Tag Archives: Teamwork

I’ve written quite a few posts with sub-themes on the numerous benefits of teacher communication and collaboration in education, and as is often the case, the more you think about a topic, the more references and associations to that topic that seem to pop up everywhere you look. This is only natural given that the deeper we delve into an issue, the greater our understanding and the greater the number of connections with our previous knowledge and experiences we can make.

A few weeks back I wrote about the problem of teacher turnover in education systems around the world, and how the turnover among new teachers makes up a disproportionately large part of that total. Several national surveys in the United States suggest that lack of communication and collaboration among teaching staff; lack of opportunity for professional development; and lack of support from school administrations are the most common reasons given for this high turnover. Much of the media attention seems to focus on a lack of training and support for ‘new’ teachers as the reason for the problem, as though the new teachers themselves are not sufficiently prepared to teach within the edcuation system. I think this is a very unfortunate and backwards way of interpreting the issue, since solutions based on this thinking would have broken teachers adapting to systems and school cultures rather than broken systems and school cultures being fixed because they are posioning education.

In addition to teacher retention, an integrated professional culture within institutions improves learning outcomes for teachers and students alike. In the absence of formal professional development, communication and collaboration among teachers can lead to shared learning, and the identification and resolution of teaching and learning issues. The results of numerous surveys and case studies seem to support this conclusion, as does research which empirically tests and confirms the cause and effect relationship between improved teacher collaboration and improved student achievement. Given the benefits of collaboration for teachers and students alike, why do so many teachers in so many schools continue to work in isolation? Surveys in the US suggest the number is somewhere between 50 and 65% of teachers (although this is likely to be the result of broken school cultures rather simply a matter of teacher choice).

Why does communication and collaboration among teachers lead to improvements in student achievement? I mentioned in a previous post on March 25th that there are certain potential dangers involved in decision making in teams such as ‘group think’ and over-confidence in group-made decisions; however, if these can be avoided the substantial benefits involve improved creativity; job satisfaction; peer review of ideas and practices; combining of skills; delegation of work; learning opportunities; identification of problems; and shared responsibility for resolving issues and reinforcing student learning. The other day I came across an interesting little video on YouTube by Steven Johnson (linked below) entitled “Where Good Ides Come From“. The theme of the video is that ’chance favours the connected mind’, and while it relates to innovation rather than issues in education specifically, you get the idea. Worth a watch: