Does Team Teaching Improve Student Engagement in an Age of Digital Learning

The shift to digital classrooms due to the COVID-19 pandemic has raised many challenges for educators regarding student participation, engagement and social interactions, and our CM1121 introductory organic chemistry course was no exception to these disruptions. As a solution for these challenges amid social distancing measures, we adopted a form of technology-augmented team teaching to model discourse, encourage student-faculty interactions and make lessons more engaging. With our choice of an undergraduate student co-teacher, we overcame many traditional key challenges that team teaching faces in its implementation in STEM classrooms, and our experiences and approach for both face-to-face and recorded tutorial lectures have significant potential in socially distanced STEM classrooms.