Collaborative Professionalism

When Teaching Together Means Learning for All

Andy Hargreaves, Michael T. O'Connor, Michael T. O′Connor

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781506328157
• eBook ISBN: 9781506328171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Ensure Conversations About Collaboration Get Results.   

Ask any educational professional about collaboration and chances are they'll tell you it's one of their core values. But this familiar sentiment doesn't always translate into meaningful professional experiences that help educators or their students grow. 

Addressing this critical gap head-on, this book lays out the theory and practice of Collaborative Professionalism. Through five international case studies, the authors distinguish Collaborative Professionalism from professional collaboration by highlighting intentional collaborative designs and providing concrete examples for how to be more purposeful with collaboration.  

Additionally, the book makes Collaborative Professionalism accessible to all educators through clear take-aways including:

• Ten core tenets, including Collective Efficacy, Collaborative Inquiry, and Collaborating With Students.
• Graphics indicating how educators can move from mere professional collaboration to the deep and transformative work of Collaborative Professionalism.
• Analysis of which collaborative practices educators should start doing, keep doing, and stop doing 

Collaboration can be one of your most powerful educational tools when used correctly, and turned into action. This book shows you how.

Part I Developing and Designing Collaborative Professionalism

Chapter 1 The Case for Collaborative Professionalism

From Professional Collaboration to Collaborative Professionalism

Collaboration is the new chorus line for innovation and improvement. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development strongly promotes it, many teacher unions are behind it, and more and more governments are seeing the point of it. The evidence that, in general, professional collaboration benefits students and teachers alike has become almost irrefutable. Professional collaboration boosts student achievement, increases teacher retention, and enhances the implementation of innovation and change. The big questions are no longer about whether teachers should collaborate. No profession can serve people effectively if its members do not share and exchange knowledge about their expertise or about the clients, patients, or students they have in common. The big questions, rather, are about how and how well teachers and other educators collaborate. Not all kinds of collaboration are desirable or effective, and not all are appropriate for the people who practice it or for the task at hand.

Collaborative professionalism is a deeper and more rigorous form of professional collaboration. Professional collaboration refers to how people collaborate within a profession. That collaboration may be strong or weak, effective or ineffective, and undertaken one way or another. Collaborative pro-fessionalism is about how people collaborate more professionally and also how they work as a profession in a more collaborative way.

No profession can serve people effectively if its members do not share and exchange knowledge about their expertise or about the clients, patients, or students they have in common.

Professional collaboration is descriptive—it delineates how people work together in a profession. Collaborative professionalism is normative—it is about creating stronger and better professional practice together.

The professional aspect of collaboration is about exercising good judgment, being committed to improvement, sharing and deepening expertise, and getting neither too close to nor too distant from the people the profession serves. The collaborative aspect of professionalism refers to how members of their profession labor or work together rather than only talk, share, and reflect together. In a capsule definition:

Collaborative professionalism is about how teachers and other educators transform teaching and learning together to work with all students to develop fulfilling lives of meaning, purpose, and success. It is organized in an evidence-informed, but not data-driven, way through rigorous planning, deep and sometimes demanding dialogue, candid but constructive feedback, and continuous collaborative inquiry. The joint work of collaborative professionalism is embedded in the culture and life of the school, where educators actively care for and have solidarity with each other as fellow professionals as they pursue their challenging work together and where they collaborate professionally in ways that are responsive to and inclusive of the cultures of their students, themselves, the community, and the society.

We make the case for collaborative professionalism through portrayals of deliberately designed professional collaboration in five different parts of the world (Hong Kong, the United States, Colombia, Norway, and Canada). This evidence leads us to set out 10 tenets of collaborative professionalism designs. We also outline four contextual and cultural factors (what we call the four Bs) that are indispensable when attempting to initiate and implement these collaborative designs in schools or systems elsewhere.

Designing Collaborative Professionalism

How do schools, professional organizations, and school systems deliberately design ways in which teachers can work together? We went in search of collaborative designs that were widely known in different parts of the world. We chose sites on four continents to ensure that diverse systems and cultures were represented. We selected different designs of professional collaboration based on the message systems (the way that schools communicate what they do) that they mainly addressed—curriculum, pedagogy, evaluation, the whole school and its organization, and the relationship to the whole society.

Additionally, the collaboration had to involve groups of three or more educators who were participating within or beyond one specific school building. We also restricted our study to collaboration among education professionals, rather than ones that engaged other partners such as businesses or universities.

After visiting seven sites, we chose five systems that were sufficiently developed in having persisted for at least four years:

• Open class/lesson study: a Hong Kong secondary school
• Collaborative curriculum planning networks: a network of rural schools in the U.S. Pacific Northwest
• Cooperative learning and working: an elementary school in Norway
• Collaborative pedagogical transformation: the Escuela Nueva network of 25,000 schools in rural Colombia
• Professional learning communities (PLCs): remote school districts in Ontario, Canada, that serve aboriginal and other students

The 10 Tenets of Collaborative Professionalism

Analysis of the case studies points to 10 tenets of collaborative professionalism that distinguish it from earlier versions of professional collaboration.

1. Collective Autonomy. Educators have more independence from top-down bureaucratic authority, but less independence from each other. Teachers are given or take authority.
2. Collective Efficacy. The belief that, together, we can make a difference to the students we teach, no matter what.
3. Collaborative Inquiry (CI). Teachers routinely explore problems, issues, or differences of practice together in order to improve or transform what they are doing. CI is embedded in the everyday work of teaching. Teachers inquire into problems before rushing into solving them.
4. Collective Responsibility. People have a mutual obligation to help each other and to serve the students they have in common. Collective responsibility is about our students, rather than my students.
5. Collective Initiative. In collaborative professionalism, there are fewer initiatives, but there is more initiative. Teachers step forward, and the system encourages it. Collaborative professionalism is about communities of strong individuals who are committed to helping and learning from each other.
6. Mutual Dialogue. Difficult conversations can be had and are actively instigated among educators. Feedback is honest. There is genuine dialogue about valued differences of opinion about ideas, curriculum materials, or the challenging behavior of students. Participants are often protected by protocols that insist on clarification and listening before any disagreement is brought forth.
7. Joint Work. Joint work exists in team teaching, collaborative planning, collaborative action research, providing structured feedback, undertaking peer reviews, discussing examples of student work, and so forth. Joint work involves actions and sometimes products or artifacts (such as a lesson, curriculum, or feedback report) and is often facilitated by structures, tools, and protocols.
8. Common Meaning and Purpose. Collaborative professionalism aspires to, articulates, and advances a common purpose that is greater than test scores or even academic achievement on its own. It addresses and engages with goals of education that enable and encourage young people to grow and flourish as whole human beings who can live lives and find work that has meaning and purpose for themselves and for society.
9. Collaborating With Students. In the deepest forms of collaborative professionalism, students are actively engaged with their teachers in constructing change together.
10. Big-Picture Thinking for All. In collaborative professionalism, everyone gets the big picture. They see it, live it, and create it together.

The Culture and Context of Collaborative Professionalism

Whenever a new method, practice, or protocol surfaces in education, there is a common tendency to spread it too far and too fast, with little thought as to what else may be needed for the particular model or design to be effective. When we are considering adapting collaborative designs from elsewhere, there are four Bs of collaborative professionalism that can help us understand and also activate the contexts and cultures that precede, succeed, and surround it.

• What came before the model existed?
• What other kinds of collaboration exist betwixt or alongside it in the school and in the distinctive culture of the whole society?
• What connections does any specific design have to collaborative ideas and actions beyond the school, in overseas schools, in international research, in online interaction, or elsewhere?
• What support does the system provide beside the specific collaborative design in government grants, official allocations of time, or wider professional networks?

Moving Toward Collaborative Professionalism

Schools and systems have become more knowledgeable about how to shift from cultures of individualism to cultures of collaboration. But they have often pushed for the wrong kinds of collaboration in the wrong way. In collaborative professionalism, we want deeper collaboration in stronger relationships of trust, support, and solidarity. We also want more professionalism involving good data and good judgment, more candid and respectful professional dialogue, more thoughtful feedback, more collective responsibility for each other’s results, and more courageous engagement with bolder visions of education that will help young people become change makers in their own and other people’s lives.

Schools and systems have become more knowledgeable about how to shift from cultures of individualism to cultures of collaboration. But they have often pushed for the wrong kinds of collaboration in the wrong way.

Making It Happen

In the final chapter, we look at what practitioners, leaders, and policymakers can specifically do to make collaborative professionalism happen through determining what should be stopped, what should continue, and what should be started for the first time.

We Recommend that Educators

• stop investing too much in data teams at the expense of broader collaborative inquiry;
• stop importing unmodified alien designs from other countries and cultures;
• end high rates of educator turnover that destroy cohesive cultures;
• keep evolving the complexity of collaborative professionalism beyond conversations or meetings to deeper forms of dialogue, feedback, and inquiry;
• continue soliciting critical feedback from peers inside and outside one’s own community;
• turn students into change makers with their teachers;
• adduce the added value of digital technology by carefully determining where and when it has a positive impact on collaborative professionalism; and
• build more collaboration across schools and systems, including and especially in broader environments of competition.

In the past quarter century, teaching has made great strides in building more professional collaboration. It is now time for this to progress into collaborative professionalism, rooted in inquiry, responsive to feedback, and always up for a good argument. Are you a collaborative professio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations and Acronyms
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Part I Developing and Designing Collaborative Professionalism
• Chapter 1 The Case for Collaborative Professionalism
• Chapter 2 Moving Toward Collaborative Professionalism
• Chapter 3 Open Class and Lesson Study
• Chapter 4 Collaborative Curriculum Planning Networks
• Chapter 5 Cooperative Learning and Working
• Chapter 6 Collaborative Pedagogical Transformation
• Chapter 7 Professional Learning Communities
• Part II Deepening Collaborative Professionalism
• Chapter 8 Ten Tenets of Collaborative Professionalism
• Chapter 9 The Four Bs of Collaborative Professionalism
• Part III Doing Collaborative Professionalism
• Chapter 10 Doing Collaborative Professionalism
• Index
• Publisher Note