Some departments at UB - such as biology and chemistry - offer courses instructed by more than one professor each semester, through the use of team-teaching. This style of teaching is intended to provide students with a variety of professors who are experts in their respective fields.
"In the sciences, the level of detail involved in any topic is extremely dense and complex," said Frank Bright, professor and associate chair of the chemistry department. "Non-experts can certainly weed through this and offer the students a good course, but the course will always lack something when students ask detailed questions about an issue and the instructor is not an expert."
While intro-level courses are generally taught by individual professors, the chemistry department often applies the team-teaching concept to junior, senior or graduate-level courses, where a greater depth of knowledge is expected.
"In contrast, when you have that section of a course taught by an expert on the subject, it is amazing at how deep student inquiry can reach and how broad the coverage can be," he continued.
"[The students] love it, because they have the expert teaching the subject of interest," said chemistry professor Luis Colon. "There are no superficial answers and the subject can be explored as deep as the students would like it."
Jim Atwood, chair of the chemistry department, said that students in higher-level courses are often more "receptive" to this method of teaching, one of the reasons the department chooses only to offer it to upperclassmen or graduate students.
"I think that it's a nice change," said Andrew McLaughlin, a junior biology major. "It is better to have a class taught by a professor who is an expert in his field rather than have a professor who just has a general understanding. The only difficulty is that you only get one shot with each professor."
Although the biology department has a different policy - it does offer team-taught courses to freshmen and sophomores - Christopher Davis, a senior biology major, expressed similar sentiments.
" I think that it's better for upper-level classes," he said. "You get a better understanding of the material this way . I had these professors before in lower level classes and so it really wasn't hard to adjust."
This method could pose problems to students who are not familiar with each professor, however.
"I think it's hard to adjust to each professor," said Philip Stavrides, a graduate student in the biology department. "Unless you had the professor before, you really don't know what to expect."
Mary Bisson, chair of the biology department, said the implementation of team-taught courses has proven to be effective, as shown by favorable evaluations of the classes.
"The faculty interact with each other in a way that is instructive or interesting to the students; they may model the kind of discourse that scholars engage in," Bisson said.
According to Bright, the chemistry department has received "no real critical commentary," and the complaints they have received are primarily from students who score better on one professor's test than on another's.
"Students do complain from time to time, but on the average they seem to realize that team teaching is just a method," said Bright. "It really doesn't change the formal coverage in the class at all."
Based on the student evaluations, Bisson believes that so long as the best possible coverage of the material is presented, students will be satisfied with the course. Bright concurred, saying it is better to have several instructors, who each teach something they know well, rather than have a professor lecture simply because it is his or her current assignment.
Edith Kabingu, a graduate student working toward a Ph.D. in immunology, said, "It's difficult to have to adjust, but we work it out somehow. Having to adjust to the different experts is definitely worth it."
Bright agreed.
"One of the great things about having experts at the university is that there are so many experts just down the hall, or up or down a floor, who are performing cutting-edge research on the subjects that we teach to our students," he said. "That is, we are in an environment where new knowledge - the stuff that ends up in textbooks - is being discovered each and every day in real time."
