"A philosophy of education, like any theory, has to be stated in words and symbols. But so far as it is more than verbal it is a plan for conducting education. Like any plan, it must be framed with reference to what is to be done and how it is to be done."
--John Dewey

In the first chapter, I stated that interdisciplinary team teaching requires some degree of collaboration. Team teaching will vary in the amount of collaboration that actually takes place in general, but also specifically with regard to planning, content integration, teaching, and evaluation. The first chapter concluded with a proposition: The greater the level of integration desired, the higher the level of collaboration required.

Assume for purposes of discussion, that the goal of team teaching is a high level of integration and that a high level of collaboration will be required to achieve the goal. Although the definitions of team teaching presented in the first chapter accommodated many kinds and levels of collaboration, assume now that a high level of collaboration is desirable. Now call team teaching involving a high level of collaboration "the ideal." Given these assumptions, how might one proceed to approximate the "ideal" interdisciplinary, team-taught course?

The ideal interdisciplinary course begins with a great idea. It is not altogether clear where these great ideas come from or how to get them. Great ideas are few and hard to come by. Often great ideas come out of the head of one individual, the solitary thinker ruminating alone in the office, or the shower for that matter. Most professors have ideas for courses they would like to teach someday. Sometimes they develop these ideas and teach "their" course. Great ideas for team-taught courses, however, are usually born of dialogue; they have their origins in discussion. The "seeds" for a team-taught course may come from one individual, but they don't begin to germinate until they are expressed, until they come out into the open for criticism, support, and elaboration. Interdisciplinary courses usually begin as the brainchild of a limited number of parents, a few fertile minds. The idea is born when these people begin to talk. The team comes into play later on to nurture the idea, elaborate it, and deliver it. Ironically, teams usually don't generate the ideas for team-taught courses. Instead, good ideas are generated by a few individuals, somehow and somewhere, with the help of the "new course muse," and then, and only then, appropriate members are sought for the team. Although this process is not an absolute rule, it appears to be a general rule: One or two people get a good idea and then seek the appropriate team members to carry it out.

In the examples described in the first chapter, the idea for "Evolution" came from two colleagues in the biology department who challenged themselves to think about developing a course for the core curriculum. One of those colleagues never went on to work with the course, but the other found the idea they had generated exciting and worthy of elaboration. He was the one who sought out the team and eventually, with the team, developed the idea into a course. But he is the first to admit that the course itself evolved into something different from the original idea. The idea for the "Lawyering Process" course came from another institution when a faculty member moved from one institution to another and brought the idea with him. The idea was powerful enough, and he was convincing enough, to persuade his colleagues at the new institution to assemble a team and try it. After a few years, the course was well established and the person who "had the idea" no longer needed to be associated with the it; the course had a life of its own. The idea for "Multiple Voices of America" emerged from discussions between a faculty member in history and a colleague in religious studies who were both interested in a new approach to teaching American history. The idea of multiple voices led these two white males to seek diversity in staffing the course, so that now the idea of the course is embodied in the multiple voices of the faculty who teach the course. The idea for "Quality Panorama" actually came from a planning committee that passed the idea on to another planning committee. The initial idea was altered considerably before the course was taught for the first time. For the "Making of the Modern Mind," the oldest and most well-established of the examples, faculty who have taught on the team for several years have to remind the newer members of the team who it was that had the original idea for the course and what that idea was.

What kind of participants are identified for the team? The most important criterion, of course, is expertise, faculty who have the appropriate subject expertise to express the idea of the course. What disciplines should be represented and why? But there are other considerations as well. William Newell suggests that "one needs to consider whether potential participants are open to diverse ways of thinking, wary of absolutism; able to admit that they do not know; good at listening, unconventional, flexible, willing to take risks, self-reflective, and comfortable with ambiguity.¹

We can conclude that the ideal interdisciplinary course begins with a great idea that can come from anywhere, and that the people who have the idea don't necessarily elaborate the idea. Once the course is established the idea grows and the course takes on a life of its own, sometimes quite apart from the people who had the original idea.

What will be the subject of the ideal team-taught course? How will the subject be conceptualized? Most faculty members are accustomed to thinking about the subject of a course in the content of their discipline. They have been thoroughly trained in a specialization and they usually are comfortable about generating courses in that discipline. If they have a problem, it is with selecting the most appropriate content for the subject. After all, they have a lot of information, and their fields are likely exploding with new knowledge. They are often preoccupied with "coverage."

When faculty members join a team to elaborate the subject for an interdisciplinary course, they experience some initial confusion, an uneasy sense that they don't know what they are doing. They find themselves immersed in a collaborative process with other people from other disciplines, who also don't know exactly what they are doing. What they all bring to the process is their disciplinary perspective and very often their anxieties about coverage. Coverage becomes a problem in team-taught courses if everyone comes into the room with strong beliefs about what students need to know. Adding team members compounds the coverage problem. At first, the team may see its problem as providing more or less equal representation for the various disciplinary perspectives. The team will often devote its energies to eliminating topics, combining and recombining ideas, and paring down a multiplicity of possibilities to the essentials.

In courses with a lower level of content integration, faculty members bring their subject into the planning process and eliminate some of it so as to allow other colleagues to teach some of their subject. Certain trade-offs are made and a serial order of presentations is established. If higher levels of content integration are to occur, that is, if a type of content integration is to take place that more nearly approximates the ideal, a very different and more complicated process must take place. The faculty will be obliged to invent a new subject, not just present the old subject in a different form, and inventing the subject for a team-taught course is not an easy process.

In many traditional disciplinary courses, the subject is defined by the discipline. Not everyone will agree on how demographics, or organic chemistry, or music history should be taught, nor will they always agree on exactly how to define those subjects; but there is usually far more initial agreement about what the subject is in a disciplinary course than there is when faculty begin to discuss an interdisciplinary course. An interdisciplinary course, by its very nature, is established in order to do something that can't be done in a disciplinary course. It is in some sense "anti-disciplinary" because its creators have consciously set about to create a context for learning that does not begin with the discipline. Where does the interdisciplinary course begin? As William Newell states, "successful interdisciplinary courses normally focus on a topic, although the term topic should be construed broadly as meaning an issue, theme, problem, region, time period, institution, figure, work, or idea.² Interestingly enough, the great scholars, the authors of the "classics" so often recommended for study at the college level, organized their thinking around themes. As David Haliburton has noted, with a twist of humor:

to the extent that the great writers, thinkers, and doers achieve a high degree of integration, it is at least in part because they take problems, themes, or issues as their point of departure. That is why it is so difficult to put them into pigeonholes. The only way to classify a Pascal is to say "Pascal--he is his own classification. But bring Pascal into a modern college and he would quickly be channeled into one department--mathematics or philosophy or religious studies or literature--unless, of course, he were fortunate enough to be invited to participate in a program of interdisciplinary studies.³

An interdisciplinary course begins with a topic and employs the disciplines in a new way to explore this topic. Thus the subject is seldom the discipline or even some aspect of the discipline, as it was learned in graduate school, but some new subject that the course faculty invents together. In the most creative interdisciplinary courses, the team members have not taken, taught, or even heard of this subject before. This subject innovation produces three enormous problems.

With few exceptions, faculty are still trained today as disciplinary specialists. They are accustomed to thinking about their disciplines first. They don't begin with themes, competencies, problems, or global concepts such as "quality" or "the modern mind" as the starting point for courses. They may occasionally think about how certain kinds of knowledge in their disciplines may apply to critical problems or relate to other fields, but they don't begin there. They begin with the discipline. To do otherwise requires some serious adjustments, venturing into uncharted waters, and abandoning the safe and familiar moorings of the disciplinary shore. It is not easy, if you are an accountant, to begin building a course around the concept of "quality." It is not easy, if you are an art historian, to begin with the concept of "the making of the modern mind." Most faculty don't have much experience with inventing the subject, because in traditional teaching the subject is a given. The team is initially handicapped by a lack of experience in inventing subjects.

Additionally, when faculty from different disciplinary perspectives begin to explore a theme, they find that they have differing points of view. To put the matter bluntly: They don't agree. These disagreements, initially quite rational in origin, can lead to serious power struggles. The sociologist on the team, for example, begins to assert that what people think, and the process that has shaped their thinking, is socially determined. The sociologist has a lot of data to show how persons of a particular social class or ethnic background are likely to think on a variety of subjects. In fact, sociologists can predict how people will think and act and can give data to support how accurate their predictions will be. The psychologist on the team operates with a different paradigm, involving a different set of assumptions and interests. The psychologist is interested in individual differences, how people have come to believe and behave as they do as a result of a particular developmental progression or reinforcement history. When the sociologist "elevates the importance of class differences," the psychologist is being asked to provide "secondary evidence" to explain exceptions; and when the psychologist "elevates the importance of individual developmental histories," the sociologist is being told that the "trends" are interesting but provide only general explanations of more complex phenomena. What begins as an interesting difference of opinion soon escalates into a power struggle because both faculty members believe that their explanation is superior to the other's. This disagreement should be no surprise; both have been taught that their perspective is superior and their job is teaching this to others. Soon they are not only attacking each other's ideas, but each other.

All disciplines are based on certain assumptions about what is important and about how to select and view the phenomena to be studied. In another comparison, this time of economists and sociologists, James Dusenberry has quipped, "Economics is all about how people make economic choices; sociology is all about why people have no economic choices to make."⁴ These differences in perspective are not easily resolved. Odd as it may seem, many faculty have never had to confront the assumptions and limitations of their disciplinary paradigm. Faculty without experience in working on interdisciplinary teams soon find themselves involved in interdisciplinary battles; what was supposed to have been an enriching and broadening experience soon turns into an unpleasant power struggle because faculty don't agree.

In addition to inexperience with inventing a new subject and hegemonic power struggles over the superiority of their disciplinary paradigms, faculty also discover that they have important epistemological differences--real disagreements about what knowledge is and how it is generated. Again, many faculty don't have much experience with the epistemological assumptions of other disciplines and many do not recognize those of their own. Often the disagreements that arise boil down to disputes about the function of language. Most physical scientists want to use language as precisely as possible, as some would say, in a positivistic way, establishing as much correspondence as possible between the observed and measured "reality" and the words used to describe that "reality." For them, language is, and ought to be, hard and tight, nearly identical with reality. Some social scientists, on the other hand, would assert that "reality" is "socially constructed," and that what is "out there" depends largely on how the people who are having a conversation about "it" define "it." Language is soft and at best conveys only shared meanings of an interpreted reality. In the humanities, those who create and interpret artistic works--poetry, novels, paintings, films, music--often assert that the understanding of "reality," if there is such a thing, is achieved best through metaphorical uses of language and other media, creating fresh comparisons that go beyond mere description and provide insightful interpretations. For them, language is not only soft, it is intentionally slippery. These epistemological differences, which are sharp across divisional and disciplinary lines, also occur within the disciplines and professions--some psychologists study rats while others study archetypal myths--making for a rich variety of ways to define and derive knowledge within academia today. As the disciplines struggle to make room for both empirical and qualitative research perspectives, the philosophers and critical studies scholars brood over the whole mess, with their revisionist and deconstructionist programs, vying alternately for the right to point out that there is either only relative truth or no truth at all, and that the whole of the academic enterprise is either bankrupt, corrupt, or both. And what is a "mere student" to make of this display of epistemological diversity? What is a freshman to make of the babel of these authorities?

In the ideal interdisciplinary course, the power struggles over the relative importance of ideas and the epistemological differences among perspectives have been sufficiently addressed--if not necessarily resolved--to give the faculty team enough comfort with these differences to make them explicit and to convey them to students. The faculty may even have discovered some continuities and compatibilities in their fields as they invent a new subject. One of the great strengths of the interdisciplinary course, at its best, is that the faculty, who are the experts, have already wrestled with and to some extent resolved the differences in their methodological and disciplinary perspectives. Such wrestling is hard work, but most faculty teaching interdisciplinary courses recognize that it is not fair to leave this task to the students, the novices, who, running from course to course, are expected to "integrate their learning." In interdisciplinary courses, the faculty team members take on the chore of integrating their various perspectives and resolving their differences. In the ideal team-taught course, the faculty have successfully met the challenges of "connecting learning" and the students have a chance to see the relationships that they don't get to see in other courses. This is one of the great pay-offs for inventing a new subject.

From the examples presented in the first chapter, the "Making of the Modern Mind" provides an interesting illustration of efforts to develop an integrated approach to inventing the subject. Although a disciplinary "homebase" is maintained in the sections taught by disciplinary specialists, the faculty have had to come together and agree upon the integrative themes for the lectures. The subject, therefore, is not art history or music history, but the themes that describe the foundations of the "modern mind." The lectures for the first term of the course, for example, are organized according to three themes: "Faith, Reason, and the Senses in the Age of the Baroque," "The Rise of Individualism and the Road to Revolution," and "The Invention of Liberty." The faculty invented these themes, and reached enough agreement about them to use them as a means of integrating, organizing, and presenting what they know about the eighteenth century from the viewpoint of their disciplines. Thus the theme on "The Invention of Liberty" is elaborated through a series of lectures: one on Voltaire by an English professor, one on Rousseau by a philosopher, one on Watteau and David by an art historian, one on Beethoven by a pianist, and one on the ideas behind the French Revolution by a philosopher. Behind the scenes, the faculty engaged in some serious discussion to arrive at the themes and to select the artists, writers, philosophers, and the composer who could best illustrate the theme. The faculty had to address and resolve the differences they had about how to approach these key figures vis-a-vis the theme. This resolution of differences involves a great amount of "homework" on the part of the faculty, but the end result available to students is very different from what happens when a student takes a series of traditional, disciplinary courses, discovering slowly and painfully, but more likely never, that all these figures scattered about in all those courses had something to do with the invention of the idea of liberty, a concept which most of us, with our modern minds, take for granted. In the ideal interdisciplinary version of this course, perhaps even more disciplines, representing the physical and social sciences, would be brought together, and a new and slightly different rendition of the subject might be invented by the participants as a result of further struggle to reconcile differences and discover commonalties.

In the ideal interdisciplinary team-taught course, the subject grows out of the idea; it is invented by the faculty who participate in the course, it is more than the sum of the disciplinary parts, and it is presented to the students, as nearly as possibly, as an integrated whole. On the other hand, there is no magic number for how many disciplines to involve--the number depends on the idea for the course--but for those disciplines that are involved, the ideal to be approximated is optimal collaboration for maximal integration.

Challenging as it may be for faculty teams to invent the subject of an interdisciplinary course, "subject matter," even interdisciplinary subject matter, is still something that most faculty can generate, given enough time to talk it out. The subject is what faculty feel they know best. But when faculty are asked to specify learning outcomes, they feel they are being required to enter an even more mysterious domain, one that belongs to real strangers--"educational psychologists" or "learning theorists." Not only are most faculty not on familiar ground, it is as if they are being asked to walk across hot coals.

All courses function at two levels: a content level, which I have been calling the "subject," and a process level, which has to do with the kind of learning taking place and the way that learning is occurring. Whether we are aware of it or not, both levels are operating simultaneously in every course. In some courses, the process level is hardly recognized because of the preoccupation with content; in other courses, the process level has been well conceptualized as an important component of the course, so that the planners of the course can speak in a coherent way about "desired learning outcomes." In the ideal interdisciplinary team-taught course, significant attention has been given to both levels of the course, and team members have spent time not only inventing the subject, but in settling on desired learning outcomes.

Learning outcomes are what William Newell has referred to as "subtexts," what faculty might say the course is "really about." What an interdisciplinary course is often really about is "recognizing contrasting perspectives; learning how to synthesize, think critically, and reexamine the world we take for granted, empowering students to tackle meaningful but complex issues; weaning students from dependence on experts without dismissing expertise; and teaching students to value disciplines as powerful sources of insight while becoming aware of the nature of their various limitations.⁵ They are the goals that most faculty have in mind when they think about liberal education or professional competence. The problem with learning outcomes is that they are often vague and unarticulated, and seldom spelled out in relation to the subject.

A useful guide for thinking more comprehensively about learning outcomes was generated by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. Although Bloom's Taxonomy, as it has come to be known, is almost 40 years old, it has weathered the test of time and has not been replaced, as nearly as I know, with any better system for examining learning outcomes. In other words, it still works. A condensed summary of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: Cognitive Domain appears below.⁶

1:00 KNOWLEDGE

1:10 Knowledge of Specifics--

knowing terminology, such as important verbal and non-verbal symbols, and knowing specific facts, such as dates, events, persons, places, and sources of information.

1:20 Knowledge of Ways and Means of Dealing with Specifics--

knowing conventions and characteristic treatments of ideas; trends and sequences; classifications categories, sets, divisions and arrangements; criteria for judging facts, principles, and opinions; and methods of inquiry, techniques, and procedures.

1:30 Knowledge of Universals and Abstractions in a Field--

knowing principles, generalizations, theories, and structures.

2:00 COMPREHENSION

2:10 Translation--

putting concepts and ideas into other language, into other terms, or into another form of communication.

2:20 Interpretation--

going beyond the part-for-part rendering of the communication to comprehend the relationships among its various parts, to reorder, rearrange . . . to secure some total view.

2:30 Extrapolation--

seeing consequences, implications, and ramifications for other situations, predicting trends, distinguishing more probable from less probable consequences.

3:00 APPLICATION

application to new problem situations in real life, transfer of training to new environments, such as the ability to apply social science generalizations and conclusions to actual social problems, or the ability to apply science principles, postulates, theorems, or other abstractions to new situations.

4:00 ANALYSIS

4:10 Analysis of Elements--

ability to recognize the various elements in a communication, such as unstated assumptions, the difference between facts and hypotheses, factual and normative statements, conclusions and supporting statements.

4:20 Analysis of Relationships--

ability to determine the relationships among the elements, such as causal relations, the relationship of evidence to hypotheses, or the relationship of facts or assumptions to a thesis.

4:30 Analysis of Organizational Principles--

ability to point out the structure or organization of the communication, such as form or point of view in a literary work; the relation of materials and elements in an artistic work, or the techniques used in persuasive materials.

5:00 SYNTHESIS

5:10 Production of a Unique Communication--

getting ideas, feelings, and experiences across to others while taking into account the effect to be achieved, such as writing a creative story, essay, verse, making a speech, or creating a simple work of art.

5:20 Production of a Plan or Proposed Set of Operations--

ability to propose a plan for testing hypotheses, to make preparations for instruction, to design a machine or building.

5:30 Derivation of a Set of Abstract Relations--

ability to formulate and modify hypotheses, to perceive alternative ways of organizing experience in a conceptual structure, to make mathematical discoveries and generalizations.

6:00 EVALUATION

6:10 Judgment in Terms of Internal Criteria--

ability to assess the probability of accuracy from internal evidence, such as the accuracy in reporting facts, nature of the documentation, logical fallacies of arguments.

6:20 Judgment in Terms of External Criteria--

ability to access worth in terms of external standards, such as major theories, generalization, works of recognized excellence; skill in recognizing and weighing values in alternative courses of action; ability to use aesthetic standards in the choice and use of objects in the everyday environment.

The taxonomy is valuable not only as a list of concepts--categories for thinking about cognitive learning outcomes--but also as a theory. According to Bloom, the outcomes are hierarchical, moving from simple to complex; and (theoretically) a student must learn to do things that are lower on the list before being able to proceed to "higher order" outcomes.⁷ Although one might raise questions about the theory, the taxonomy has been widely used as a useful classification scheme in the public schools in K-12 education; and many professors in postsecondary disciplinary settings have found it useful as a way of thinking about educational outcomes. The widely known Taxonomy of Cognitive Outcomes has two lesser-known cousins, The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook II: Affective Domain and A Taxonomy of the Psychomotor Domain.⁸ For certain courses, it is valuable to think about these additional categories of learning outcomes as well. Some courses involve feelings--perceptions, attitudes, beliefs, values--and some involve motor skills and physical movements. Most successful disciplinary courses have well articulated learning outcomes.

What happens when professors try to think about learning outcomes for an interdisciplinary course? Does the interdisciplinary context change the process of thinking about outcomes? The answer is both yes and no. No, the categories of the taxonomy need not change, but, yes, the content of the tasks that might be considered within the categories will usually be much more complex in an interdisciplinary course. The range of knowledge and the amount of integration necessary for the comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation of knowledge usually becomes greater. Consider, for example, the following statements of learning outcomes that might appear in interdisciplinary courses, arranged by the categories set forth in Bloom's Taxonomy.

• To know the work of selected eighteenth- and nineteenth-century artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers; the key facts of their lives; and the dates and historical context of their activity.
• To know the three primary categories of the law (case law, administrative law, and legislation) and to be able to recognize examples and place them in their proper categories.
• To know the basic principles of evolution, and to be able to describe how the theory is derived and what it attempts to explain.

• To be able to generate your own definition of "diversity" and to be able to put into your own words why and in what ways diversity has been important in shaping the experience of people in the United States.
• To read the texts of selected writers and philosophers, and to view and hear the works of selected artists, and to describe how the concept of "liberty" is set forth in their work.
• To see how the use of total quality management principles can increase trends in customer satisfaction, worker productivity, and net profits.

• To apply your understanding of "diversity" to persistent problems in families, organizations, and local communities and at the level of international relations.

• To identify the key elements of the types of statements being made by texts that provide "religious explanations" of the origins of life and "scientific explanations."
• To compare and contrast two case studies of organizations, one applying extensive "total quality management" principles, the other not.
• To describe the color, form, and texture of Navajo weaving, and to relate these to comparable structural elements of the Negro spiritual.

• To write a brief letter to your grandmother about why you think the theory of evolution makes sense, and why it does not necessarily threaten your religious beliefs, knowing well that grandmother is not likely to agree with you.
• To create a business plan for a small business (under 20 employees) that incorporates total quality principles into product development, production, management, marketing, and accounting.
• To write two briefs for a problem case, one summarizing the key points for the plaintiff, the other summarizing the likely points to be made by the defense.

• Given detailed descriptions of species, as represented in an extensive report on the fossil evidence, generate hypotheses about how the species should be classified, including probable dating.
• Given examples of Native American art, evaluate whether and to what extent the examples are representative of important styles and traditions, and whether they are worth the asking price of the seller.

In this list of learning outcomes, the same "levels" of Bloom's taxonomy are represented, but the tasks involve more fields and a greater number of connections across the disciplines or professional fields being represented. Although this often increases the attractiveness of the subject, and although the abilities to perform the task well are not "higher" in a hierarchical sense, they are often more complicated. It takes more skill, for example, to examine the work of writers, philosophers, artists, and musicians, than it might to examine only philosophers. Likewise, it requires more skill (and more effort) to relate total quality management principles to management, marketing, and accounting than to just one of those fields. Some of the objectives in the examples listed above are "tougher" just because they are more difficult, but some are tougher because they require an interdisciplinary perspective. An interdisciplinary course requires more disciplines and more integration for most learning outcomes. If this is the case, teams of faculty might profitably give attention to generating and selecting the most desirable list of learning outcomes, keeping in mind that interdisciplinary learning outcomes have the inherent potential for being more complicated.

Bloom's Taxonomy, with some adaptation for the interdisciplinary context, is one way of looking at outcomes. It is perhaps most useful for thinking about outcomes for courses involving several traditional disciplines. For the professions, the concept of "competencies" may be more useful. The idea of "competency-based education" goes back many years; the earliest experiments with it appeared in nursing and teacher education in the late 1960s. The idea is relatively simple: by beginning with what the professional nurse, teacher, or lawyer actually does, it is possible to identify the "competencies" one needs to perform well as a professional in that field. The outcomes of most types of professional education, therefore, can be construed as competencies, and the task of educating professionals involves providing contexts where students can cultivate these competencies.

In many professional settings, theories and skills are taught one at a time in separate courses, and application occurs, or is intended to occur, in a practicum, internship, or other field experience. Competencies may or may not be learned in individual courses; and the cumulative aspect of actually practicing and being able to perform the competency is often neglected. Interdisciplinary, team-taught courses in professional settings provide a valuable opportunity for addressing the competency as a whole, thus overcoming the deficiencies of the perceived, "one course-at-a-time" approach.

One of the learning outcomes teachers hope for in the business curriculum, for example, is that students can develop competence in using their analytical skills to identify what is going wrong or has already gone wrong in an organization, and to generate solutions or ideas about what could and should be done. Often this competency is developed through the "case method." In institutions where the curriculum is organized along departmental lines, students may encounter marketing cases, management cases, or sometimes accounting cases, but they may not engage in a comprehensive case until they take a senior capstone course or even a graduate seminar. An interdisciplinary approach to developing professional competencies provides more opportunities, early in the student's experience, to develop competencies that integrate several skills from several areas of study, as, for example, in the study of quality. Similarly, law students often gain fragments of competencies from an array of courses, but an interdisciplinary course specially designed to introduce the competencies needed to be a lawyer provides a unique opportunity to acquire and practice these skills holistically, in the way they are actually used in a typical law firm.

In thinking about the outcomes for the ideal interdisciplinary course, faculty will want to give some additional attention to those outcomes peculiar to the interdisciplinary process itself. William Newell has identified these outcomes as:

an appreciation for perspectives other than one's own; an ability to evaluate the testimony of experts; tolerance of ambiguity; increased sensitivity to ethical issues; an ability to synthesize or integrate; enlarged perspectives or horizons; more creative, original, or unconventional thinking; increased humility or listening skills, and sensitivity to disciplinary, political or religions bias.⁹

A good question to ask is: what outcomes are we identifying that take special advantage of the interdisciplinary format?

In the ideal interdisciplinary course, learning outcomes have been discussed by the team and elaborated in sufficient detail to make clear to the faculty, and ultimately for the students, the kinds of learning intended. Learning outcomes will be specific, and will be based on some rational scheme, such as a taxonomy of cognitive objectives or a set of professional competencies. Because learning outcomes in an interdisciplinary setting can get complicated and require much of students, decisions will need to be made about which outcomes are most important, given the idea underlying the course and the definition of the subject.

As the subject is invented and learning outcomes are developed, four important additional questions need to be addressed: Where does this course begin and end? How should its content be ordered? How many topics should be included? How deeply should any one topic be explored? These issues are addressed in the careful planning of any course, but they become especially important in the development of interdisciplinary courses because more team members generate more potential answers to these questions, and, therefore, more choices are required.

Where curriculum planners speak of "scope," they are referring to the boundaries that have been set for the inclusion of material. A radar "scope," such as those used by air traffic controllers, provides information about aircraft within a particular part of the sky; the scope contains only those things that fall within the direction, vector, and distance of the radar beam. For disciplinary courses, the scope of a course is often predetermined by general understandings about where subject matter fits within the context of the discipline. In chemistry there is some general agreement about what to include and what not to include in general chemistry, organic chemistry, and physical chemistry. A course on American poetry of the nineteenth century has its boundaries set both by the nationality of the poets and the time when they wrote. Although the boundaries--the beginning and end of the subject--are clearer in some disciplinary courses than in others, there is often a prescribed domain that is fairly easy to identify, a territory that the subject fits into naturally, and is accepted across the discipline.

In interdisciplinary courses, the boundaries are not obvious; they have to be defined through dialogue about the scope of the course. For example, it is not clear, when a team of faculty sets about to create a course on "The Making of the Modern Mind," exactly where that course should begin and end. What is meant by "modern?" Does it mean that period of civilization when humans left their hunter-gather mode of existence and began to settle into agricultural communities? If so, the "modern mind" might be thought of as having its "making" in the advent of urban civilizations, such as those of ancient Greece, China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. On the other hand, "modern" could refer to the emergence of a new way of looking at human beings that began at the time of the Renaissance; but if so, is it important to look at the Greek and Roman origins--the birth--of those things that made the Renaissance a rebirth? Where does "modern" really begin? In the course as it actually came to be taught, a consensus was reached about scope: a decision was made to focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to begin the course there, and to deal in a less extensive way with the twentieth century. There is no a priori logic that the course has to be set up that way; one could as easily argue now, on the brink of the twenty-first century, that the scope of the course should be primarily twentieth-century thought. The boundaries of the course are agreed upon by the team of faculty responsible for it; they make decisions, often difficult and painful decisions, about what they want to do. The decisions are not arbitrary, they are reasoned and can be justified, but often a great amount of energy goes into making those decisions and defending them. Without clear agreements about scope, the faculty team can wander into topics that don't belong in the course; and eventually the course loses its focus, both for the faculty, and, of greater importance, for the students.

Once questions about the scope of the course have been settled, the faculty must order topics in a reasonable sequence. In disciplinary courses, the sequence of topics is often determined by an inner logic growing out of the discipline. Sometimes this process involves an ordering of skills, as in mathematics or foreign languages, that requires students to master the prerequisite skills needed to perform advanced skills. Sometimes there is a "chronological logic," as with a history course, or a "structural or conceptual logic," as with a course in astronomy. What usually happens with an interdisciplinary course, however, is that the rules for determining the sequence of topics need to be created by the team.

In the course "Multiple Voices of America," the team made a conscious choice to abandon the traditional chronological order for teaching American history. They assumed--rightly or wrongly--that students already have background from their high school social studies courses about the key chronological events of American history. Assuming, rather than abandoning, a chronological understanding, the faculty decided on a different sequencing of topics. They began with an inquiry into how the land was used, how it was settled, and how it was changed over time by the way it was used. The next set of topics, in the second term, involved the development of political structures to cope with diversity. The topics addressed in the third term of the course involved the cultural contributions of diverse peoples to the American experience. The team made a conscious decision about sequencing the content of the course around three themes, rather than teaching the course as a complete chronological coverage of political, social, and cultural events, beginning at the beginning in the first term, and ending with the present at the end of the third term. Without some sense of the logic for sequencing the topics in a course, students as well as faculty often feel lost. In interdisciplinary courses, the rules for sequencing topics usually need to be created by the team.

Members of the faculty team also need to make decisions about the breadth of topics to be included and the depth of treatment given to each topic. In a disciplinary context, this distinction is most frequently made in describing the differences between the introductory survey course and the advanced topics seminar. The survey course touches on general topics lightly, introducing students to many aspects of the subject. The seminar focuses on one or two subjects, going into significant depth. Because interdisciplinary teams usually possess a broad range of expertise, there is a natural tendency to emphasize breadth, including a broad range of topics, because the faculty know about many things. This breadth is one of the advantages of teams. On the other hand, interdisciplinary courses can also focus on a single theme, examining it in depth from several different disciplinary perspectives. In "Multiple Voices of America," the emphasis is not on providing a broad survey of American history, but on examining three themes in some depth: the land, the political process, and the personal and cultural contributions of diverse individuals. Depth is also achieved throughout the course via the Family Heritage Project, whereby students interview family members and assemble family artifacts (pictures, stories, crafts, descriptions of traditions) to explore more deeply the experience of their own family in America.

The "Lawyering Process" course, on the other hand, is consciously designed as a survey of the most important skills a student will need to function effectively as a lawyer. The skills are taught by specialists in writing, library research, and client counseling. The skills are also taken in order, beginning with the skills that a lawyer would need to talk to a client on the first encounter and continuing through the skills needed to file an appeal if the case was lost. The team has agreed to touch on all the skills lightly, but they know that they have a problem in acquainting students with all the skills they need to function well in conducting an actual trial. The whole faculty agreed with the faculty on the team that trial procedure requires a course in itself, to be presented in depth as an upper division offering. Thus the team made a conscious choice for breadth, reserving depth of treatment for certain other courses in the curriculum. As with other questions that must be answered in developing the ideal interdisciplinary course, the appropriate balance of breadth and depth needs to be struck through an informed decision reached by the team after adequate discussion.

In planning the ideal interdisciplinary course, the faculty team needs to make conscious and justifiable decisions about the scope of the course, the sequence of topics, and the appropriate balance of breadth and depth.

Every course has some organizational structure. Decisions need to be made about who is teaching the course, when it will be offered, how many credits to give, what texts and readings to assign, and where the course will be taught. In traditional disciplinary courses, most of these decisions are fairly uncomplicated and are usually made by one person, the teacher. In interdisciplinary team-taught courses, the organization can get complicated; the course coordinator can begin to feel like the producer/director of a Steven Spielberg film.

Many of the decisions about course structure are made in the planning phase for the course. How many students will this course enroll? Will the students always meet together as one class, or will there be some smaller groups? If so, how many? How many credit hours will be granted for the course? Given the number of credit hours, how will contact hours be arranged? Will large group sessions be interspersed with small groups or laboratories? Will the pattern of class sessions be regular (one hour of lecture followed by one hour of discussion) or will it be flexible, leaving a block of time open for various kinds of activities? Will there be field trips or other forms of experience-based learning associated with the course? All of these matters need to be decided, and, as usual, they need discussion by the team.

Once these large organizational issues have been settled, the team also needs to make decisions about the weekly and daily schedule. Exactly what will take place each time the class meets? How will these activities foster course objectives and learning outcomes? What supporting media will be used? What assignments will students be expected to complete? What materials will they read or examine? Who will find and designate these resources? How will they be made available to the students? In wrestling with these questions, the team begins to divide up team tasks, assigning lectures, groups, and responsibility for materials to various members of the team.

By far the most important organizational decision has to do with personnel: Who will actually deliver this course? In some cases, the team of faculty that plans the course coincides exactly with the team that delivers the instruction. More often, however, the faculty planners draw on several other types of personnel to help deliver the course. Teaching assistants, guest lecturers, adjunct faculty, advanced students, and other kinds of specialists can help deliver the course. If many people are involved in the course, the team must make their roles clear to them. What is it, exactly, that they are all expected to do? How are their roles different from the roles of other personnel, and how do their roles relate to the whole? On other teams, in other walks of life, team members have differentiated roles. Not everyone is expected to do the same thing. In fact, sports teams have rules about such things. In football, the quarterback can pass only to certain receivers, and penalties are given for having "an ineligible receiver down field." Team-taught courses must also have rules about who will do what. In the ideal team-taught course, a variety of personnel are used in creative ways, but all the people involved are clear about their roles and know how their efforts contribute to the whole.

One of the great advantages of teaching with a team is that roles can, in fact, be differentiated. Traditional teaching, as it has been conducted by individual professors in their own classrooms, has required that each professor do it all, without any help. The assumption is that every professor is good at everything and needs to be good at everything. Traditional teaching at the postsecondary level is one of the few work areas left where differentiation of function has not taken place. College teachers are specialists in their disciplines, but they have learned almost nothing about how to specialize as teachers, i.e., how to differentiate the tasks of teaching and become expert at different things. Thus, most college teachers do one thing: They go into classrooms and lecture. Team-taught courses offer an opportunity to divide up the tasks and bring different talents into play for different functions. With team-teaching, some people can specialize in large group lectures, some can specialize in facilitating case discussions, some can work with students on their writing, and others can assist students in locating and retrieving information. Students have the advantage of dealing with experts in these various roles.

The development of this specialized expertise often requires training. The participants in a team-taught course often need to learn how to play their specialized roles. One would hope, of course, that the various participants are selected because of their ability to play a specialized role, but often they need some additional training in that role within the context of the course. Furthermore, it is important for all the players on the team to see how their work contributes to the whole enterprise, and that achieving that perspective also requires some training.

Once the team members have been selected, their various roles differentiated, with proper training provided for them, they need to stay in good communication with each other. The personnel involved in a team-taught course also need to function as a team, and this means being able to work together day-by-day as the course is taught through the term. Although it is important to plan in advance for as much of the course as possible, executing a team-taught course requires much more than checking off the events on a calendar. Things happen in the course, and as things go well, or break down, people need to know. Sometimes things don't go as planned, and adjustments need to be made. Most team-taught courses have a "coordinator," and one of the jobs of the coordinator is to insure the smooth flow of communication. In most team-taught courses, regular meeting times are set throughout the term to insure that everyone knows what is happening, to adjust the schedule as necessary, and to deal with problems that may arise.

In making decisions about the organizational structure of the course, teams can follow usefully the old rule of architects: form follows function. The organizational structure exists to facilitate the goals and objectives of the course. The form given to the course grows naturally out of decisions made about function. Sometimes this means creating a complex organizational structure; but complexity has no value in itself, and the structure should only be as complex as needed to achieve course objectives.

Among the examples, the "Lawyering Process" course clearly has the most complicated and most interesting structure. It is a complex structure, but one that is uniquely suited to achieving the objective of the course. The overarching objective of the course is to introduce students to the components of the law and the skills that lawyers must have to perform competently. What better way to do this than to put students into simulated law firms and let them work on problem cases! The central team of faculty that planned the course made decisions about the organizational structure of the course. When the course was first offered these general decisions were also ratified by the faculty as a whole because some of the decisions had big implications. The faculty decided to offer the course to all first-year students, in both the day and evening divisions. To do this, the faculty agreed that two sets of lectures, essentially identical, would be offered, and that simulated law firms would not mix day and evening students. Beyond those differences, the course would be the same course, with the same schedule and assignments for both groups of students. The duplicate lectures are now offered twice a week and the law firms meet approximately once a week for two hours, though not every week, and not the first two weeks of the course. Some lectures are now even a part of the initial orientation week for new students. Students are divided into groups that become their firms; in the firms, they must meet their senior partners (a practicing attorney in the city), the upper division students who serve as junior partners, and their assigned writing and library consultant. Over the years, the faculty team has reordered the topics for the lectures and adjusted the work in the firms accordingly. Some assignments have been dropped and others added. Problem cases have been added, dropped, and rewritten, and the librarians have changed their methods of introducing students to the materials needed to address the problem cases. The course now involves a large cast of players. The central coordinating team, composed of faculty, does most of the lectures, except for a few guest appearances by specialists. The faculty team also divides up the responsibilities for recruiting the rest of the personnel for the course. Two faculty are responsible for recruiting the senior partners, some of whom "turn over" each year. Two other faculty are responsible for recruiting the junior partners through a time-consuming process that involves a formal application and interviews. Being a junior partner is very attractive to many upper division students, so many apply and the screening is rigorous. Some junior partners, to provide continuity, are invited to serve more than one year. The faculty member who writes the problem cases is also responsible for recruiting and supervising the writing consultants, and the librarian on the team recruits the library consultants from the library staff. Once all of the players have been recruited, separate training processes are provided for each group, as well as one large training session to coordinate the work of all of the players each summer before the course begins. During the year, the faculty team meets regularly during the term to adjust the schedule, make necessary changes, and respond to feedback from the junior partners. One faculty member serves as the team coordinator, and a full-time staff member coordinates communication and provides support materials. High standards are maintained and when it becomes evident that someone's role is not being enacted properly, taking too little or too much responsibility, and a warning has been given, replacements are made. The organization cannot accommodate a weak link; the team has to function as a team.

The ideal team-taught course has a defined structure and actually becomes a small organization. The form of the organization flows directly from its function. The team divides up its work, differentiates various roles, and recruits and trains people to perform these roles. The organizational structure of the course is important.