There was no yellow Post-It note, no collegial suggestion like, “Hey, I’ve tried these ...” Newly hired French teacher Amy Moran merely found a stack of worksheets tossed on her desk by a colleague soon after she arrived at Westford Academy, a public high school in Westford, Mass.
With 10 years of teaching already under her belt, Moran had seen students benefit when teachers shared observations about strategies, lessons, and test results. The pile of worksheets made tangible what Moran already knew: She and her new colleague weren’t working together. The two teachers gave students different tests and assessed the results separately. Who knew if their students were learning the same things? “To dump papers on a person’s desk doesn’t mean anything; it’s not helpful,” Moran recalls of the incident that occurred seven years ago.
It’s hardly rare to find teachers who don’t click. But such behavior—once considered an unfortunate personality conflict—is increasingly seen as a barrier to school success. Spurred by shifting teacher demographics and the drive for standards-based instruction, schools across the country are pressing teachers to take active roles in changing practice and to work together more effectively.
Principals in particular are responding by requiring teachers to participate in activities designed to encourage effective collaboration. They are going beyond simply providing common planning time, and setting specific tasks and goals that depend on collaboration, such as writing common assessments, identifying “power (essential) standards,” and devising common curricula. They are also structuring meetings to help teachers stay on track and offering feedback.
"[Collaboration] is difficult in any workplace and it is probably more difficult in schools,” says Richard DuFour, a Virginia-based educational consultant and coauthor of Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. “Teachers are used to total autonomy. Now they have to build consensus.”
Generational Differences
Making teachers active team players, problem-solvers, and even innovators, however, requires a new approach to the profession. In 1975, when Dan C. Lortie famously characterized the work and rewards of the schoolteacher as largely individual, he was describing the norms of the era in which today’s veteran teachers entered the profession. Susan Moore Johnson, professor of teaching and learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says this isolated “egg-crate” structure reflects how schools grew—one classroom at a time—and an essential belief about the work itself.
With 10 years of teaching already under her belt, Moran had seen students benefit when teachers shared observations about strategies, lessons, and test results. The pile of worksheets made tangible what Moran already knew: She and her new colleague weren’t working together. The two teachers gave students different tests and assessed the results separately. Who knew if their students were learning the same things? “To dump papers on a person’s desk doesn’t mean anything; it’s not helpful,” Moran recalls of the incident that occurred seven years ago.
It’s hardly rare to find teachers who don’t click. But such behavior—once considered an unfortunate personality conflict—is increasingly seen as a barrier to school success. Spurred by shifting teacher demographics and the drive for standards-based instruction, schools across the country are pressing teachers to take active roles in changing practice and to work together more effectively.
Principals in particular are responding by requiring teachers to participate in activities designed to encourage effective collaboration. They are going beyond simply providing common planning time, and setting specific tasks and goals that depend on collaboration, such as writing common assessments, identifying “power (essential) standards,” and devising common curricula. They are also structuring meetings to help teachers stay on track and offering feedback.
- At Robert Adams Middle School in Holliston, Mass., new principal Jessica Huizenga revamped how teachers work. She provides common planning time for grade-level subject teachers to create and assess lessons together and demands that teachers submit written logs of their discussions as proof of real collaboration.
- As the founding principal of the three-year-old Chicago Academy High School, Brian Sims hired team-oriented teachers because, he says, “I wanted it to be a collaborative environment.” He has assigned multiple teachers to teach different sections of the same course and requires them to create common curricula and assessments. To keep collaboration on track, Sims regularly attends teacher meetings.
- At Adlai Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Ill., principal Janet Gonzalez says the school’s collaborative culture shows in its organizational chart. It’s shaped like a bull’s eye, rather than a pyramid, and depicts a two-way flow of ideas between teachers and administrators. The key to success, she says, is the role of teacher leaders, who work with administrators to draft agendas for grade- and subject-level meetings and who keep talk focused on effective practices, rather than allowing griping or chit-chat.
"[Collaboration] is difficult in any workplace and it is probably more difficult in schools,” says Richard DuFour, a Virginia-based educational consultant and coauthor of Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. “Teachers are used to total autonomy. Now they have to build consensus.”
Generational Differences
Making teachers active team players, problem-solvers, and even innovators, however, requires a new approach to the profession. In 1975, when Dan C. Lortie famously characterized the work and rewards of the schoolteacher as largely individual, he was describing the norms of the era in which today’s veteran teachers entered the profession. Susan Moore Johnson, professor of teaching and learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, says this isolated “egg-crate” structure reflects how schools grew—one classroom at a time—and an essential belief about the work itself.
Decades of research since Lortie’s day, however, has linked strong collegial practices with school success—including a 1982 study by Judith Warren Little connecting regular talk about instruction, structured observations, and shared planning time as common to “high-success” schools. More recently, a new cohort of teachers has arrived from fields or with backgrounds steeped in team-oriented approaches. New teachers, says Johnson, “expect to work with other people. They do not expect to be left on their own.”
Still, a 2004 study by Susan Kardos illustrates how difficult it has been for schools to make the shift from the egg-crate culture to a more collaborative one. Kardos found that nearly half of 486 first- and second-year public school teachers surveyed in California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Michigan planned and taught lessons alone.
Unfortunately, too many schools “are still structured for the retiring generation” and fail to push collaboration, says Johnson. But, she notes, pressure to show that every child is reaching standards has begun to make teamwork appealing. “Schools have had to face some data they have never had to look at before. It is disaggregated by subgroup, so they can’t slide along based on the high performance of wealthy kids from the suburbs,” says Johnson. “People within schools are realizing they need to work together, but [often] the time is not there and the skills are not available to them.”
Overcoming Teacher Resistance in One School
When Huizenga, age 31 and a doctoral student, got her first principal’s job at the Robert Adams Middle School and—steeped in the writings of DuFour and others—marched into a reasonably performing suburban school and announced her plan for teacher collaboration, she expected battles. In September she required that teachers jointly write new curricula and document collaboration in logs turned into her every two weeks. Each log entry included an outline of topics for teachers to talk about, with room to summarize the discussion. Topics to be covered included goals and objectives for the week or unit, common assessments and individual teacher assessments used, instructional strategies, and lesson design, as well as adjustments to instruction based on a shared evaluation of assessment results.
The teachers union at first balked, grieving the demands as a change in work conditions. But ultimately they relented.
“I know they see me like this little Tasmanian devil, like a cyclone,” she says of her faculty. “But I keep reinforcing that [collaboration] will make our work easier. This is not like the 1960s or 1970s teaching where we went on our guts,” she says. “We will know exactly what kids know, what they need to know, and what we need to do to change our instruction so all kids are learning and successful.”
Good idea, but tough to execute. One teacher at Huizenga’s school, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that required sessions with a colleague have been frustrating, even painful. Assistant superintendent Timothy Cornely observes that some teachers always resist change. “Teachers also aren’t used to problem-solving,” he says. “They are used to, ‘Here’s the problem. Who do we tell?’"
However, sixth-grade science teacher Michelle Roy credits mandatory meetings with helping her and her two colleagues to focus on what works, even though the three of them “couldn’t be more different people.” Now they plan, discuss, and review labs together so if one approach yields clearer results for students they will all teach the more effective lab—something that would have surfaced only by chance in the past.
“I was originally all about, ‘This is my lab, this is my way of doing things,’” says Roy. She has learned to compromise and recently deferred when her colleagues both wanted to teach a particular lesson earlier in the year and she wanted to do it later. “I liked my way,” Roy says, “but I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it. They are professionals.’”
In fact, teachers don’t have to be friendly with each other to collaborate well, says DuFour. He stresses that collegial harmony should not be mistaken for collaboration, a more formal activity. “All teams have conflict,” he notes. “Bad teams ignore it, while good teams work through it” (see sidebar "Guidelines for Collaboration"). Close SidebarGuidelines for Collaboration
Effective collaboration means moving teachers from broad aims (wanting all kids to learn) to specifics (learn what?), says Richard DuFour, educational consultant and coauthor of Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. His advice for making it work:
* Make student learning the center of collaboration: “Focus on the learner instead of the teacher.”
* At the start, insist that teachers spell out rules for collaborating, including individual responsibilities and distribution of work.
* Set goals that can only be accomplished by working together. “Without a goal, you are not a team,” says DuFour.
* Be certain goals are results oriented, not process oriented. For example, instead of deciding to do more hands-on labs, aim to raise fifth-grade science test scores by 10 percentage points, or to raise the percentage of A's on final lab reports.
* Set a timeline and a means to measure progress. Administrators can help by creating a vehicle for teachers to check in and receive feedback.
* When conflicts arise, administrators must demand that collaborative work continue.
Still, a 2004 study by Susan Kardos illustrates how difficult it has been for schools to make the shift from the egg-crate culture to a more collaborative one. Kardos found that nearly half of 486 first- and second-year public school teachers surveyed in California, Florida, Massachusetts, and Michigan planned and taught lessons alone.
Unfortunately, too many schools “are still structured for the retiring generation” and fail to push collaboration, says Johnson. But, she notes, pressure to show that every child is reaching standards has begun to make teamwork appealing. “Schools have had to face some data they have never had to look at before. It is disaggregated by subgroup, so they can’t slide along based on the high performance of wealthy kids from the suburbs,” says Johnson. “People within schools are realizing they need to work together, but [often] the time is not there and the skills are not available to them.”
Overcoming Teacher Resistance in One School
When Huizenga, age 31 and a doctoral student, got her first principal’s job at the Robert Adams Middle School and—steeped in the writings of DuFour and others—marched into a reasonably performing suburban school and announced her plan for teacher collaboration, she expected battles. In September she required that teachers jointly write new curricula and document collaboration in logs turned into her every two weeks. Each log entry included an outline of topics for teachers to talk about, with room to summarize the discussion. Topics to be covered included goals and objectives for the week or unit, common assessments and individual teacher assessments used, instructional strategies, and lesson design, as well as adjustments to instruction based on a shared evaluation of assessment results.
The teachers union at first balked, grieving the demands as a change in work conditions. But ultimately they relented.
“I know they see me like this little Tasmanian devil, like a cyclone,” she says of her faculty. “But I keep reinforcing that [collaboration] will make our work easier. This is not like the 1960s or 1970s teaching where we went on our guts,” she says. “We will know exactly what kids know, what they need to know, and what we need to do to change our instruction so all kids are learning and successful.”
Good idea, but tough to execute. One teacher at Huizenga’s school, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that required sessions with a colleague have been frustrating, even painful. Assistant superintendent Timothy Cornely observes that some teachers always resist change. “Teachers also aren’t used to problem-solving,” he says. “They are used to, ‘Here’s the problem. Who do we tell?’"
However, sixth-grade science teacher Michelle Roy credits mandatory meetings with helping her and her two colleagues to focus on what works, even though the three of them “couldn’t be more different people.” Now they plan, discuss, and review labs together so if one approach yields clearer results for students they will all teach the more effective lab—something that would have surfaced only by chance in the past.
“I was originally all about, ‘This is my lab, this is my way of doing things,’” says Roy. She has learned to compromise and recently deferred when her colleagues both wanted to teach a particular lesson earlier in the year and she wanted to do it later. “I liked my way,” Roy says, “but I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it. They are professionals.’”
In fact, teachers don’t have to be friendly with each other to collaborate well, says DuFour. He stresses that collegial harmony should not be mistaken for collaboration, a more formal activity. “All teams have conflict,” he notes. “Bad teams ignore it, while good teams work through it” (see sidebar "Guidelines for Collaboration"). Close SidebarGuidelines for Collaboration
Effective collaboration means moving teachers from broad aims (wanting all kids to learn) to specifics (learn what?), says Richard DuFour, educational consultant and coauthor of Learning by Doing: A Handbook for Professional Learning Communities at Work. His advice for making it work:
* Make student learning the center of collaboration: “Focus on the learner instead of the teacher.”
* At the start, insist that teachers spell out rules for collaborating, including individual responsibilities and distribution of work.
* Set goals that can only be accomplished by working together. “Without a goal, you are not a team,” says DuFour.
* Be certain goals are results oriented, not process oriented. For example, instead of deciding to do more hands-on labs, aim to raise fifth-grade science test scores by 10 percentage points, or to raise the percentage of A's on final lab reports.
* Set a timeline and a means to measure progress. Administrators can help by creating a vehicle for teachers to check in and receive feedback.
* When conflicts arise, administrators must demand that collaborative work continue.
Leading the Way to “Developmental” Practice
A 2006 study by W. David Stevens at the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago has revealed barriers to meaningful collaboration, even when schools embrace the concept. The study identifies two kinds of collaborative practices. Supportive practices include teachers offering advice, suggesting approaches to tasks or concerns, and generally helping one another with daily classroom work. These typically occur informally and affect only one or a few teachers. Developmental practices, on the other hand, are interactions that spur improvements in overall instruction and change classroom practices. These require collective and structured efforts (see table "Supportive vs. Developmental Practices").
Supportive vs. Developmental Practices
Typically, teachers help each other by using one of two types of collaborative practice. However, only developmental practices lead to lasting, systemic change.
Source: W.D. Stevens, with J. Kahne, "Professional Communities and Instructional Improvement Practices."
Teacher chit-chat about school “is not wasted time,” Stevens says, “but it is not focused time, time that is used to sustain a larger improvement effort.” He notes that the study of seven small schools in the Chicago High School Redesign Initiative revealed that discussions can easily get sidetracked and that real gains require a leader to take responsibility for setting goals and structuring collaborative teacher discussions.
One successful principal, for example, required teachers to create interim assessments based on college-readiness skills. Teachers reviewed test data together every two to three months, and together they made adjustments to keep kids on track. Another asked faculty members to list student performance goals by grade level. “The principal had the teachers think about what [they] expect freshmen to be able to do at the end of the school year [and also for] sophomores,” and so on, says Stevens. Listing learning goals, he says, “helped teachers focus discussions on what they needed to do in the classroom to ensure students pick up those skills.” Such goals, says Stevens, “force departments to work together.”
At Westfield Academy, Moran’s former colleagues have retired and she is now the French department veteran. Today, she and her colleagues regularly discuss program issues; for example, they recently decided students needed to speak more French in lower-level courses to prepare them for the demands of upper-level classes. “I really wonder if seven years ago we had been told to give a common assessment, if it would have changed the dynamic,” says Moran. “We would have been forced to collaborate.”
Laura Pappano writes about education and is coauthor, with Eileen McDonagh, of Playing with the Boys: Separate Is Not Equal in Sports, published by Oxford University Press.
A 2006 study by W. David Stevens at the Consortium on Chicago School Research at the University of Chicago has revealed barriers to meaningful collaboration, even when schools embrace the concept. The study identifies two kinds of collaborative practices. Supportive practices include teachers offering advice, suggesting approaches to tasks or concerns, and generally helping one another with daily classroom work. These typically occur informally and affect only one or a few teachers. Developmental practices, on the other hand, are interactions that spur improvements in overall instruction and change classroom practices. These require collective and structured efforts (see table "Supportive vs. Developmental Practices").
Supportive vs. Developmental Practices
Typically, teachers help each other by using one of two types of collaborative practice. However, only developmental practices lead to lasting, systemic change.
| Dimenisons | Supportive Practices | Developmental Practices |
| Focus | Supporting routine tasks (i.e., sharing information about students or new ideas for classroom activities) |
Improving instructional capacity (i.e., developing standards-based curricula or new interdisciplinary curricular units) |
| Context | Informal, individual, and group interactions (random conversation) |
Formal, collective interactions (regular, structured meetings) |
| Prompts | Reactive (responding to immediate, pressing concerns) |
Proactive (addressing systemic, general concerns) |
| Time Frame | Short-term solutions | Long-term projects |
| Type of Information Exchanged | Disconnected pieces of information about individual problems (spontaneous advice) |
Connected sets of information about common problems (deliberate follow-up and monitoring) |
| Depth of Change | Isolated, corrective changes | Systemic, fundamental changes |
Teacher chit-chat about school “is not wasted time,” Stevens says, “but it is not focused time, time that is used to sustain a larger improvement effort.” He notes that the study of seven small schools in the Chicago High School Redesign Initiative revealed that discussions can easily get sidetracked and that real gains require a leader to take responsibility for setting goals and structuring collaborative teacher discussions.
One successful principal, for example, required teachers to create interim assessments based on college-readiness skills. Teachers reviewed test data together every two to three months, and together they made adjustments to keep kids on track. Another asked faculty members to list student performance goals by grade level. “The principal had the teachers think about what [they] expect freshmen to be able to do at the end of the school year [and also for] sophomores,” and so on, says Stevens. Listing learning goals, he says, “helped teachers focus discussions on what they needed to do in the classroom to ensure students pick up those skills.” Such goals, says Stevens, “force departments to work together.”
At Westfield Academy, Moran’s former colleagues have retired and she is now the French department veteran. Today, she and her colleagues regularly discuss program issues; for example, they recently decided students needed to speak more French in lower-level courses to prepare them for the demands of upper-level classes. “I really wonder if seven years ago we had been told to give a common assessment, if it would have changed the dynamic,” says Moran. “We would have been forced to collaborate.”
Laura Pappano writes about education and is coauthor, with Eileen McDonagh, of Playing with the Boys: Separate Is Not Equal in Sports, published by Oxford University Press.
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