Six Keys to Successful Collaboration

Teacher collaboration—when it's good, it's very, very good, but when it's bad, it's horrid.

Many educators believe that implementation of the Common Core Standards offers an unprecedented opportunity for collaboration among teachers. What do educators already know about the benefits and pitfalls of collaboration?

Marsha, a science teacher from Kansas, posed this question to colleagues on the Center for Teaching Quality's Teacher Leaders Network discussion board. Drawing on their own successful (and miserable) experiences, teachers identified key attributes of effective collaboration:

Clarity of Purpose

Top-down mandates for collaboration often fail. But systemic collaboration is not necessarily impossible—just tricky to design. And clarity of purpose is critical.

Some teachers noted that there are times—like when data shows students are struggling with a certain subject area—when mandated collaboration can work, as long as everyone understands its purpose.

Anne, a former state teacher of the year, described how she'd seen a school district achieve remarkable results after one middle school principal formed "small learning teams of teachers to accomplish a specific purpose." Their goal? Improving reading instruction.

The teams cut across all instructional staff and had training in how to collaborate successfully. They studied about reading strategies together; designed, implemented, and assessed lessons; and made adjustments. All teams exchanged "big ideas" with each other regularly. The process spread from school to school—and the district saw impressive achievement gains.

"So I actually don't think professional learning communities have to be made up of volunteers who see the value of collaboration at first," Anne said. "Sometimes collaboration has to be mandated in order to ratchet up teacher learning in areas of student need. But if it is mandated, there must be training in the 'how to' and a culture of positive support, coupled with time, recognition, and incentives."

Individual Commitment

A high school English teacher quoted a blues standard: "If it don't fit, don't force it."

She pointed out, "Each member of the collaboration team would have to be convinced that their time and energy would benefit students, and there would have to be a process of coming to real consensus on what the intended outcomes for students should be. Commitment to that baseline focus would be necessary to hold the group together long enough for trust to develop."

Time

Bill, a Massachusetts teacher, observed that there's a difference between "the professional, collegial trust I'll give anyone on first blush" and the deeper kind of trust that is necessary for collaboration. And the latter takes time.

Time. This word came up over and over again—along with "money." As Steve in Vermont put it, "Sooner or later, boards and administrators will have to confront the fact that if collaboration is desirable, it will have to be purchased, either with cold, hard cash or by eliminating vestigial tasks that don't contribute to student learning."

Many teachers had seen "good ideas" fail because they were mandated system-wide by those who underestimated the time needed to support the effort. One teacher offered a ...

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