Collaboration in effective professional development

Another important aspect that all reviews of effective teacher professional development highlight is the importance of teacher collaboration. This is referred to with diverse concepts, such as community, cooperative work or colleagueship among teachers, and teachers and researchers, always referring to the importance of professional exchange and feedback among these different professionals. The importance of collaboration is also stressed regarding other useful strategies for teacher learning, such as the aforementioned reflection, which are also discussed to be more effective within collaborative environments (Zeichner 1994; Lang 2000;

Manouchehri 2002).

According to Lang (2000), “collaboration is a complex task dependent on mutual help, trust, openness, open access to various sources of information, reflective experiences from inside and outside school, and autonomy in a community of the individuals involved.” (p.10). As described, it is much more than mere collegiality or social interaction among teachers. The author defines collaboration as a special kind of personal and technical exchange for innovative educational planning. Behind this

notion there is a change of rationale regarding the scholar view of teachers’

collaboration that has taken place during the last decades.

During the 90’s, a lot of emphasis was placed on the idea of “professional communities” and the focus of interest was on how these communities form among teachers, promoting and analysing basically social interaction, collegiality and group cohesion. This focus on teachers’ relations was a result of Hargreaves (1978) and others’ complaints that, despite the extensive research on the relationships between teachers and students, or among students’ themselves (particularly within the paradigm of peer work), there was almost no systemic research on the relations among teachers.

However, a focus on mere collegiality and social life evidenced that focus and promotion of these two aspects alone did not have the expected impact on students’

learning. In fact, research results showed that strongly cohesive teacher groups could have very limited interest or impact in changing their practice (Little 2002). For instance, a study confirmed that shared goals, joint decision making, shared responsibilities, consultation and advice, despite important, were insufficient to improve educational practice and, consequently, student achievement (Visscher and Witziers 2004). Rather, effects resulted when departments “consistently translate their shared vision and willingness to cooperate into a system of rules, agreements and goals regarding teaching and instruction, and evolve their professional activities around this by obtaining data on student performance, which in turn serves as a feedback mechanism for improving teaching and learning. This differs from a ‘softer’ approach [to cooperative work]” (p.798, Bolam, McMahon et al. 2005). In this sense, the interest in teacher collaboration and community has been reformulated towards an interest in these scenarios to improve teachers’ professionalism and change in practice, that is, collaboration or communities for reflecting on, learning from or for, and inquiring on practice. Teacher collaboration and community goes far beyond than a mere gathering of teachers (Grossman, Wineburg and Woolworth 2000), if authentic collaboration (Couso 2008a, 2008b) is pursued.

The above mentioned implies that for professional development purposes is necessary to organise purposefully the new cooperative settings, establishing new norms of discourse and ways of working together, so that collaboration becomes useful beyond socialization purposes. For instance, to make explicit reference to classroom practice, the material artefacts used in it and the observed results (what is done, with what materials, what happened, etc), which is very important to promote opportunities for teacher professional exchange and cooperative learning, does not happen

spontaneously in teachers’ interactions or group work (Little 2002). Collaboration needs, then, to be managed by teacher leaders or researchers helping to create the appropriate settings. For Haberman (1992) the collective implementation of change, that is, teachers’ active participation in educational innovation, can be one of these settings where useful collaboration takes place. According to the author, these scenarios can have the fruitful by-product of fighting teachers’ evidenced culture of closeness and professional isolation: “teachers, much like other artists and artisans, typically stay away from one another's workshops. Within the school building, one does not ask spontaneously for help and one does not cavalierly offer advice. Both behaviours are reckless. To ask for help is publicly to compromise one's professional reputation (self-abasement); to offer help is to violate important norms of status equality (arrogance, hubris, bad form)" (p.12-13). This has been referred to in the literature as the model of the independent artisan, certainly difficult to be addressed when it is the status quo of most schools (Huberman 1993). In this sense, it is important that in the process of enacting significant change, these norms can also modify. “Since everyone is in over her head, no one is expected to perform well. Since we are all learning, making mistakes, finding solutions serendipitously, it is all right to ask for help and to give advice" (p.13). However, collaboration would not arise spontaneously even in these facilitated settings of collective involvement in innovation and, again, collaboration needs to be managed. According to Darling-Hammond (2006), teachers need to be prepared to become expert collaborators who can learn from one another.

In addition, the organisation of cooperation has the objective to deal with conflict.

Collegial work, interaction, community etc. invariable engenders conflict, either by bringing to a public forum pre-existing conflict (for instance in a school where there are past problems among certain people) or making hidden conflict to arise once teachers have to expose their views and beliefs of teaching and learning, subject matter, etc. We have to keep in mind that teachers are not only not used to work with each other, but generally purposefully avoiding to do so to avoid these situations in which different rationales and views of education emerge and confront (Perrenoud 1995). However, the emergence of conflict, if well-understood and managed, is not problematic for teachers’ development in collaborative scenarios. On the contrary, for some authors it is not till some conflict is able to arise that a “pseudo-community” of teachers were there is a false sense of agreement does not start to become a real community (Grossman, Wineburg and Woolworth 2001). In this sense, the organisation of the cooperation has the objective to create a climate of critical collegueaship (Lord 1994), were critical discourse and feedback can be seen as something positive for one’s

development. This is the main role of real cooperative groups or communities: “When teachers come together for a day-long or even a week-long institute, the disciplinary and pedagogical issues we have encountered do not have time to surface. Only in a committed community, where individuals have the sustained opportunity to explore issues of teaching and learning with their peers, do such differences emerge” (p.32, Thomas, Wineburg, Grossman, Myhre and Woolworth 1998) thus allowing to discuss them, think about them, reflect on them, negotiate them.

Research also shows that not all teachers’ benefit equally from collaborative experiences. Experienced teachers, whose professional culture is related with independence and autonomy, norms of privacy and non-interference, etc. experience the greater difficulties in collaborative settings (Lortie 1975). It is common in research studies to report these experienced teachers as the ones facing more personal and professional conflict within the experience. They are generally those with bigger proportions of withdrawal from projects. Isolation for these teachers is chosen, is an option, the best one to work (Haberman 1992; Perrenoud 1995). However, they are also the teachers who acknowledge more the fact of being treated professionally (so this has to be accomplished) and also being allowed to discuss publically aspects of subject matter and practice with others. Because they have long belonged to the profession, they have form strong views on both aspects and their discussions are profound (despite sometimes quite imposing), and generally more focused on the actual curriculum development task and subject matter. For new teachers, the situation is a little bit different. Despite contextual differences in recruitment and organisation of new teachers, in most countries research reports that new teachers receive very few supervision and generally assume almost immediately the same responsibilities and tasks than experienced teachers have, with whom they have few contact. In general, new teachers’ are more open to collegiality (they have been less socialized in the isolation equals autonomy culture) and generally have closer experiences from pre-service teacher education where working with colleagues was important. However, they focus much more in classroom management and planning of activities, because the everyday tasks are demanding enough. Their participation in this sort of communities have been discussed as helping them to overcome this teacher centred and immediate concerns (Thomas, Wineburg et al. 1998)

Similar differences are encountered between primary and secondary school teachers regarding cooperation and community (Bolam, McMahon et al. 2005). In secondary schools,where collaborative relationships are particularly hard to achieve in the face of

a historical legacy of top-down administration and fragmented departmentalized subject-based communities, school wide cooperation is especially difficult to establish and maintain (McLaughlin and Talbert 2001; Giles and Hargreaves 2006). Primary schools, on the contrary, can more easily show a quite interesting working culture of mutual support and cooperative learning (Nias, Southworth and Yeomans 1989).

Due to these important differences regarding the experience and type of teachers participation in collaborative settings or communities, it is sometimes necessary to

“level the playing field” so that everyone has something to learn, or reflect on, or inquiry about within the collaboration. In this sense, the literature mentions that dealing with interdisciplinarity or innovative strategies can be good scenarios in which everyone has lack of expertise in certain aspects and expertise in others (Thomas, Wineburg et al.

1998). Another crucial aspect for teacher cooperation or communities to work for effective professional development is the role of researchers, which has been described as that of facilitators and consultants. In general, researchers organise the teacher development activities, bring resources and guide discussions. However, if teachers are expected to develop and the community has vocation of sustainability (becoming the normal working culture of the teachers and the institution), there has to be room for teachers’ agency and strong promotion of teachers’ leadership, in particular sustainable leadership (Hargreaves and Fink 2006). Balancing the offer of appropriate guiding with the support of teachers’ autonomy becomes the crucial task of researchers, teacher leaders and teacher educators facilitating professional development cooperative scenarios.

The aspects related with teacher cooperation mentioned in this section refer mostly to the need for critical colleagueship instead of mere collegiality to become the school working culture, to be able to overcome the independent artisan metaphor. This has been discussed to be facilitated by managing cooperation and promoting collective involvement in change in, if possible, heterogeneous teacher groups (regarding expertise and subject matter specialisation). The reasons behind this claim for a focus on cooperation in professional development, however, are not just related to the need for professional development to be systemic at the institution level, as it could be inferred from the aforementioned argumentation. The main reason behind the interest on cooperation is related with the view of professional development as a social process, not only personal and professional one (Bell 1996, Bell and Gilbert 1998) which in turn is due to a socio-constructivist view of teacher learning and change. In

this sense, more about cooperation and its relation with teacher learning will be discussed in the following section on teachers’ learning.