By Dr. Brittany Jacobs | 07/09/2025
Imagine meeting the general manager of a professional football team during your first course in a sports management degree program. It’s even more exciting to have a sports professional respond to your discussion posts with insights from experiences gained from working in the National Football League (NFL®).
What if that same sports pro provided feedback on your final projects or created the opportunity for a live session where you could ask any questions about the sports industry or the course content? While it might sound like something out of a fairytale, team teaching programs can provide students with such an opportunity.
What Is Team Teaching?
Team teaching is an alternative teaching model where two or more teachers instruct the same group of students. Popularized in the 1950s, team teaching has often been utilized as a strategy to support students with individualized education programs. Since its advent, team teaching has evolved into a practice that can be applied in different ways, such as co-teaching.
Co-Teaching
Co-teaching is one version of team teaching. Like the original model, co-teaching also leverages the teaching skills and experience of two or more teachers in an inclusive classroom. Co-teaching can include different models such as:
- Parallel teaching – A parallel co-teaching model divides a class into two groups and both teachers deliver the same content.
- Station teaching – Station teaching divides the content into multiple sections. Students then rotate to different instructors to explore the content at each station.
- Instruction with one teacher and one observer – The lead instructor delivers the lesson while the other teacher helps manage student behavior, engagement, and collects data on student learning.
The key to co-teaching, regardless of the model, is that two teachers exist in the same classroom. Both use collaboration and provide various levels of instruction.
Why Use a Team Teaching or Co-Teaching Model?
Co-teaching provides additional individualized attention to students and exposes students to different teaching styles, which can improve student learning. With more than one teacher in a classroom, it is easier to teach students in smaller groups or manage them one-on-one.
Additionally, the collaboration modeled by teachers in an environment that supports team teaching can encourage students to work collaboratively and improve group dynamics amongst students. According to Ashley Abramson in an American Psychological Association article, students in team-taught courses report learning twice as much compared to traditional formats.
The Difference Between Team Teaching and Co-Teaching
While some educators utilize the two terms interchangeably, others highlight that a team-teaching model requires an equal sharing of the classroom load. On the other hand, co-teaching may utilize various models that create different load management outcomes.
What Does Team Teaching Look Like in a Collegiate Classroom?
Leveraging a team-teaching model in a classroom means that rather than pairing two faculty members to team-teach a class, a faculty member is paired with an industry expert like the general manager of an NFL team. Both then serve as instructors for the course.
Leveraging the strengths and expertise of both instructors, this type of team structure allows a faculty member to manage the classroom, ensuring that the desired outcomes are met and assessed and that there is no risk to accreditation or course quality. The industry expert elevates the course by infusing the academic setting with industry expertise.
For instance, Kevin Carr, the founder of Pro2CEO and the former VP of Player Programs for the National Basketball Association (NBA®), served as an industry expert in graduate-level sports marketing courses at American Public University.
Guest Speakers in Higher Education
Most college students have had a guest speaker in their courses. However, you might wonder, “Could a guest speaker be as effective as implementing a team teaching or co-teaching model in the classroom?”
In most instances, the guest speaker is an expert from a relevant area of a professional industry such as sports management. The guest speaker will often join a course for one session and the discussion will likely be in a question-and-answer format.
Guest speakers have proven to be invaluable assets who can help with career readiness, provide real-world insights, and increase student engagement. In fact, scholar Mengyan Ma notes that “carefully selected guest speakers, paired with intentional preparation and follow-up activities, greatly enrich students’ educational experiences.”
Guest speakers alone, however, provide only a small fraction of the potential benefits that a team-teaching process may provide to a group of students.
The Benefits of Industry Expertise in the Classroom
A team-teaching model using industry experts takes the use of guest speakers – a tried-and-true teaching strategy in collegiate settings – and amplifies their impact. In such a model, the industry expert is integrated into all aspects of the course and participates for the course’s duration. The value of using an industry expert for either a small group or a large group includes relationship formation and student engagement.
In comparison to the use of guest speakers, a team-teaching model provides opportunity for relationships to extend well beyond what might be developed when a guest speaker joins a course. With a team-teaching model, students and their instructors create a working relationship with the industry expert, who then becomes part of their network.
For example, it is not every day that a student produces a marketing plan that might be reviewed by a marketing director of a professional sports team. Similarly, students could discuss their insights on name, image, and likeness (NIL) legislation with a collegiate athletic director.
This ability to seek guidance from an industry pro is where team teaching truly shines. Students are immersed in the course’s material through their access to their industry expert instructor. Without leaving the classroom, they garner the benefits of applied learning in a professional industry.
The Benefits of Team Teaching for Students
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of a collaborative team-teaching approach for students is that they can benefit from two instructors – the faculty member and industry expert. Both teachers will have distinctly different experiences, teaching styles, and expertise.
Multiple perspectives allow students to learn more about the course’s content than they might otherwise. Also, they may connect with one teacher or teaching style more than the other, enabling the disparate learning needs of students in different learning communities to be met in various ways.
From a numbers perspective, team teaching allows students to receive approximately twice the amount of support in team-taught classes, as compared to a different educational institution that does not offer collaborative, team-teaching model. This increase in individualized attention enhances student engagement, facilitates understanding, and improve students’ motivation to learn.
The value of using more than one teacher goes beyond that provided when teaching assistants (TAs) are involved in the classroom. Unlike TAs who are often graduate students studying in the field, both team teachers are experts who are highly credentialed in their respective areas.
Additionally, when students are enrolled in a team-taught course, they have a direct model for team building, collaborative communication, and innovative teaching approaches. All these skills add to each student's professional development and can then be practiced in the real world upon graduation.
The Advantages of Team Teaching for Faculty Members
Team teaching provides many benefits for instructors. First, it allows one faculty member to share the planning and instruction workload, which promotes collaborative planning and teaching.
The team-teaching model allows the faculty member to reallocate time towards other responsibilities, such as providing robust feedback in courses or developing creative ways to assess learning objectives. Often, when time is limited, innovation and creativity are one of the first areas to suffer.
Second, there is a significant opportunity for professional growth in the same classroom. For instance, faculty members and industry expert professors can learn from each other’s example or extend their knowledge in particular areas. Team teaching can also introduce a faculty member to new resources or new insights that can support student learning or better prepare them for future career paths.
Team teaching provides additional opportunities for one teacher to have one-on-one or small group interactions with students. As a result, faculty members can develop stronger relationships with their students, understand their needs, and provide more individualized education through collaborative teaching.
The Benefits of Team Teaching for Industry Experts
From a logistical perspective, most industry experts are highly sought after, and their time is valuable and limited. Because of time constraints, they are often integrated into courses as guest speakers and traditionally talk for 30 minutes to one hour.
However, industry experts may not have expertise in classroom management, assessment, or curricular design. Also, they simply may not have the bandwidth to manage some of the more time-intensive portions of a course, such as grading.
Team-teaching approaches allow industry experts to leverage their experiences. They can share industry insights with students without the worry of classroom management.
Working with students and other faculty members can also lead to professional development for the industry expert. For instance, lessons from these two groups can challenge knowledge and existing ways of thinking, allowing all parties to continue learning throughout courses.
What Does It Take to Be a Team Teacher?
Shared teaching can be challenging, particularly for faculty members who have maintained their own courses and have developed their own specific processes for classroom management or content delivery. As a result, team teaching requires a willingness to be open. New insights may come from the industry expert that change one's way of thinking.
On the flip side, an industry expert must be prepared to re-enter the field of education, and they may not have been a part of education since their own graduations. For industry experts, understanding their responsibilities – as well as and the roles of the faculty members and students – is key to successful team teaching.
Serving in academia can often require a different type of thinking because one group of students may resonate with a topic while another group may remain less engaged. Different models of content delivery and feedback can be incredibly important in academic communities, and team teachers must be willing to explore these modalities together.
Overall, both instructors must be willing to collaborate, determine how they will share responsibility, and plan as a team. They are both incredible resources for their group of students and can facilitate the learning of their students far more effectively than one instructor if a team-teaching model is properly executed.
The Master’s in Sports Management at APU
For adult learners who are interested in sports management, American Public University (APU) provides an online Master of Science in Sports Management. Taught by expert sports instructors and industry experts (when sports industry pros are available), courses in this degree program feature topics such as the sports industry, sports law, and sports marketing, promotion, and public relations. In other courses, students will learn about sports finance and sports management.
Students can choose from one of three concentrations to acquire the knowledge best suited to their professional goals. These concentrations include:
- Coaching theory and strategy
- Interscholastic athletic administration
- Sports business leadership
This master’s degree in sports management has specialty accreditation from the Commission on Sports Management Accreditation (COSMA). COSMA accreditation ensures that this academic program is thoroughly evaluated for high quality by higher education professionals.
For more information on this program, visit APU’s nursing and health sciences degree program page.
NFL is a registered trademark of the National Football League.
NBA is a registered trademark of the National Basketball Association.
Dr. Brittany Jacobs is an Associate Professor and Department Chair for the sports management and esports programs at American Public University. She is highly involved in the Olympic and Paralympic movements and worked for USA Rugby before returning to academia. Much of her current research centers around officials and other marginalized populations providing a direct connection to her previous coaching and officiating experiences.
Brittany holds a master’s degree in sports management from the University of Texas, a master’s degree in secondary education from the University of New Hampshire, and a B.S. in kinesiology from the University of New Hampshire, where she also played collegiate field hockey. She earned her Ph.D. in sports & exercise science with a doctoral minor in statistics from the University of Northern Colorado.
