Professional Development Within the School: What can educators learn from collaboration?

Dagen and Bean (2020) interesting address the fact that “while collaboration has been cited as a key component of PD over time, only recently has there been an emphasis on systematic, intentional approached to nurture such collaborative engagement” (p. 416). This finding suggests that not only do teachers need to be encouraged to collaborate during professional development seminars, but they also need scheduled professional development sessions where they are required to collaborate. In addition, these sessions should include specific goals for collaboration. Schools need to maximize their social capital to benefit all teachers and students. Part of using and sharing the social capital involves collaboration.

Caskey and Carpenter (2014) echo these thoughts when they emphasize that collaborative professional development helps advance the learning of teachers, helps troubleshoot specific issues, builds community, and allows teachers to gain experiential insight. They also provide several strategies for building teacher collaboration. First, they suggest that teachers create a vision and goals that can be shared by all teachers who are involved in the collaboration. It is difficult to work as a team when everyone is hoping for different outcomes. Next, they encourage the collaborators to develop a sense of community by getting to know one another and learning about their values for their classroom. It is also recommended that collaborators identify group norms by discussing what goals are similar between educators. Their next suggestion may seem obvious as teachers are encouraged to use discussion and dialogue during collaboration. However, when focus is solely placed on data teachers sometimes forget that their own insight and opinions are also important and should be shared. Finally, they emphasize that any conflict that arises during collaboration can be solved by using dialogue to sort through differing opinions and views on best practices (Caskey & Carpenter, 2014). I believe that teaching teachers how to collaborate with these strategies set the expectations and provides a road map for collaborators to follow.

The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD, 2011) provide several suggestions for helping educators collaborate. It is recommended that teachers videotape and discuss their lessons. This is particularly helpful if a teacher is trying to troubleshoot, determine a change in instructional practices, or provide a live example of an instructional practice. Although it can be awkward for teachers to videotape and share their lessons, it provides busy educators with tight schedules and opportunity to share what goes on in their classroom. Teachers should also be encouraged to collaborate in a comfortable environment and on a regular basis. Scheduling collaboration time when teachers can meet to discuss teaching practices is worth the effort. Teachers should also be offered a choice when deciding what they will collaborate about. It is helpful to find something that will be useful for teachers and that they will be passionate about. In addition, it is always important that teachers are able to meet on a regular basis. It is easy to dream big and recommend that teachers meet on a regular basis. However, it is easy for the busyness of the school year to sweep collaboration under the rug. By prescheduling professional development opportunities, a literacy leader is embedding collaboration into the school year. Finally, literacy leaders need to establish professional learning collaboration groups. In order to do this the groups, need to have concrete goals and should not merely be told to collaborate. Although these instructions are commonly given to educators, they are ambiguous and often result in confusion. All of these strategies are helping in promoting collaboration among educators. 

Caskey, M.M., & Carpenter, J. (2014, October). Building teacher collaboration school-wide. AMLE. https://www.amle.org/building-teacher-collaboration-school-wide/ 

Dagen, S. A., & Bean, R. M. (Eds.). (2020). Best practices of literacy leaders, second edition: Keys to school improvement. The Guilford Press. 

ASCD. (2011, March 1). Among colleagues: how can we promote teacher collaboration? https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/how-can-we-promote-teacher-collaboration