Guidepost 1: Effective Collaboration

“Teachers should be offered ample opportunity to model lifelong learning and cooperation for their students by working regularly with each other.” Cheryl Watkins, Milken National Educator and Golden Apple Fellow, Chicago, IL

Why Effective Collaboration Matters

Teacher collaboration is closely tied to student achievement. Teachers who enjoy regular opportunities to observe, interact with, and trade ideas with colleagues show higher gains in their students’ achievement than those who don’t have similar opportunities.ⁱ

What’s more, teachers prefer collaborative workplaces. In a survey of teachers across the country, two out of three teachers preferred a school with “a lot of collaboration among teachers and guidance from other instructional experts in developing lesson plans” to one with “less collaboration, but where teachers are freer to design their own lessons.”ⁱⁱ

Changes in expectations for student work are driving us toward collaboration. Take, for example, the ACT College Readiness chart below, which shows a skill ladder for critical reading. It only makes sense that to move students up the ladder; teachers must work together both within and across grade levels, and across subjects, from preschool through postsecondary education. 

Effective collaboration goes beyond friendly cooperation and the informal exchange of ideas and information.ⁱⁱⁱ Effective collaboration includes:

• Developing common goals for student learning, (shared student goals) and a shared vision of excellent teaching;
• Building and sharing curricular supports (that is, lesson plans) and discussing both the implementation challenges and the rationales behind their design;
• Regularly observing each other’s teaching and providing in-depth feedback; and
• Monitoring student work and progress together to decide what went well, what might have been taught better, and what to do next.^iv

Creating and supporting opportunities for collaboration will be hard work even in the new school we envision. In particular, teachers and administrators need more time to work together, , and professional discretion in how to use that time. They also need space to meet, talk and collaborate.

Refashioning structures to allow schools to find more than a few minutes each day will require new approaches to scheduling and professional development.  We also caution that all teachers - including those who teach art, music, career technical courses, and physical education - be included. Collaboration can't be limited to teachers of "tested" subjects if it is truly to enrich student learning.

We provide some suggestions below and in later guideposts to help schools change how teachers work together. But one thing is certain: in places where teacher work is changing, shifting toward collective responsibility, creative collaboration, and a focus on teamwork, students are benefiting.^v

Guidepost 2

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[i] Saunders, W. M., Goldenberg, C. N., & Gallimore, R., Increasing achievement by focusing grade-level teams on improving classroom learning: A prospective, quasi-experimental study of Title I schools, American Educational Research Journal, 46, 4 (2009), 1006–1033.