By Jennifer Heldt Powell

Special to the Gazette

Instructors teaching the Health Policy 2000 course don't paint a picture for their students; they present them with real life puzzle pieces they must fit together.

Throughout the year, students hear from more than a dozen professors, each talking about their area of expertise. As students are exposed to different perspectives, they sometimes realize issues are more complicated than they had expected.

"I often walked out with fewer opinions than I'd had going in because the sessions made me realize how complex the issues are," said doctoral student Melinda Beeuwkes Buntin. "But it was fabulous to meet all these different people and to hear from instructors who are experts on the problems."

This year, Beeuwkes Buntin will help other students fit the puzzle pieces together as a teaching fellow leading weekly discussions for Health Policy 2000, one of a growing number of collaboratively taught classes.

Across Harvard, the team teaching approach is used to give students a more complete understanding of a wide range of subjects, from environmental ethics to helping children.

Students see how some problems are more easily solved by attacking them from several angles. They also learn that professors sometimes disagree, but can put aside those differences to reach a common goal.

"It forces us to be a university -- it forces everybody to talk together. That has pushed us together to do research and share students," said Professor of Health Economics Richard Frank, one of the primary teachers of Health Policy 2000. "For the students, it allows them to takes advantage of the richness that Harvard has to offer."

The practice of collaborative teaching has grown with President Neil L. Rudenstine's Interfaculty Initiatives, launched in 1991. The Initiatives encourage faculty from different fields to work together on research and teaching projects in five areas: Ethics and the Professions; Schooling and Children; Environmental Studies; Health Policy; and Mind/Brain/Behavior.

As scholars break down the walls among their traditional fields of study, students learn the skills they will need to survive in a world that needs them to work with people who have different opinions or who see things from different angles.

Putting The Pieces Together

A doctor, a factory owner, and a politician can each affect a person's health, so it follows that many different perspectives must go into teaching about health policy. That is the belief behind the new Health Policy Ph.D. program, which includes Health Policy 2000.

"Students need to hear from different instructors, and this course introduces them to the faculty at Harvard," said Joseph P. Newhouse, founder of the program and John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy and Management.

Students not only hear about different areas of health policy, they also hear different perspectives on the same issue, such as smoking.

A doctor may consider smoking a problem because it harms people who work and live with the smoker, but an economist becomes alarmed when smoking reduces the work force or causes insurance rates to increase, said Economics Professor David Cutler, another primary teacher of Health Policy 2000.

Team teaching has become a cornerstone of the ChildrenÕs Studies at Harvard Initiative fostered by the Harvard Project on Schooling Children (HPSC).

"It makes students wiser in terms of thinking of solutions," said HPSC Executive Director Katherine Merseth. "Suppose we look only at psychology. That ignores all the other things that affect a child, such as their family structure, their health, and their environment. If we take only one strand of the fabric that is woven around a child, we would be naive."

The Children's Studies at Harvard Initiative each year intends to sponsor, through stipend support, collaboratively taught classes.

Classroom Challenges

As students hear from different professors, they are challenged to think for themselves, melding the different viewpoints.

"A lesson we try to bring home to the students is that legal concepts are up for grabs," said Law Professor Bruce Hay, who has taught Civil Procedure with Law Professor Anne-Marie Slaughter. "It creates an element of discomfort at first because they come in expecting the answer and then here are these two professors who disagree."

Students taking Topics in Environmental Ethics are confronted with professors who approach the issue from two very different backgrounds.

Public Health Professor Timothy E. Ford begins by examining how water pollution affects people's health and survival, while Timothy Weiskel from the Divinity School is more concerned about how society's contradictory values and belief systems allowed the public health problem to get so bad in the first place. Both believe, however, that environmental problems can only be solved by people working collaboratively across academic fields.

"It's critical for students to be exposed to different perspectives," Ford said. "And it's crucial for us as professors to hear from one another."

Making it Work

Although professors enjoy teaching collaboratively and believe it helps students, they said it is difficult, largely because of the additional time needed.

Professors often meet weekly and most attend each otherÕs classes to answer questions and provide continuity from one lecture to the next. They have many ways of divvying up work, such as correcting assignments.

Hay and Slaughter each wrote and graded one question of their exam. Other professors each grade all the papers.

However the mechanics of managing the class are worked out, collaborative teaching will only succeed if the professors are open to new ideas.

"It requires a willingness to speak to one another," Weiskel said. "You have to respect one another. It's hard to find people who will admit they don't have the whole picture, but only a piece of the complex puzzle. You have to get beyond dismissing one another's view point."

In addition to getting over philosophical differences, professors must learn to work together and play off one another's strengths.

Hay and Slaughter took turns giving lectures. They followed a detailed outline of what was to be covered, but still didn't know quite what to expect from one another.

"You have to cede a lot of control to someone else and a lot of teachers are uncomfortable with that," Hay said. But, he added, he enjoyed the spontaneity.

"It lent an aspect of improvisation and excitement," he said.

The extra time and effort pays off as professors get new insights from students and from each other. They are more likely to collaborate on research projects, and they see new angles to the problems they have been trying to solve.

"It's a lot of fun working with the other faculty," Cutler said. "I've been able to go into all these areas that I wouldn't have otherwise."

Which illustrates another reason why collaborative teaching is effective -- it teaches students how to put aside differences and look at problems from other people's viewpoints, something they will have to do in the real world.