Teaching with Undergraduates: A Reflective Guide for Political Scientists

March 6, 2026

H. Howell Williams, PhD, Associate Professor of Political Science, Western Connecticut State University

The following reflective guide originates from a 400-level seminar on the politics of the 1990s, a class co-taught by a full-time associate professor (Williams) and an undergraduate political science student (Powers). You can view the annotated syllabus from the course that explains the content across the semester, and background reading and preparation here: https://educate.apsanet.org/resource/03-06-2026/politics-of-the-90s-syllabus-and-guide-to-co-teaching-with-undergraduate

Introduction

Political scientists recognize the importance of high impact practices (HIPs) in the undergraduate curriculum, and the recently published APSA Task Force on Rethinking Political Science Education report identified integrating HIPs as a priority for political science departments. In addition to traditional capstone experiences and internships, political scientists also invite students into the research process as assistants and co-investigators. And while collaborating with graduate and undergraduate students as teaching assistants and recitation leaders is common, there are few resources for faculty interested in co-teaching (i.e., sharing the responsibilities of course development and delivery) with undergraduates.

This report encourages us to consider co-teaching with undergrads as another fruitful avenue for developing co-curricular HIPs. Co-teaching with students allows them to shape learning outcomes, apply their education experiences, and collaborate with a professor to develop material that is meaningful to them and their peers. It can lead to a richer classroom experience by breaking down some of the traditional hierarchies between professors and students, encouraging all students to feel like knowledge holders and creators rather than passive receptors of information.

Co-teaching invites student-instructors to develop skills 
that are useful in a variety of professional settings 
and encourages them to communicate what
—and perhaps more importantly how—
they have learned to outside audiences.

The following reflections are based on my experience working with an undergraduate political science student in two classes: a 200-level course on the 2024 election and an advanced seminar called “Politics of the 90s.” In both classes, this student contributed to all aspects of course delivery except assessing student work. This student built out lessons, identified impactful readings and media sources, and provided instruction across the semester. Through this experience, I identified the benefits of co-teaching with students, including:

Students have different perspectives on the course material, and the differences between student-instructor and professor perspectives can be generative for course delivery;
Student-instructors develop crucial professional skills, including conducting independent research, distilling complex ideas into comprehensive units, managing time effectively, and delivering confident presentations; and
Students enjoy learning from their peers.

There were also trade-offs in the experience, namely:

Relinquishing some control over the course;
Advising student teaching impacted credit hour designation and advisor credit allocation as well as student credit hour compensation; and
Selecting appropriate candidates for co-teaching.

What follows summarizes these points and provides recommendations so that our discipline can embrace bringing students into the teaching process more intentionally.

Background

My experience co-teaching with Chris, an undergraduate Music Education major and Political Science minor, began as I prepared a course on the 2024 election scheduled for the fall of that year. He wanted to take the class but had a timing conflict, so we devised a plan for him to lead a few of the sessions with self-developed lectures. Given his major, it seemed like this would offer him practice and allow him to connect his interest in politics with his chosen career. After meeting to discuss his interests (including public opinion, media, and political behavior) I assigned him three class sessions to lead on those subjects. Chris developed lectures and class discussion topics on these subjects using detailed lesson plans. His sessions helped his fellow students understand political dynamics with the dispassionate and well-informed approach of a political scientist, essential for any class, but especially so for a coterminous election class. It was a risk, but turned out to be a success.

When I began to design another advanced class, a 400-level seminar called Politics of the 90s, Chris suggested that he could offer even more thorough assistance, perhaps even co-teaching the class. The class was an advanced seminar that connected political events in the 1990s with the present-day using concepts borrowed from American Political Development (APD) including path dependency, critical junctures, durable orders and political change. I provided Chris with a list of topics and a rough sketch of the syllabus, and he spent the summer before the class getting deeply immersed in all things 90s. The course subject matter was bookended by the end of the Cold War and 9/11, and topics included neoliberalism, Clintonism, racial politics, the rise of the radical right, LGBT rights, impeachment, welfare reform, and the internet.

We largely split the teaching delivery. I took responsibility for presenting broad themes and concepts, and Chris provided more of the historical detail and nuance. This approach tapped into our respective strengths and allowed him to develop units based on his interests in political history. Chris wrote detailed lectures for many of the sessions based on the research he had conducted, and I designed the assessment based on his input on what would make the most impactful assignments from a student’s perspective. We intentionally tried to highlight the subject matter from our respective vantagepoints: Chris, a college student born after 9/11 who learned about the 1990s as a historical period and myself, a child of the 80s who lived through this history and had a firsthand account of many of the developments we discussed.

Benefits and Trade-offs of Co-Teaching

I noted numerous positive impacts based on the experience. First, as will be familiar to anyone who has co-taught with a colleague, the different perspectives we brought to the subject matter added nuance and complexity to the subject matter. Students have different perspectives on the course material, and the differences between student-instructor and professor perspectives were generative for course delivery. This was particularly pronounced for the 90s class because of the inherently different perspectives we brought to the experience.

Second, co-teaching allowed Chris to become more familiar with the practices of effective teaching, such as rigorous independent research and impactful presentation delivery. Like many of our students, Chris was already a keen political observer. He channeled this energy into deeply researching aspects of the courses which allowed him to refine his interests. He then conveyed this research into lectures and activities, outputs whose quality improved over the course of our collaboration.

Third, I noticed very early in this experience that students enjoyed learning from their peer. I was concerned at the outset that inviting a student to contribute to course delivery might disincentivize student engagement, but I found the opposite to be true. Students in the class were inspired by the work Chris put into his contributions and engaged with his lectures and activities. I attribute this to the proximity between students and student-instructors, as the latter are personally familiar with the types of learning styles that they find most impactful.

Alongside these benefits, co-teaching also entailed a few trade-offs, concessions and further considerations. First, most obviously, co-teaching with anyone requires relinquishing some control over the course, and I found this to be especially true in co-teaching with Chris. We endeavored to make the experience impactful for him and reflective of his interests and research focus, which were inevitably different from my own. Rather than just subject-area differences, however, our different perspectives were really differences in scale or level of abstraction. He was much more interested in the topical nature of the class material, whereas I was more interested in pursuing the thematic and conceptual aspects. Thankfully, these approaches were complementary, and the discrepancies did not detract from achieving the courses’ learning outcomes. Fusing them nonetheless required stepping out of the driver seat somewhat and allowing the courses to progress organically, a challenge at times for an admittedly fastidious professor.

Second, advising a student co-teacher requires navigating the administration of student-instructor compensation, faculty workload, and credit hour designation. I teach at a teaching-intensive (4-4) institution, so there is little space in my workload for advising students on independent studies without appropriate credit compensation. At the same time, we lack a formal mechanism to monetarily compensate student-instructors, so we relied on course credits to recompense Chris’s work. Chris is a student in our honors program, and we facilitated his co-teaching as supplements to his honors degree. Different institutions may have different ways to work this out, but there is not, at present, a systematic process at our university for student co-teaching. I hope that the success of our experience provides a datapoint for institutionalizing these types of opportunities, but there are a variety of considerations from both pedagogical, labor, and administrative perspectives. These considerations are further complicated by the contemporary environment of increasingly scarce resources in public higher education.

Finally, Chris was an ideal student to work with through these classes, but co-teaching may not be a good fit for every student. In addition to advising the co-instructor on pedagogical best practices, the preparation and delivery requires a high level of responsibility and independent initiative from the student-instructor. As an education major, he came to the experience with a fair amount of knowledge about effective teaching practices, though these could also be easily incorporated into mentoring a student without such a background. Developing appropriate best practices for working with undergraduate co-instructors, perhaps through a campus’s center for teaching and learning, is a helpful step toward institutionalizing such opportunities, with the understanding that other HIPs may be more appropriate for other students.

Strategies for Effective Co-teaching with Undergraduates

I learned a number of things in the course of this experience. Faculty interested in bringing students into their teaching practice may find the following tips helpful:

Find the right student. Obviously, making sure the student is capable of the work involved is an essential first step toward success. This student should be interested in teaching, fairly advanced in their degree pursuit, and capable of working independently on a long-term project.
Find the right subject matter. Perhaps less intuitive than #1, the subject area for the class matters as well. Both of the classes in which I worked with Chris were once-off topical classes (called “Faculty Developed Studies,” or FDS, at my institution), meaning they did not have full course outlines and were not established elements of our program’s curriculum map. This allowed more flexibility to accommodate the student-instructor’s interests. Classes that are more introductory or are part of a general education curriculum may be less appropriate for student co-teaching.
Lean into the differences between faculty and student perspectives. The different vantage points we brought to our classes provided fruitful material to interrogate. Following from #2, this was particularly useful in the 90s class because we necessarily had such different experiences of the material.
Mentor student-instructors to find answers and develop their own content. The co-instructor brings their own interests and background to the subject matter. Nurture their sense of discovery by encouraging them to develop modules that they find interesting. This is also what distinguishes co-teaching from more traditional teaching assistantships whereby the student-instructor leads a recitation of material they did not assign.
Provide the larger conceptual and thematic background, and let your co-instructor present the details. The model that worked for us, particularly in the 90s class, entailed the professor lecturing on the “big picture” background and the student-instructor providing more granular historic details. Student-instructors do not have PhDs in political science, and they should not be expected to explain the major concepts in our discipline.
Navigate administrative requirements. Advising student-instructors requires additional considerations of labor equity, and as such administrative matters like faculty workload allocation are an important consideration. Enterprising students may want to co-teach, but the faculty member must ensure that they are able to support the co-instructor given their other workload requirements. At the same time, students must also be appropriately compensated for their time and expertise in the classroom. Institutions without formal monetary compensation procedures for student teaching may utilize the student’s credit hours, but this may affect other considerations such as time to degree and other major/degree requirements.
Remain flexible. The experience of co-teaching with students is different from co-teaching with other faculty and certainly much different that independently delivering a course. Empowering students to take their own—and their peers’—education in their hands means relinquishing some control and allowing the process to take the course in new directions. There will be sessions that are more or less successful, but the overall experience of stepping out of the standard routine can be enriching for students, student-instructors, and professors alike.

Conclusion

As departments expand their emphasis on High Impact Practices, they may consider institutionalizing co-teaching opportunities for some students. For faculty at institutions without PhD programs or graduate degrees, co-teaching with undergraduates may be the only opportunity we have to impart the pedagogical elements of our practice onto our mentees. Because not all students will be well-situated to act as co-instructors, co-teaching should not fully replace other opportunities. Programs should think creatively about how they can utilize advanced students and deepen a culture of learning together. Some of our undergraduates are not likely to be professional political scientists (though this opportunity certainly reflects well on a graduate school application). Student-instructors may not go on to lecture about federalism or political economy, but they are nonetheless deeply committed to studying and understanding political phenomena. Co-teaching provides them a unique opportunity to convey these interests beyond traditional reporting mechanisms like research posters or senior theses. Co-teaching invites student-instructors to develop skills that are useful in a variety of professional settings and encourages them to communicate what—and perhaps more importantly how—they have learned to outside audiences. The fact that these audiences happen to be their peers only increases the value for students and student-instructors alike.

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