Roth, Wolff-Michael and Tobin, Kenneth. (Eds.) (2005). Teaching Together, Learning Together. Reviewed by Susanna Calkins, Northwestern University

Roth, Wolff-Michael and Tobin, Kenneth. (Eds.) (2005). Teaching Together, Learning Together. New York: Peter Lang Pp.xviii +275 $32.95   ISBN 0-8204-7911-x Reviewed by Susanna Calkins Northwestern University May 23, 2006 How can two or more teachers learn to teach while teaching together, in a way that optimizes the learning opportunities for students as well as what teachers can learn from each other? This is the central question raised by Wolff-Michael Roth and Kenneth Tobin in Teaching Together, Learning Together, a comprehensive new offering in the Studies in the Postmodern Theory of Education series. Continuing a conversation initiated with their earlier book, At the Elbow of Another, Roth and Tobin bring together studies on coteaching from Australia, Canada, Ireland, and the United States. Unlike team teaching, in which teachers may take turns teaching to decrease workload or to allow teachers to teach in their specialties, coteaching (and the associated cogenerative dialoguing practice that is used) assumes that both teachers will share responsibility for all parts of lessons, literally teaching at one another’s elbows. Coteaching “explicitly brings two or more teachers together to increase what they can offer to the students; they teach all the while providing opportunities for the participants to learn to teach” (p. x). Cogently grounded in theory and practice, coteaching, the editors argue, is as much about learning—for the teachers as well as the students—as it is about teaching. The volume is divided into three main sections. In Part I, Roth and Tobin focus on the underlying theoretical perspectives of coteaching, drawing on a decade of classroom practice to inform theory. They ground their explanation by focusing on the coteaching experience of two science teachers, “Christine” (an elementary school teacher with twelve years of experience) and “Brigitte” (a curriculum developer with four years of prior teaching experience), who had decided to share the responsibility for teaching a science unit in Christine’s elementary classroom. Although Christine wanted to teach the unit, which stressed learning concepts of science and engineering in a hands-on learner centered fashion, she did not know how to develop the curriculum effectively. Brigitte, on the other hand, had the expertise to develop the curriculum, but felt she did not know the students well enough to make decisions on her own. Rather than simply dividing up tasks as team teachers might, they developed and conducted whole class sessions together, creating a space in which each felt that she could contribute, take the lead, or fall back as necessary. While their teaching styles were different, their roles complemented each other, and over time as they learned from one another. Ruth and Tobin allege that both women became better teachers, each “equally comfortable as content experts and facilitators of group work.” (p. 9). Ruth and Tobin root the praxis of coteaching within a theoretical framework that draws on cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) and critical theory, stressing the importance of the individual and the role of agency within broader historical, social and cultural constructs. As they assert, “social change is possible through the agency of participants, who can collectively alter structures and produce new culture, thereby disrupting cycles of reproduction” (p. 3). Not only did Brigitte and Christine seek to contribute to their students’ agency as individuals as action makers with their own voices, but they also sought to enhance the collective responsibility for learning among their students. Yet, the teachers discovered that it was difficult to facilitate such agency and effect large-scale change in practice. On one occasion, for example, Brigitte and Christine sought to address a problem common to many high school science classes: the girls in the class were not responding to the teachers’ questions and in general seemed disengaged from the scientific process. The solution they came up with was to consciously call on the girls, even when their hands were not up, thinking that the girls probably knew the answers but just did not want to respond in front of the more dominant or competitive boys. Instead of increasing their interest, the girls were instead upset by the unexpected questions. From this example, Ruth and Tobin suggest that since the girls and boys were used to asymmetrical gender responses, there was no consensus in the (classroom) community, and thereby no expectation, that both genders should respond equally to questions. Even though one member of the community, the teacher, strove to make that change in the classroom environment, the community did not agree, so the change did not happen. What is interesting about this example is the authors’ implication that the community was too fixed in its traditional views to change; perhaps the teachers were just not asking very good questions. The dialectical relationships between agency and structure in coteaching are more closely explored in Roth’s discussion of how co-teachers “become like the other.” How coteachers physically occupy and position themselves within the classroom space, how they come to draw on and complement each other’s teaching, and how they come to reproduce one another’s teaching practice, Roth argues are all crucial components to understanding the phenomenon of coteaching. In a process of entrainment, or drawing together, the temporal patterns of individual teachers become synchronized, and the actions of coteachers become complementary as they come to share a common orientation and motivation. The findings in this study are provocative: the researchers discovered that coteachers began to coordinate their speech and actions as the coordinated space and time (who occupied the physical space at the front of the room, who stood in the wings; who facilitated discussion, who took notes; how long did each person speak before the roles shifted, etc.) Not only did the coteachers in their study begin to adopt each other’s teaching methods, such as the manner of asking questions, but often, the two instructors even adopted each other’s mannerisms, speech cadences, word choices, and even pitch, intonation, and volume. Indeed, it is fascinating to learn: “Although speakers are seldom aware of the absolute or relative pitch levels of their talk—because of resonance phenomena, we do not hear our own pitch in the same way we hear that of other speakers—matching pitches is a way to signal and produce emotional alignment and therefore solidarity” (p. 44). One might wonder, however, if such adoption of one another’s speaking patterns and cadences is always beneficial, particularly if a certain undesirable trait or characteristic is unconsciously being learned and mimicked by the other. Part II focuses on coteaching and research that was conducted at City High School in Philadelphia. In a useful, but occasionally repetitive overview, Tobin and Roth describe how notions of coteaching and cogenerative dialoguing changed over a seven year span, discussing many of the practical decisions they made when problems arose, or to suit the needs of the students and coteachers involved. Readers might find Jennifer Beers’ analysis of the impact of coteaching on her own identity as a teacher particularly intriguing, as she moved as a new teacher from initially viewing coteaching as “an organizational nightmare,” (p. 82) to a viable alternative to the traditional model in which new teachers sat as passive observers in the back of the classroom. As she explained, she found it possible “to learn science and learn about each other” (p. 88). Later, when she became the more experienced co-teacher, she was better able to reflect on the coteaching process and find ways to give new teachers “the space to create lessons, try new things, and make mistakes” (p. 92). Coteaching can also serve as a means to transform the interactions and communication between teacher and students, as Sarah-Kate LaVan points out, in her study of how pitch contours, verve and movement illuminate the sociology of emotion in the classroom. Even in a classroom “characterized by an ineffective learning environment and failed interaction rituals,” (p. 98) which was the case of the class she cotaught with Beers, LaVan argues that communication can be fostered by the shared communal nature of the coteaching process. Rather than clinging to the traditional belief that teachers hold all the power and knowledge in the classroom, La Van argues that Beer, a white teacher in a predominantly African-American classroom, switched roles with her students at times so she became at times the learner, and her students became the teachers. Thus, both teacher and students shared the responsibility for their collective learning. La Van contends that cogenerative dialogues allowed the teachers to become more aware of unconscious and conscious conceptions and practices, which in turn allowed them “to talk across age, race, gender and economic borders” (p. 117). It is unclear, however, how coteaching in itself brought about this changed dynamic, or how this method truly differs from simply listening to one’s students in order to find a new perspective. LaVan effectively characterized Beer’s teaching style as teacher-centered, rather than learner-centered, so it is quite possible that simply devising ways to give students a greater voice and sense of power in the classroom may have helped improved communication in the class. The coteaching relationship is not without challenge, of course. In his study of how coteachers learn to share the lead in the teaching situation, Tobin likens the process to relay runners exchanging a baton during a race. In productive coteaching, the metaphorical baton would be passed in a smooth and synchronous transfer from the hand of one runner to the next. The image on the front of the book nicely encapsulates this metaphor, although instead of a baton, one teacher is writing with chalk, and the other teacher seems to be explaining the scientific process under investigation. Dysfunctional coteaching, on the other hand, can occur when one teacher either refuses to pass the baton to the other, or seizes the baton in order to more energetically pursue the subject or even to enact his or her own agenda. Part III places coteaching in a more global perspective, by looking at how coteaching and cogenerative practices were enacted at four additional sites, in two states (Alabama and Delaware) and in two countries (Australia and Ireland). These studies helped explore the feasibility and applicability of coteaching outside of the initial practice sites in Philadelphia and British Columbia. In particular, Kathryn Scantlebury offers an insightful commentary into the gender issues associated with coteaching. Looking at the coteaching experiences of three chemistry interns at a high school in Delaware, Scantlebury explores how men and women share the coteaching space and how patterns of socialization can affect the coteacher dynamic. Gender can have a huge impact, albeit an unintentional one, on the interactions between coteachers. At the Deleware site, for example, the male interns participated in established social networks that connected the male teachers, while the female interns did not. As she warns, “Women are socialized to consider others and place the well-being of others before their own needs. It is possible that without careful monitoring that coteaching may provide two very different teaching experiences for women and men rather than “co-” (shared) experience (p. 247). Overall, Teaching Together, Learning Together effectively integrates theory and practice, drawing from hours of classroom observation and videotaping. The casual reader seeking tips might find the book rather hard going, but researchers and teacher educators may be intrigued by the contributors’ use of the latest micoranalytic methodologies (e.g. conversation and discourse analysis and prosodic analysis) and new technologies (e.g. voice analysis software), and many may find these methods useful for documenting teaching practices and teacher education. Certainly, one might quibble with certain unsubstantiated statements that the contributors make on occasion. For example, the editors write in the introduction, “Rather than spending great amounts of money on workshops, which often bring about little change as the research on science teaching over the past four decades has shown, fewer resources are needed to hire competent science teacher to coteach with regular classroom teachers” (p. 25). This claim would surely have been enhanced if a more thorough discussion of the relevant literature had been included as well. Despite some minor shortcomings in accessibility and style, there is an honesty—even rawness—to the book as the teachers describe and dissect what goes on in their classrooms. Certainly the contributors did not shy away from mistakes and issues, but rather lay bare the problems they encountered as coteachers. Although framed within a science education context, there are principles and lessons to be learned from this work that can be applied across disciplines. About the Reviewer Susanna Calkins, Ph.D. is a Senior Program Associate at the Searle Center for Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, where she conducts research on faculty development. She also lectures in history at Lake Forest College (Lake Forest, IL). Copyright is retained by the first or sole author, who grants right of first publication to the Education Review.