Collaborative Teaching at Chicago

When are two teachers better than one? Faculty in the psychology department have brought collaborative science into the classroom by offering innovative courses that draw from the knowledge of faculty in different areas. Unlike team teaching, in which two professors have expertise in a topic and share responsibility for curriculum development and instruction, collaborative teaching allows two faculty members to offer a course that neither one could teach alone. Several recent courses highlight how this approach to teaching provides faculty and students with exciting new ways to examine and contextualize the material. 

In another recent graduate course offered this past Autumn, Quantitative Methods in Cognition and Perception, Marc Berman and Steve Shevell gave students with a solid math background a rigorous introduction to topics such as signal detection theory, Fourier analysis, and multivariate methods and fMRI. In the past, students often had to learn these topics on their own or pick them up working within an individual laboratory. By taking this collaborative course, students were able to learn modern approaches to research design and analysis. When Berman and Shevell first discussed the course, they realized neither of them was an expert in all of the topics they wished to cover. A collaborative course was a natural fit because it provided students with instruction from a real expert in every topic, and also allowed Berman and Shevell to learn from each other.

Faculty in the Department have also been involved in teaching collaborative courses to undergraduates called Big Problems courses. Big Problems courses are designed to be capstone explorations of issues that by their very nature cut across disciplines and take fundamentally different approaches to the questions they address. One such course that has now been offered twice, Understanding Wisdom, was taught most recently by Anne Henly, Senior Lecture in Psychology and the College, and Clark Gilpin, an emeritus professor in the Divinity School. 

For this topic it was clear both humanities and sciences had much to offer the question of what guides wise reasoning, judgment, and behavior. However, the goal in exploring the nature of wisdom was to go beyond a simple, side-by-side presentation of perspectives from philosophy, religious thought, and psychological science, and to engage students in the practical application of these perspectives to the complex and seemingly intractable issues encountered in life. 

To be sure, collaborative teaching can always benefit from the specialized expertise and knowledge each instructor brings to bear on the topic, but Gilpin and Henly wanted to avoid classroom discussions devolving into disjoint, didactic monologues from their respective fields. To accomplish this they used current issues (The Campus Ethos and the Aims of Education), essays (Martin Luther King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail), and even popular movies (Dead Poets Society), to provide common ground for organizing discussions and to illustrate the nature of wisdom, its antecedent conditions, and the processes central to its practice. Using cultural prototypes in this way not only helped students develop a deeper understanding of abstract and esoteric concepts, it allowed Gilpin and Henly to exemplify for the students the analytic application and integration of very distinct theoretical perspectives and methods, and to illustrate how such vastly different approaches to understanding complex aspects of human nature can be mutually enlightening. 

Collaborative teaching across a disciplinary chasm of this breadth requires a great deal of joint study, reading, and planning. But perhaps more importantly, it requires what is often referred to in wisdom studies as epistemic humility—a willingness not only to learn about another field’s approach, but to actually take seriously and learn from its answers to our questions.