Building a culture of collaboration in schools 

 

Collaboration builds teacher trust and expertise and enables schools to implement changes in instruction with greater ease and comfort.  

 

In a monthly staff meeting, several groups of three to four teachers assemble in the school library to review a sample of a student’s writing. Teachers represent several departments and are intentionally grouped to calibrate writing supports across departments.  

The math and science teachers have their computers propped open passively checking email while the English teacher reads the protocol aloud. The science teacher stops working on his computer and asks, “Sorry, what are we supposed to be doing again?” The math teacher mutters, “What does this task have to do with teaching math?” The English teacher leads the group in diagnosing problems she sees in the student’s work. Five minutes into the task, the math teacher again voices frustration, saying, “I get that writing is important, but what my ELL students could really use is help comprehending the language in long word problems.” For the rest of the task, the English teacher leads the group while the other two teachers occasionally chime in with “that sounds right,” and “that makes sense.” 

This is how many teachers experience collaborative work. Groups are organized to build a common understanding of a particular issue in teaching, but to many the experience of collaboration rings hollow. The collaborative task may be driven by a top-down mandate. Teachers may see the task as inauthentic or irrelevant to their daily practice. It may be unclear to teachers why they are grouped with colleagues from other departments. Or it may be that the tasks teachers are asked to complete are not worthy of collaboration to begin with. 

Teaching is complex; teachers and school leaders crave meaningful, collaborative experiences to make sense of that complexity. However, the structural, cultural, and historical factors involved with schooling impede teacher collaboration. Teachers spend five to six periods of the day teaching classes, largely working in isolation from each other; they spend their remaining time tending to administrative tasks, answering emails, or grading. When we ask teachers to begin collaborating with colleagues in meaningful ways, they often perceive it as more of a hindrance than a help.  

When we ask teachers to begin collaborating with colleagues in meaningful ways, they often perceive it as more of a hindrance than a help. 

For schools to work around the structural constraints to establish sincere and thoughtful collaborative cultures present in the research literature (Cochran-Smith, & Lytle, 1999; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012), they must approach collaboration differently. Collaborative cultures emerge from authentic and relevant problem solving. Teachers see collaboration as an integral feature of their work when the problems we ask them to solve are specific to their practice, common to a majority of teachers in a particular school, and have a solution that can only be reached via collaboration. In the example provided above, the issue was what teachers were asked to do, not how they were asked to do it.  

Collaboration at Sammamish High School 

The authors have spent the last five years in a close partnership with Sammamish High School (SHS), a public, comprehensive high school in the Pacific Northwest. To stem decreased enrollment, persistent achievement gaps, and a sense that students simply were not sufficiently motivated to engage in required coursework at a high level, teachers and administrators began work to transform their school from a traditional high school to a problem-based learning (PBL) environment. Much of this work was funded by a federal grant in 2009. Since that time, we have participated in, observed, and collected data on multiple activities related to the school’s renewal process, including data collected on multiple design teams where teachers redesigned curriculum, consulting, and in some cases codesigned multiday professional development experiences. We offered technical assistance to teachers implementing PBL coursework, participated in leadership team meetings, and worked with school leaders to write the school’s Key Elements of Problem-Based Learning guiding document. 

The questions that emerged were weighty. How would they shift their practice to support students’ learning in PBL classrooms? How would they redesign established curriculum into PBL curriculum while aligning it with multiple standards such as the Common Core, Advanced Placement (AP) frameworks, and the district’s common curriculum? How would they redesign professional learning to support that work? Doing this work, collaboration became central to the school renewal efforts.  

Collaborative curriculum redesign  

A team focusing on the Social Studies I class was one of the first to design a PBL course. Originally, the team included six teachers representing a diversity of teaching experience and expertise. The team included a second-year teacher and a teacher with deep expertise and extensive experience teaching the specific content of the course. The school had recruited the teacher with the content expertise to help redesign this specific course. This and other teams worked largely autonomously throughout the school.  

When teachers were designing a challenge cycle in which students would redraw the school district attendance lines, the team considered including elementary and middle schools in the challenge. One teacher said doing so would make the challenge “way too complex.” As the conversation continued, another teacher suggested creating mega groups of nine students and splitting them into elementary, middle, and high school groups according to feeder schools. That prompted one teacher to ask, “Will there be enough buy-in for the kids who are doing middle and elementary schools?” After further discussion, the team decided that having students work on high school attendance lines would suffice if the point of the challenge cycle is to have students deeply engage content-specific concepts and use them to make attendance boundary decisions. The team decided that task would lose some authenticity, but students would find the overall task more relevant to their lives.   

Throughout the redesign experience, Social Studies I teachers did not hesitate to ask each other clarifying questions and challenge each other’s suggestions. Teachers interacted as equals with no one teacher assuming leadership over the group or attempting to dominate the process. They disagreed often, but those disagreements were resolved by deciding what option(s) best aligned with PBL principles and served the interests of students and student learning. 

The Social Studies I team did not stumble across a healthy collaborative working relationship by happenstance. In October of their design year, the team took a retreat day to establish clear norms and a shared commitment to and vision for their curriculum redesign work. Interviews with each Social Studies I teacher strongly supported our observations. Teachers often referred to the “we” of the team and the department. They discussed how they spent ample time both in design team meetings and during lunch trying to define a PBL class, how that is different from a traditional class, and how to begin to plan for it. One team member described how the department “collaborates a lot” and how “at lunch, we [they] talk about how we can work together better as a department.” In this group, there was a sense of accountability and responsibility present in the “we” that seems to be an extension of the culture of the department. One teacher said, “I’ve never been in a department that talks so much about history and cares so much about the lessons.” 

Teacher-led professional learning 

As the teacher teams worked on curriculum design, the school redesigned the way teachers learned in formal professional development spaces. Every summer school, leaders and teachers led a voluntary professional development experience called the Sammamish Institute of Learning and Teaching (SILT). Planning for SILT would begin the previous winter and involved teacher leaders, school leaders, teachers, and university partners. Each SILT experience was focused on specific principles of PBL to support the work teachers were doing to design and implement PBL curriculum. Teachers who demonstrated mastery in implementing specific PBL principles such as authentic assessment or student voice were asked to design and lead 45- to 60-minute SILT sessions. Teacher surveys, compiled over four years of SILT, show that more than 90% of teachers “came away with something specific today I will be able to use in my teaching this year.” The following example, illustrating how a well-respected math teacher facilitated a discussion on the perils of group work, shows why. 

Judy Smith (a pseudonym) teaches several sections of AP math. Like many teachers, she struggles with facilitating student collaboration between native and non-native English speakers in her AP classes. She opened her 45-minute SILT session by revealing to teachers that this is a chronic problem in her classroom and that she was hoping they could help her find some solutions. “I’m going to make myself vulnerable and share with staff my failings with facilitating student collaboration,” she said. “I think that might work.” She focused teachers’ learning on several case studies from her practice that showed why group work did not meet the needs of her ELL students, her native speaking students, or both. Working in both discipline-specific and interdisciplinary groups, teachers shared common struggles with Judy’s problem and quickly got to work on solutions.  

On the end-of-the-day survey, all 31 teachers who attended Judy’s session rated it highly, saying that it was relevant to their teaching and learning goals for the upcoming year. One teacher said she “really enjoyed being able to work through some actual problems and form solutions to things that come up in almost every class.” Another teacher bluntly stated, “We need more of this . . . real kids, real problems we all share and working to solve them and hear what others have done.”  

Distributed leadership in action 

Eight people sit around a conference table in a converted office space at Sammamish High School. It is the second year of their PBL transformation work, and a group consisting of teacher leaders, the principal, a university researcher who is also one of the authors, and a representative from an educational nonprofit organization discuss the merits of an externally validated assessment to measure students’ college readiness. At this point in the project, the leadership team was facing a quandary. Although student performance on AP exams and the various state-mandated exams gave them data on yearly student progress, those same assessments gave them little insight into how students were developing creative problem solving, critical thinking, and research skills needed in college or a career. 

Once they had decided to pilot the new assessment, one of the teachers presented a dilemma: “Given the school has to administer any number of high-stakes, standardized tests throughout the year, how will the team persuade teachers — who already are implementing PBL coursework — that the additional time they will need to give up to administer the multiple day exam is worth the investment?” The partner representative asked how the assessment aligns with the Common Core standards, suggesting that this exam could serve multiple purposes. A teacher leader suggested face-to-face conversations with those leading implementation on each design team to gauge the willingness of the design teams. At one point, the school’s ELL facilitator asked, “What accommodations would be made for ELL and special education students, and how much extra time and support they would be provided?”  

The discussion continued for more than 15 minutes with no clear resolution. Then, after listening to the discussion, the principal suggested that they “don’t know of a better way to assess students on college-readiness skills” and that this test may help the school “establish an externally validated way, beyond AP exams, to assess students’ progress within the PBL framework. This as an opportunity for us to learn,” he argued. “We need to be clear with staff why we think this is a good idea and get creative in how we support them.” After his input, the group transitioned to identifying teachers whose classes would be asked to pilot the test and the various ways they could alleviate the extra work they would have to do. By the end of the conversation, the group established a clear argument about why they wanted to pilot the assessment, and they identified concrete ways to help support teachers who administer the test. 

In many schools, this decision would be made in a top-down manner. At Sammamish High School, a group or groups of people will deliberate policy decisions that affect the whole school. Sometimes the school’s leadership team makes the decision. Other times, the principal works with other teachers to better understand the implications of various decisions. In the example above, the principal deliberated with the leadership team for most of one hour to solve this problem. In this case, all participants had ample space and time to express their opinions, and each opinion was weighed equally. The decision-making process was open, transparent, and candid.  

Keys to a collaborative culture 

In our work with Sammamish High School, we observed several key practices that helped create a strong and durable collaborative culture. The first were explicit moves to empower teachers and involve them in every facet of the school improvement process. At Sammamish High School, the principal built strong relationships with teachers by developing a vision for school improvement with them, not for them. From the beginning, teachers were provided the space and time to diagnose problems such as decreased enrollment, weak inclusion of students of color in STEM-related coursework, and chronic achievement gaps. From that work came a shared understanding of problems facing the school and a shared vision for how the school could address those issues.  

Instead of relying on outside consultants or district leaders, the school leveraged the expertise of existing staff to design and lead relevant professional development and redesign established curriculum. 

Strong partnerships between teachers and school leaders should extend to redesigned professional learning for teachers. Instead of relying on outside consultants or district leaders, the school leveraged the expertise of existing staff to design and lead relevant professional development and redesign established curriculum. This approach has several advantages. Teacher-designed and teacher-led professional learning will, in most cases, focus on problems of practice most relevant to other teachers (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Cochran-Smith, & Lytle, 1999). When teachers design and lead professional development, they simultaneously deepen their expertise and establish themselves as a resource for other teachers (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). By trusting teachers to design and lead thoughtful professional learning, in small- or large-group settings, schools position teachers as instructional and pedagogical leaders within the school.  

Most important, their school improvement efforts focused on shifting how students learn and how teachers teach. Across the school, teachers collaborated to redesign coursework. Their work was supported by highly relevant and engaging professional learning experiences designed and led by teachers. To support teachers’ PBL implementation efforts and their ongoing professional learning, the leadership team charted long-term goals for the school and designed professional learning experiences based on feedback from teachers. Taken separately, each characteristic demonstrates the increasingly collaborative ways teachers worked together. Over time, however, Sammamish High School’s collaborative culture emerged from sustained, collaborative, problem solving occurring across multiple settings within the school around local, yet universal, problems of practice.  Teachers came to see that work as not only meaningful and purposeful but necessary in order to better address the needs of students. 

Sammamish High School has taken a decidedly long-term, ecological approach to collaborative school improvement. To them, collaboration is more than a tool of professional development. It is “about the process of individual and organizational change, about nurturing the intellectual connections in the lives of educators working together to understand and improve their practice . . . and about continuous, critical inquiry into current practices and principled innovation” (Sirotnik, 1999, p. 607-608). As one teacher describes it, “Collaboration is how our work gets done now. I couldn’t imagine it being any different.”  

References 

Ball, D.L. & Cohen, D.K. (1999).  Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes (Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession (pp. 3-32).  San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.  

Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. (1999). Relationships of knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities. Review of Research in Education, 24, 249-305. 

Hargreaves, A. & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital: Transforming teaching in every school. New York, NY: Teachers College Press. 

McLaughlin, M.W. & Talbert, J.E. (2006). Building school-based teacher learning communities.  New York, NY: Teachers College Press.   

Sirotnik, K.A. (1999, April). Making sense of educational renewal. Phi Delta Kappan, 80 (8), 606-610. 

 

Citation: Sutton, P.S. & Shouse, A.W. (2016). Building a culture of collaboration in schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 97 (7), 69-73.