortly after the implementation of the intensive concept, a decision was made in the Spanish language program to implement a communicatively driven curriculum. In a communicative curriculum, classes center on meaningful experiences in the language (i.e., listening, speaking, reading, and writing), rather than on learning about the language (i.e., linguistic rules and forms). Optimally, such experiences are concrete and are contextualized through the use of audiovisuals, props, role-play, movement, drawing, cultural reenactments, etc. (Met, 1988; Omaggio Hadley, 1993; Savignon, 1997; Lee & VanPatten, 1995). The intensive nature of the course, with its extended block of time, offered an optimal opportunity to implement an experiential, communicative curriculum. Team teaching in the intensive course would provide a context to help TAs learn the value of experiential instruction, for which they had little prior experience. A collaboratively taught course would also provide an opportunity for TAs who were traditional in their approach or who were novices in communicative methodology to learn strategies from more experienced TAs. …