Using Special Teams for Teaching and Not Team Teaching

Undoubtedly, teaching at the college level requires professors to orchestrate and play a diverse set of roles which require the performance of different tasks and which depend on a variety of talents and temperaments. Historically, it has been almost universally accepted that all the diverse roles to which a college teacher must play, should be assumed by one teacher. James L. Bess and his associates (2000) challenge this long held assumption and suggest that special teams for teaching should be established, whereby the various teaching roles are unbundled and differentiated with separate faculty fulfilling the individual roles. Rather than team teaching in which different faculty teach a particular portion of the course content, Bess argues that different faculty should be used to perform the diverse roles of a teacher in each specific course. Bess suggest seven specialist\u27s roles that faculty should perform: (1) pedagogue; (2) researcher; (3) lecturer; (4) discussion leader; (5) mentor; (6) integrator; and (7) assessor. An explanation of each teaching role follows