Jobs for the Future, a college readiness and career advancement organization, recently featured the collaborative efforts of instructors at Central Georgia Technical College for Team Teaching models in their Accelerating Opportunity initiative’s national publication, Transformational Teaching: A Team Approach.

Following recent economic trends, the need for educated adults, and provisions of job support, the AO initiative enables innovative educational techniques for adult education and community college programs. Through research and featuring schools this publication looks at how their performance translates to educational and career success for students.

Transformational Teaching explores these dynamics in significant detail, sharing insights from teacher across AO states on instructional efforts. In this particular edition, Team Teaching is the focus. Team Teaching is an educational instructional strategy that suggests a content instructor collaborate with a basic skills instructor in course instruction. Research shows this model to be a potentially transformative one as it can bridge gaps for students from adult education coursework to college content.

Specifically for CGTC, the publication spoke to the efforts of Jeremiah Johnson, Accelerating Opportunity lead instructor, to initially facilitate a “culture shift” among both adult education faculty and program faculty to embrace “assessing students upfront” within AO to, “ensure this program would be a good fit.”

“It’s coming up at meetings, luncheons and general discourse, “said Johnson to JFF.

The publication continued to discuss the post-cultural-shift work of the College. CGTC is featured for its varied use of the Team Teaching models, including “acting as a monitoring teacher and providing contextualized instruction” in math techniques that will serve GED students into Welding courses.

Johnson said he is grateful to Eli Walker, instructor of Computer Information Systems, and Jason Haramut, instructor of Welding & Joining Technology, for allowing him the “privilege” of team teaching along with them.

“I’ve learned a great deal from them in regards to comprehensive word processing and welding, respective to their pathway, and in three years of working together for the benefit of the AO students at CGTC, we have been able to use the team teaching model to effectively inform and guide many students to graduation and employment,” Johnson said.

Also mentioned in the publication are the success of coordinators, success coaches and student navigators who played a major role in combating barriers AO students have in meeting their educational goals. Their presence alleviated some of that pressure on instructors and allowed for more collaboration.

To read more on AO and the Team Teaching efforts of CGTC faculty visit, http://www.jff.org/sites/default/files/publications/materials/Transformational%20Teaching%20091516.pdf.