Co-teaching in higher education: reflective conversation on shared experience as continued professional development for lecturers and health and social care students

• Published in: Reflective practice 2005-01, Vol.6 (4), p.491-506
• Main Authors: Crow, Jayne, Smith, Lesley
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1462-3943; 1470-1103
• DOI: 10.1080/14623940500300582

There are a variety of mechanisms used for the continued professional development (CPD) of higher education (HE) lecturers, some of which are more useful than others in promoting reflection on practice. Reflective conversations between peers involving collegial probing are suggested as important catalysts to reflexivity and we propose here that the process of co-teaching can provide a powerful vehicle for this activity. The reflective conversations that co-teaching encourages are based upon joint reflections on shared experiences and as such add another dimension to the reflection. This provides the opportunity for the deconstruction of those experiences and the reconstruction of a shared meaning in a way that transforms understandings and changes practice. In this article we describe an inquiry into our co-teaching of an undergraduate health and social studies module. We present fragments of our data and analysis in the hope that some of the conversations and shared reflections resonate with readers and will encourage them to embark on co-teaching if they have not already done so. Through our examination of the data we found that the reflective conversations on our shared experiences that were engendered by our co-teaching experience had identified a range of interesting questions/issues and that these issues mirrored closely those faced by our students as experienced health and social care practitioners. We go on to suggest ways in which reflective conversations between peers on shared experience could also be utilized to facilitate reflective practice in our health and social studies students.