Effective Classroom Teamwork

Support or Intrusion?

Gary Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134894635
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The nature of classroom practice is undergoing change as more and more adults are being brought into classrooms in response to such trends as parental involvement and the integration of children with special educational needs. The parents, teachers, ancillary staff and support workers comprising these new groups probabley fail to recognise themselves as teams, but nonetheless they are characterised by the same stresses which mark teamwork in any oter setting. This book is a guide to working together as an effective team, designed to show that they are part of a team, and employ strategies to minimise chances of failure. Gary Thomas identifies key areas of concern, including poor communication, status barriers and inadequate role definition, and offers guidelines for dealing with these stresses and tensions in teamwork.

1

THE NEW CLASSROOM TEAMS

Good teamwork is notoriously difficult to achieve. In industry, an enormous research effort on the workings of teams attests to the truth of this fact.

In education, also, the difficulty in making teams effective is conspicuous. The demise of team teaching provides ample evidence of the problems of teamwork. Team teaching began in the late 1960s with high hopes of success. It has, however, failed. Many studies, both in the UK and in the United States, have shown that only a fragment of the original team teaching edifice remains. It appears that teamwork in classrooms is more difficult to achieve than many had anticipated.

Indeed, looking at the history of teams in classrooms one could quite justifiably claim that classrooms provide an especially uncongenial environment for teamwork. Despite this, classroom teams have formed the subject of surprisingly little research.

The issue of effective teamwork in classrooms is more important now than it has ever been. Although team teaching may have had its heyday, a new kind of classroom team is emerging. The new teams are more widespread and more varied than those which arose from the move to team teaching. The new teams are generated principally from two main trends: the trend to integration of children with special needs, and the trend to parental involvement. The former results in personnel formerly associated with special settings (special schools, withdrawal rooms, etc.), moving to the mainstream classroom to work alongside the classteacher. The latter results in far greater numbers of parents working in the classroom than would ever have been the case previously.

Team teaching meant, of course, teams of teachers, and was often in response to a coordinated programme of introduction. But the new teams are emerging not in response to an ideal about teamworking. Instead, their emergence is in response to unrelated trends which in themselves are unconcerned with teamwork. Unlike team teaching teams they will comprise participants from very different backgrounds, with different ideologies, skills and interests.

The very diversity and instability of these classroom teams make them and their members especially vulnerable to the tensions and stresses which threaten the effectiveness of groups elsewhere.

The people comprising these new groups probably fail to recognise themselves as teams. Their reasons for existing have nothing to do with the benefits which are brought by working as a team. They are none the less teams, and as such they are characterised by the same stresses that mark teamwork in any other kind of setting.

The fact that the ‘teamness’ of these new teams is unrecognised – or at least unremarked upon – means that they stand even less chance of surviving than did the team teaching teams of the 1960s and the 1970s. The latter at least had the dynamics of the team as a central question to be addressed. It would be a pity if the new teams atrophied in the way that team teaching atrophied due to inadequate attention to the working of the team. If that happened, it would mean that the ideals behind the new developments – parental participation and the integration of children with special needs – would be rejected, and worse, rejected for the wrong reasons. Teams can be made to work, but team members need first, to recognise that they are part of a team, and second, to employ strategies which will maximise their chances of success.

In order to devise those strategies, it is necessary to examine the dynamics which so often seem to be responsible for the attrition of teamwork.

This book will argue the case that the new collections of people in classrooms are, in every sense, teams. It will provide documentary evidence for the existence of the new teams. It will examine the dynamics of teams generally. It will provide case study data about the kinds of tensions which exist in the new teams. It will provide a model for analysing ‘team personalities’, and it will provide guidelines for the effective working of classroom teams.

CHANGES IN THINKING WHICH GIVE RISE TO THE NEW TEAMS

Over the decade 1980–90, many adults moved into the classroom to work alongside the classteacher. The new teams have emerged by stealth, almost unnoticed. There was no fanfare, no top-down initiative which inspired the creation of these new teams, as there had been for team teaching.

Rather, there were a number of discrete and separate changes in educational thinking which gave rise to the new teams. Two have been of overriding importance:

1 the idea that children with special needs should be integrated into mainstream schools; and

2 the idea that parents have a central place in their children's education – including full involvement in their children's schools.

Both of these trends have, as I shall show, brought extra adults into classrooms. The picture of classrooms containing two, three or even more adults working together, represents a major departure from the stereotype of the classroom (one adult to one class) which the public probably holds.

The effects of these trends are exaggerated by other wider social developments to result in an unprecedented influx of additional people to many classrooms. However, the ways in which this influx alters the working environment of the classroom have remained unexamined. As I indicate in the remainder of this chapter, there is widespread recognition among researchers, observers and commentators that analysis of this alteration is necessary.

EXTRA PEOPLE DUE TO INTEGRATION

Fundamental changes have taken place in schools due to the move to integration over the last ten years or so. Calls for the integration of disabled people into society generally have been responded to in education and have been legitimised in this country by the report of the Warnock Committee (Department of Education and Science 1978) and by the 1981 Education Act. While integration has not occurred to the extent that some would have wished, calls for integration have given rise to a number of changes in the way in which services for those children who are experiencing difficulty are organised.

There are a number of trends within the integration movement, all of which result in the movement of additional adults into the classroom:

1 Peripatetic teachers are beginning to provide help for these children by working alongside the classteacher in the classroom, rather than by withdrawing children, a practice which may isolate and stigmatise the children who are withdrawn.

2 It is becoming increasingly common to find that local education authorities are, rather than placing children with special needs in special schools, seeking to make special arrangements for those children in ordinary schools; in practice, these arrangements often include the allocation of an ancillary helper to work with a child in his/her classroom for a set period of time in a week. Allied to this is the developing practice in some LEAs of providing welfare assistant time for children whose special needs are ‘statemented’ under the 1981 Education Act and who are attending ordinary schools. This looks set to increase with the 1988 Education Act and its provisions for exclusion from the National Curriculum.

3 A resource-based approach to special needs in secondary and middle schools has seen a transfer of resources and personnel from remedial departments to the mainstream of the school. In practice, this has resulted in a change from systems of withdrawal to a range of new team teaching arrangements; in these new arrangements, remedial teachers are working alongside mainstream colleagues and are now often designated support teachers.

4 In some LEAs, ‘outreach’ schemes are enabling the devolution of the skills of special school teachers (who remain on the special school staff) to mainstream classrooms.

5 Similar kinds of developments, with teachers seeking to work collaboratively, are occurring in other, related areas. For instance, in the teaching of children for whom English is a second language, the Bullock Report comments:

We are wholly in favour of a move away from E2L provision being made on a withdrawal basis (p. 392) [and] in secondary schools we believe that pupils with E2L needs should be regarded as the responsibility of all teachers.

(Department of Education and Science 1975: 394)

The move to integrate children with special needs from special to ordinary schools means, therefore, that many of the staff who had been working with children in special schools, special units or other special settings within the ordinary school may now be deployed to work in the mainstream class alongside the classteacher. Many of those practices, which lay at the backbone of special needs provision in ordinary schools (e.g. withdrawal for remedial work) and which were also segregating in their effects, are being replaced by practices which involve specialist staff going into the mainstream classroom to work alongside the classteacher.

Despite the general accord with which this move has been received, there have been suggestions that without proper organisation integration may not result in the benefits which were envisaged (e.g. Hodgson, Clunies-Ross and Hegarty 1984 in research conducted by the NFER; Strain and Kerr 1981 in a large-scale American review of the effects of integration). The success of integration hinges on the effective assimilation into mainstream education of special sector personnel and resources: in some cases it may be possible to meet special needs through the provision of equipment or through adaptation of the physical environment. By contrast, the assimilation of human resources from special settings is infinitely more complex and more problematic.

EXTRA PEOPLE DUE TO PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT

Running parallel with moves due to integration is another major trend which results in additional people moving into the classroom to work alongside the classteacher. The parental involvement movement has gained increasing momentum over recent years and has been accompanied by a vigorous debate over the role of parents in the school. The concern of teachers' unions, for instance, centres on the implications for the teacher's status and on effects on staffing levels, with parents perhaps supplanting paid ancillary help; surveys by trade unions show that in some areas of the country as many as fifty parents a week have been working in some schools (Caudrey 1985). It appears that the debate is being won by those who favour involvement, and teachers' unions seem to have re-examined their policies on the issue.

Despite the enthusiasm for parental involvement, research is beginning to support the notion that in its own right such involvement may not provide the unqualified benefits which some presume for it: Atkin and Bastiani (1985), for example, examining the effects of the very rapid movement of parents into primary schools, feel that teachers need special training to work effectively with other adults in the classroom – training which, they say, is conspicuously lacking from the curricula of most teacher-training establishments. Stierer (1985) finds that to make parental involvement a success may involve the teacher in substantially more work.

OTHER TRENDS TENDING TO INCREASE ADULT PARTICIPATION

Wider social trends may exaggerate the effects of these changes and the problems that accompany them. The influence of technology on the economy and ultimately on the school is a case in point. At its simplest level this might find its translation into practice through young people on training schemes being placed to work in a school.

Some argue (for example Cohen, Meyer, Scott and Deal 1979; Miskel, McDonald and Bloom 1983) that the activities of people in school become more complex as the technological environment surrounding them becomes more complex. They argue that technology facilitates the appropriation of complex skills from professionals; they assert that this enables a loosening of professional constraints in such a way that potential participants in the classroom may be able to participate with fewer inhibitions than they would have experienced ten or even five years ago.

GENERAL ISSUES CONCERNING THE INFLUX OF ADDITIONAL ADULTS

The developments concerned with integration (and the integration of ‘special’ personnel), with parental involvement and with other moves result in radically altered classroom dynamics. If Doyle (1977) is correct in seeing the classroom as a fragile ecosystem in which the alteration of even minor variables may have profound effects, the effect of introducing another adult participant is, of itself, worthy of study.

However, little attention has been paid in this country to the means by which additional people in the classroom may work together to the best possible effect. By contrast, in the USA, where the enactment of Public Law 94–142 (the Education for all Handicapped Children Act) pre-dated the 1981 Education Act by some six years, studies noting the effects of moves to integration in terms of the transfer of personnel from specialised settings to mainstream settings have been commissioned. DeVault, Harnischfeger and Wiley (1977), for instance, looked into the effects of personnel allocations to the various Project Follow-Through curricula. They make the observation that little if any attention has been paid to the question of how best to deploy additional personnel. They state:

It is high time to investigate this question. If we staff typical-sized classrooms with up to four full time instructional adults then we [had] better find out how to use them most effectively, as the educational costs are surely high.

(DeVault, Harnischfeger and Wiley 1977: 47)

Despite such clearly articulated recognition of the need for analysis in this area, little systematic investigation has been undertaken. Neither has there been any examination of the extent of the trends as a whole or the issues which arise from their introduction, despite the manifest coherence of a set of problems which appear to exist irrespective of the nature of professional groupings of the individuals concerned.

One of the assumptions of this book is that the influx of very varied groups of people is accompanied by problems which are general to the teams thus constituted, irrespective of the nature of the participants. The uncertainties engendered by these moves carry with them a host of questions which none of those groups has had the chance to formulate coherently, let alone address or resolve. An assumption throughout will be that despite the diversity of the groups of people moving into classrooms, they are homogeneous at least to die extent that such questions exist for them.

Although these questions have not been addressed in education, substantial ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 THE NEW CLASSROOM TEAMS
• 2 THE DYNAMICS OF TEAMS
• 3 CLASSROOM TEAMS: TEACHERS WORKING TOGETHER
• 4 CLASSROOM TEAMS: TEACHERS WORKING WITH NON-TEACHERS
• 5 A MODEL FOR ANALYSING CLASSROOM TEAMS
• 6 INVESTIGATING CLASSROOM TEAMS
• 7 THE EXTENT AND NATURE OF THE NEW TEAMWORK
• 8 TEACHERS, PARENTS AND ANCILLARIES IN TEAMS: HOW THEY MAKE THEIR ROLES
• 9 SUPPORT TEACHERS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF ROLES
• 10 DIARY OF A SUPPORT TEACHER
• 11 TEAM PERSONALITIES
• 12 A KEY TO THE PROBLEMS? TASKS TO BE FULFILLED BY THE TEAM
• 13 THE EFFECT OF DEFINING ROLES
• 14 OVERVIEW AND CONCLUSION
• Appendix: Extracts from the diary
• Glossary
• References
• Name index
• Subject index