The Team System

How can students have a successful, satisfying experience in a large research university? At CGS, we believe the key idea is to optimize the contact between professors and students, especially for first- and second-year students. We implement this idea through an innovative system of instruction—the team approach.

A team of four professors teaches the four cross-disciplinary core courses to a team of about 100-110 students. Regular consultation among faculty members enables them to coordinate coursework to meet the interests and needs of their students. The team structure thus reinforces the interdisciplinary character of the College’s curriculum.

Our professors are full-time BU faculty appointed to our College. They are not on loan from other colleges in the University. The faculty are fascinating, accomplished scholars and scientists who like to teach. Their teaching load for each semester is their team of about 100 students. While they are expected to be active in their professions, the primary reason they were hired, retained, and promoted is their interest and skill in teaching young people.

Our faculty are not expected to advise graduate students, teach senior seminars, or bring in grant money. We have no intermediaries between the students and their professors—no teaching assistants, no teaching fellows, lab assistants, no graders, and no readers. The professors grade your exams, read every word of your essays, and evaluate your term papers themselves.

Our professors do give some formal lectures, but the most common sessions during the 15 hours of classroom time are discussion sections and labs of about 26 students. The professors who gave the lectures now lead discussion and lab sections—they engage the students in a discussion of the ideas in the lectures, readings, films, and lab experiments. (The Rhetoric professors meet primarily with their students in groups of about 16 or in individual meetings.)

So, you will come to know your professors and they will know you by name, by your work, by your writing, and by the expressions of your ideas. Each team has a professional academic advisor who joins the faculty in a weekly team meeting to discuss the progress of their students. This is unheard of at a major research university. A team is often called a “college within a college”, and CGS itself is like a “small liberal arts college within a large, urban, research university.”