Intra-Coordinated Team Teaching: Benefits for Both Students and Instructors

vantage is shared with most lecture courses. Debate format courses are recommended as a promising teaching device for at least some areas of psychology. This format appears to produce more interest and independent scholarly research than other formats, particularly the lecture format. It also juxtaposes differing viewpoints on an issue allowing students to recognize controversial areas and to a certain extent to distinguish paradigmatic assumptions from empirical results. Evaluating specific learning from this format is more difficult because the instructors must disagree on at least some important points in order to present a debate. Finally, the debate course had a stimulating effect on the instructors. Although both of us had taught similar material in the past, the debate forced us to re-read and re-think both our own and the opposing position more intensely than is necessary to repeat lecture material with appropriate up-dates.