IN-PERSON MADRID FOCUS ON PEDAGOGY. SECTION B

Abstract

Teaching remains largely an individual practice (OECD, 2020), requiring teachers to respond independently to challenges such as increasing student diversity, technological demands following COVID-19, growing child poverty, educational reforms, and high attrition rates among novice teachers. Team teaching – defined as collaboration between two or more teachers in planning, delivering, and evaluating instruction (Baeten & Simons, 2014) – is often proposed as a promising response to these challenges and as a professional development strategy fostering collaboration, shared expertise, and collective learning. In this presentation, we report the findings of a large-scale research project in which three empirical studies examined the benefits of team teaching for both students and teachers: (1) a survey study involving 479 teachers who apply team teaching (Decuyper et al., 2025); (2) a multiple case study based on video observations (Decuyper et al., 2025); and (3) an experimental study with 267 students and 16 teachers comparing the effects of team teaching with individual teaching (De Weedt et al., 2025). Drawing on these studies, we refine the conceptualization of team teaching and demonstrate that it enables teachers to more effectively enact complex dimensions of effective teaching (Van de Grift, 2007). We also show that students receive stronger support and achieve greater learning gains in team teaching settings, while acknowledging that several challenges remain. In addition, we identify the key conditions necessary for the effective implementation of team teaching.