3.6 Help Teachers Collaborate
When budgets are tight, districts and unions find it easiest to agree about safeguarding classroom instructional time as their top priority. In such circumstances, time for non-classroom work (such as time for teachers to collaborate on lesson planning) tends to be squeezed.
Most successful schools (and successful school leaders) cultivate “communities of learning.” In these schools, professional development and inquiry are integrated with the activities of teaching. Such collaboration is hard to put into practice for many reasons, beginning with the limitations of time. Collaboration, prep, staff development and meeting time all occur during paid work hours, and as such are negotiated elements of the teacher contract.
Collaboration is also challenging for basic, human reasons that are far from unique to the world of school. Some principals are more effective than others at bringing teachers together and resolving differences of opinion about key decisions. Some teachers are friends; others are merely colleagues.
A collaborative workplace is part of what makes teaching attractive, at least in schools and districts that are successful in sustaining such an environment. It is exciting and satisfying to work with others who share your calling.
But teaching is not only a calling – it is also a job. The next few primers will explore benefits, pay, job security, and retirement security, all critical elements of the Big Picture.
Next: 3.7 Provide Attractive Benefits
There are two elements of teacher collaboration that can help it grow into a sustainable, ongoing process rather than a one-time event within a school (or even across a district).
First, as you mention, Jeff, is the role of the principal. If a principal knows how to bring his or her colleagues together, then collaboration is more likely to happen in a school. However, facilitating collaboration, just like teaching itself, is part art and part science. In other words, some principals do it more easily than others, but all principals can learn a set of tools to help their colleagues collaborate. At the New Teacher Center, one of the ways in which our principal coaches help new principals is in helping them help their teachers collaborate more easily and more often.
Second, collaboration is more successful when it is something the teachers themselves can own in their own professional learning communities (PLCs). PLCs can be extremely powerful for teachers. They offer a way for teachers to continuously learn and improve, and I’ve seen first hand that when district budgets get tight and in-school collaboration gets sacrificed, teachers have taken it upon themselves to preserve their PLCs, even if it meant staying late or meeting outside of their regular hours.
Collaboration is a powerful learning tool for teachers. In the end, they and their students benefit from it.
I expect that a real investment in the time and additional support for teacher collaboration in schools would be a great boon to the quality of teaching and learning. Those who haven’t taught generally struggle to understand how difficult the work is, and how little opportunity most teachers have to focus on improvement. For most of us, it’s a constant juggling act; our non-teaching time at school is minimal, and divided among a dozen separate duties and responsibilities. This is an area where international comparisons suggest we’re missing something important. Not only do I think we’d see better teaching, but we’d see a significant improvement in the work environment, which surpasses salary in terms of what teachers find most important in job satisfaction. Improved teaching, greater stability and less turnover (and turnover has hidden costs). Of course, such a move wouldn’t have the “ed-reform to the rescue” appeal of some other initiatives, and it would require what is common sense in business but striking absent in education these days – trusting and empowering your skilled employees to use their skills with minimal interference.
Thanks, David. It is often difficult for people in business to appreciate the mundane-but-important obstacles to collaboration in teaching. Part of the problem stems from a flawed analogy between business and education.
Some in education resist any comparison of schools to businesses, viewing them as fundamentally different concerns. For the benefit of those open to an imperfect analogy, I suggest this: think of teachers as managers, not workers. The students are more like workers than customers. Teacher leaders and administrators are not managers, they are group VPs and executives. Schools are not small businesses, they are enterprises.
Businesses (at least those that thrive) create strong supports for managers. Teachers rarely receive that kind of support. Is it any surprise that Dilbert cartoons show up in schools, too?
You’re exactly right about treating teachers more like managers than lower level employees. We need the flexibility to meet our mandate in a variety of ways, trusted and empowered by our supervisors, (but still supervised and evaluated). Many times I hear people talk about business models for education, but they’re wrong on so many levels. I won’t bother deconstructing the whole analogy here, but I’ve done some homework on the topic; if schools were run with the wisdom of management experts like W. Edwards Deming, I’d be all for it. Peter Drucker, Samuel Culbert, Bob Sutton – I could find plenty in their work to dispute the usual suggestions from the supposed business crowd. I wrote a three-part series on this idea last year: here’s a link to the first one, which in turn leads to the other two:
http://accomplishedcaliforniateachers.wordpress.com/2010/05/21/schools-like-business-pt1/