Co-Teaching

[hoodd]

We are just getting started using Canvas.  Have any of you every had an assignment that was for 2 classes?  For example....Social Studies and English....the social studies teacher graded content and then the English teacher the grammar etc?  How did this work for you?  What was the experience like?  Thanks of your input!

[cgiraud]

This would be a great feature for Canvas to add. It would promote terrific teacher collaboration and encourage the building of assignments that are cross-curricular. I hope they add it. I think the only way to do this right now would be to add the teachers to each other's pages and have them both offer feedback in the assessment process.

[kmeeusen · Accepted solution]

Deanna:

We are a technical college, but we use co-teachers extensively in our I-Best programs (students are enrolled in a dev ed/ESL course, while also enrolled in a technical program and both faculty contribute to instruction). At another college where I teach, we have a program to embed Librarians into courses.

What we do is:

• Enroll both faculty in the course,
• Create grading rubrics for each assignment,
• The rubric will include criteria for both disciplines, and each faculty member will grade their section of the rubric to provide a cumulative score for the assignment.

Canvas grading rubrics work very well for this purpose, because even though one teacher may have made it into SpeedGrader first and submitted a score, the second teacher can come in later, re-open the rubrics and add their scoring. Learn more about grading rubrics @How do I add a Rubric to an Assignment?

Other Considerations:

• This does require a bit of coordination by faculty, because once the first scorer has submitted a score, the assignment falls off of the teacher to-do list.
• It is probably best to mute the assignment until both teachers have submitted their scores. this way, students will not see a partially graded assignment in the grade book and have one of those mini heart attacks students are prone to. Learn more about muting assignments @How do I mute an assignment in the Gradebook?

You might want to consider adding a feature request for strengthening the functionality of co-teachers in Canvas. There is a lot of co-teaching occurring out there in K-12, Higher Ed, and Industry. There are also quite a bit of college faculty looking for better solutions for TA grading. You can learn more about submitting feature ideas @How do I create a new feature idea?

I hope this helps,

Agent K