Team Teaching in PBL: A Literature Review in Engineering Education

Abstract

Project-based learning (PBL) is a challenging learning methodology, also for teachers, questioning common assumptions of teachers, like control over the classroom and reliance on expert knowledge. Most challenging is teamwork. Team teaching has been explored in many disciplinary areas, both in traditional as well as in PBL curricula. Teachers may feel uncomfortable with sharing knowledge and being assessed by students and peers. This chapter explores characteristics of team teaching in a PBL context through two consecutive literature reviews. The first seeks to characterise team teaching and its meaning to teachers, zooming in from team teaching in general to team teaching in a PBL context in engineering education. The second connects this characterization to the experiences of a specific PBL teaching team in an engineering context, resulting in insights in experiences at practitioners' level. The authors argue that successful team teaching is crucial for the success of PBL in engineering education and is important as an example for students to engage in collaboration.