8.5
Policy of the Office of Academic Affairs on Team-Taught Courses

Updated as of July 1, 2021

Team teaching is a resource to be shared among faculty across the University. In considering requests for team teaching, Academic Affairs must balance the pedagogical innovation that team teaching affords with the distribution of enrollments, faculty members’ course loads, and curricular demands and requirements. All proposals must be approved by the appropriate department chairs and divisional deans.

Department chairs will manage the proposals. Requests for approval will include a clear rationale that explores the intellectual and pedagogical purposes to be served by this format. If instructors are from the same department, the rationale must include a full discussion of why the proposed course should be team-taught.

In each case, a team-taught course must provide an appropriate number of spaces. Although this will vary across discipline and academic division, it is expected that spaces will be more plentiful than in a course taught by a single faculty member within the departments in question. The request should specify the minimum number of spaces that will be available. It is unlikely that requests for team-taught courses with very low enrollments will be approved.

All instructors are expected to collaborate in the design of the course, be present for all class meetings, and to share in assessing and evaluating student work.

Team-taught courses may be repeated, but this will require that the chairs submit a new request that incorporates and is justified by an evaluation of the prior iteration of the course.

Team-taught courses that have been approved according to the above procedures will normally count as one full-credit course for each instructor.

If faculty wish to team-teach with a non-Wesleyan instructor, the faculty member must receive approval from the department and divisional dean. A course is considered co-taught and requires approval if the non-Wesleyan instructor will participate in 50% or more of the scheduled class meetings. Guest artists/lecturers who will participate in fewer than 50% of class meetings do not require pre-approval.