The Pedagogical Value of Co-Teaching: Case Study – Computer Science

Co-teaching, defined as the collaborative planning and delivery of teaching by two or more educators within the same learning space, is a people centric pedagogic approach than can promote student understanding, a sense of community and inclusion across cohorts as well as increae staff enjoyment of teaching.
In this series of Case Studies we talk to several academic staff who have been practicing Co-Teaching to understand how they approach this and what the benefits and challenges are.

Professor Sean Bechhofer Professor Steve Pettifer

How long have you been co-delivering for your course units and what was the rationale for taking this approach?

We delivered this course for the first time in Feb 2020. We’re both strong believers that there’s very little value in just talking at people in a traditional lecture format, so we’d already decided that we’d spend a lot of the ‘lecture’ time doing live-coding instead, but we think it’s fair to say that our thinking was in-progress when lockdown happened, which forced us to think about how to do something more valuable than a ‘zoom lecture’ .

Can you explain about how you deliver your sessions, what is the dynamic between the teaching staff, do you adopt different roles?

This is a blended learning course in a fully ‘flipped’ style, so students are expected to watch some pre-recorded videos and do some reading (and possibly some experimenting with code) before the live session. The videos are done in a sort-of coversational/podcast style where one of us leads the discussion on that week’s topic, and the other acts as a little like an ‘engaged student’ asking relevant questions or adding in extra thoughts along the way. The live sessions then follow a similar concept, with one of us working through some live coding in front of the students on one projector screen, and the other illustrating the ideas by drawing on a visualiser on another projector screen and helping to field questions from students. We’ve split who leads on the videos and in the live sessions roughly 50/50 by topic, some of which span multiple weeks, and that’s resulted in a roughly 50/50 split in terms of who leads which sessions.

What are the benefits/drawbacks to this approach for you as staff and also your students?

For students we think this approach gives a much more engaging way to learn than even the best traditional lecture; they’ve already ‘seen the lecture’ (albeit in podcast video form), so the live coding sessions are inherently interactive, and as well as seeing things happen for real, they get to see us mess up for real by getting a bit of code wrong etc. For us having a ‘buddy’ there to spot what the error is removes a lot of the stress of live coding and actually makes the sessions fun to teach and means that they get to see our thinking process as we figure out why something didn’t work the way we expected it to.

What has been the impact of this approach on your non-teaching time – for example moving from 100% teaching of half a unit to 50% teaching of an entire unit?

Computer Science course units typically have two one-hour delivery slots a week, with one academic involved. For our course, we only teach one hour per week, but there are two of us there. So status quo for students in the sense that in elapsed hours they’re still doing two per week (1ish for the pre-watch, 1 for the live-code), status quo for us in that we both teach 10 sessions, we’re just doing them together. Post-COVID there was of course a huge outcry about ‘contact hours’, and in one sense you could argue that this format delivers 1 fewer elapsed contact hour per week; on the other hand you can argue that for that 1 hour you’re getting two academics’ time, and a format that’s more meaningful than a traditional lecture.

We don’t think that aspect has made any radical difference to the experience of non-teaching time really. We made what we think are good quality teaching videos in 2020 and haven’t had to touch them since.

Has there been any change in student outcomes since you adopted this approach or any student feedback that relates to team teaching?

Hard to tell in terms of outcomes: in its previous incarnation the course was taught at second year level in a different style, and our version of the course, which is now taught in the first year, has only ever been taught our way. The feedback on the course is very positive though.

How do you approach the planning of the sessions? Both plan sessions, take it turns etc.

We just split the topics roughly 50/50. When we created the videos whoever was leading would create the slides and figure out what they wanted to say, so generally speaking the other person would be seeing them for the first time when we made the recording, which made it easier to react naturally. This wasn’t a strict rule and occasionally the ‘leader’ would prime the other person in advance of the recording to drop in a question or make a comment at a certain point, but that was rare. There was a little bit of editing afterwards, and the very occasional retake, but the ‘podcast style’ is very forgiving and there wasn’t much editing required.

In terms of the live sessions we’ve stuck to pretty-much the prompt sheets we came up with in 2020, and just tweaked them slightly as we’ve gone along (spend a bit more time on this and less on that etc) by discussion between ourselves after and between the sessions. These are a list of things we plan to do in the sessions, snippets of code to save us typing everything, questions to ask the students if they don’t ask them themselves etc.

Because most of the examinable material is there in the videos and pre-read, or in the exercises, in the live sessions we’ve got a fair amount of latitude to go wherever the audience’s questions take us within reason.

Any issues with student queries? Do they favour one over the other? As you are sharing responsibility for the whole course how are you ensuring consistency of messaging to students?

They tend to ask whoever was the ‘leader’ for that topic, and we encourage students to interact via the learning environment (which until this year for the first time was Teams, and is now Canvas) so that everyone can see the answer.

Anything about this approach to teaching that you didn’t foresee?

In its first iteration, we delivered the course online during lockdown, and that went really very well. Bringing the course back into the real world we found that fewer students were coding along with us on their laptops in the lecture theatre than they were when they were at home, but the outcomes have been steady and the feedback very positive, and it’s just a more fun way to do teaching.

Advice for any staff wanting to adopt this approach?

For the video side of things it took us maybe the first video to find our groove and figure out how to talk to one another naturally in what is obviously not a natural setup (we started off sounding like we were talking to a class rather than to one another), so perhaps do a short throwaway experimental recording before committing to recording an ‘episode’. Our ‘episodes’ are maybe 30 to 40 minutes, broken up into three or four videos.

A good rapport really helps here. We’d been colleagues for many years, so we were comfortable “just chatting” and the conversational style worked well.

We were originally thinking pre-COVID that we’d record the videos in one of our offices just sitting either side of a decent microphone, but lockdown forced us to record the audio tracks separately home and merge them later. Perhaps not surprisingly this ended up being way better and allows you to edit out any coughs or unwanted noises much more easily. So even if you are using one of the podcast studios on campus, probably still keep to separate tracks.

For the live sessions, every year we look at the list of things to be covered in the live sessions and worry that there won’t be enough to fill the hour. But the reality is that with the interaction being built into the design rather than bolted on a quiz etc, the time goes past very quickly and it’s a satisfying experience for everyone.

Thanks to Sean and Steve for sharing their experiences.

Dr Chris Parlett and Professor Arthur Garforth – Chemical Engineering

Professor Richard Winpenny and Professor Eric McInnes – Chemistry

Professor Uli Sattler and Professor Sean Bechhofer – Computer Science – coming soon

Dr Rachel Parker-Strak, Dr Rachel Studd and Dr Aurelie Le Normand – Fashion Business and Textiles – coming soon