Schools work better when teachers work together. It takes time and practice to collaborate effectively.

Most successful schools (and successful school leaders) think of their schools as communities of learning. In collaborative school systems, professional development is integrated with the activities of teaching. This includes analyzing data together to improve instructional strategies, sharing perspectives regarding a student who is struggling, and collaborating on lesson planning. Collaboration is hard to put into practice for many reasons - primarily, the limitations of time.

Time for collaboration is negotiated in the contract

Collaboration, prep, staff development, and meeting time all occur during paid work hours, and as such are negotiated elements of the teacher contract. When budgets are tight, districts and unions agree on making safeguarding classroom instructional time their top priority. In such circumstances, time for non-classroom work gets squeezed.

Put yourself in the shoes of a teacher who hasn't had a raise in a while: would you prefer for your union to negotiate for more pay in the contract, smaller class sizes, or more collaboration time? Budgets require difficult choices.

Professional Learning Communities (PLCs)

Some principals receive explicit training about how to bring teachers together into effective and sustainable Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). By meeting together regularly to discuss their practice and address challenges, PLCs help create a culture of continuous improvement in a school.

At least, that's the theory. Research about the impact of PLCs has been almost amusingly equivocal. In one notable study, school district staff ranked PLCs as the form of professional development that they were most dissatisfied with. Most also rated it as a form of professional development that they wanted to spend more time on, although they rated lesson observation and coaching more highly.

Top school systems invest in teacher prep time

Teachers in most American public schools spend the vast majority of their time at school in front of the classroom. Time for preparation and collaboration is limited.

Collaboration is challenging to put into practice, and can take many forms. After early anecdotal successes in Shanghai and Finland, the OECD launched a study of collaborative teaching practices to develop a way of describing and comparing them to glean patterns.

The OECD study examined the frequency of the following collaborative practices in 48 countries or locales:

The study is complex and the responses so varied that it is hard to draw easy conclusions from them. The two most commonly reported types of collaboration are “discussing the learning development of specific students” (61% of teachers) and “exchanging teaching materials with colleagues” (47%).

Teachers want collaboration

The pandemic experience reinforced the importance of interaction in education. A collaborative workplace helps make teaching attractive as a profession. It is exciting and satisfying to work with others who share your calling. Check out this video to see how one school transformed itself through collaboration.

But teaching is not just a calling - it is also a job. The next few lessons will explore benefits, pay, job security, and retirement security, all of which are critical elements of the "big picture" of education.

Updated September 2018
August 2021
September 2022