Team-teaching Within Schools of Business: Increasing the Chance for Success

Applications of team-teaching within schools of business appear to contain inherent defects, which lead to superficiality. A three-fold modification is suggested and a case history applying this solution is presented. A preliminary general model for team-teaching success is also presented. With their numerous disciplines-all inter-related, some overlapping-schools of business seem to be ideal environments for application of the team-teaching concept. Yet a review of business and education journals and personal knowledge and experience indicate that team-taught classes are very much underrepresented in business schools ’ curricula. Team-teaching occurs when two or more teachers work together regularly to enhance instruction. Patterns of cooperation can include planning and designing materials or instruc-tional processes, sharing groups of students and/or sharing instruction, or any combination of those activities (Rutherford 1979). Within schools of business, team-teaching can be ap-plied both intradepartmentally (for example, two marketing instructors jointly offering a section of the principles course) and interde-partmentally (as when the MBA capstone course is a cooperative effort of the finance, marketing, management, and quantitative sys-tems departments). FROM AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE Team-teaching developed within secondary schools in the late 1950s and 1960s. According to some sources, its success was minimal-a concept which &dquo;never got off the ground on a massive scale&dquo; (Nolan and Roper 1977). On the Gary D. Klein is Associate Professor of Marketin