The Future of Education

Research into team teaching practices has largely been conducted in special school settings and in classrooms in which English has been a second language. Often these studies have been based on only one or two classes. The research that we are reporting on involved nine mainstream schools and one special needs school across Victoria, Australia. Team teaching took place in primary and secondary schools located across urban, regional and rural settings. Participating schools used an action research approach to investigate their team teaching practices. This involved teams of teachers undertaking SWOT analysis of video evidence of teaching supported by critical research friends from Deakin University. Data were collected throughout the life of the research project and analysed to inform this presentation. The project design included 4 workshops of 50+ participants from 10 schools across the year during which school teams came together to learn with and from each other. Smaller cluster meetings of 3-4 schools met to observe team teaching practices at the host school and to learn strategies to support their participation in challenging conversations about their team teaching practices. In this presentation we will consider the design of the project, its applicability in different settings and the successes and challenges that the teachers in our project experienced. Analysis of the data indicated that the project design did effectively support teachers professional development which students benefited from academically, socially and personally.