• Introduction
• Articulating Goals
• Faculty as Learners
• Sharing Authority: The Models
• A Richer Classroom
• Authority and Trust
• Growth and Community
• Printable Text of Article

Kim Eby A lot of the conversations about authority in the classroom have been about sharing authority with students. In the first-year learning communities in New Century College (NCC), teaching is so team-oriented, with six to eight faculty, and we bring in a lot of support people who are also faculty, that we started thinking about sharing authority not just with the students, but how, in that team, we could share our decision-making about such issues as the curriculum, the assignments, and how to grade. All these different issues should be negotiated, giving everyone a sense of autonomy and control over his or her own teaching, and yet, in this team setting, there has to be a set-up that’s shared. How do you determine what is shared? Who has a voice in the team? That actually started me thinking about how our team began negotiations and consensus-building. Why did our team work? What was it about this process that facilitates our teams?

Teresa Michals Linked classes build in much less explicit attention to sharing authority with students and faculty, but I have noticed two developments that show how important an issue this is for the program. First, I have to articulate everything in a linked class. I used to be able to teach my class with reference to no one but myself. Now, my goals and objectives have to be explained, both to myself and to my co-teacher. That, in turn, makes the explaining to my students easier, because I've already gone through the process. 

Second, the kind of authority I share with the students is the authority of their experience, because if they have been in two classes together, they bond more, they compare notes and create a cohort mentality. One of the experiences they're affirming for each other is that this is not like high school, but in some ways they want it to be like high school. So they talk together and say, "This is harder than high school. Something's wrong." And they turn to me and say. "Fix it. This is too hard." Whereas if they were divided, and did not share more than one class, they would just feel inadequate, and try to come up to my standards and learn how to play the 'game.' When students are learning together, they gain both a stronger individual voice, and a collective voice in their learning, and sometimes they use it very effectively.

Elizabeth Patten In the transition to university program, the University 100 courses, we partner peer advisors, who are undergraduates, in the classroom with faculty. We have over thirty sections, and it's interesting to observe some of the sharing of authority in the classroom. For many, that works out very well, while others struggle. It seems to me that some of the faulty members come in very focused on content, whereas the peer advisers realize the importance of content, but are focused on the importance of developing the community. As the faculty realize that peer advisers have both training and a background in community development, they become willing to negotiate a more equal give and take in the classroom. In many ways, some faculty have to see the authority to feel confident in giving up authority.

Elizabeth Gunn In deciding when and how to exercise authority, I find I have to talk it through with myself and my fellow teacher: it's like a decision tree I have to go through to sort out why authority might be important in one sense and not in another. We clearly know more than our students about certain topics, and then the issue becomes, "How do we use that expertise? How do we exercise that authority when going into the classroom, communicating that knowledge to the students?" That's when I really love to co-teach, to share classroom authority, because I'm not an expert on all the possible ways we might introduce material.

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