Team teaching merged sections as a way of mentoring faculty

Mentoring new faculty is an important activity in academic departments, especially with teaching techniques such as group learning emerging as effective new tools. However with tight resources it often seems hard to make time for mentoring or to free experienced faculty to mentor new colleagues. We describe our experience with an approach that addresses both issues. Mentor-mentee teams of faculty were assigned merged classes that reached at least as many students as the individual classes of the faculty members would have. The classes were then team taught by the mentor and the mentee. We describe the specific scenario in which this effort was set and we discuss its implementation as well as lessons learned in hindsight. This description should allow readers to decide if such an approach is viable at their institution.