Teachers are often
viewed as sentries to change, working alone in their classroom,
repeating daily routines, delivering well-worn lessons. Outside
their classrooms, traditional school cultures and structures
prompt these pursuits by reinforcing the present, the
conservative, and the individual (Lortie, 1975; Sarason, 1982).
Given these constraints, an implicit debate has emerged in the
literature on school change about the anonymous teacher as an
instructional leader at her or his school. One view supports
the notion that teachers can develop and use capacity for
initiative and change at the local level (Cuban, 1998). In this
view, teachers may work critically, reflectively, and ethically
(Greene, 1989) in ways that support a sense of authorship in
their teaching life (Greene, 1989; Sawyer, 2001, Vinz, 1996) and
change in their settings (Wasley, 1992).
Another position,
however, suggests that the culture of schools often prevents
teachers from following personal initiatives to work together for
personal renewal and school reform (Sarason, 1982, 1990). A
comparison between the work of university faculty and that of
K-12 faculty helps clarify this discussion. University faculty
are rewarded when they engage in inquiry that may both support
new knowledge and facilitate change (a synergy between research
and service). K-12 teachers, however, are rewarded by
implementing curriculum that supports various state mandates,
mandates which often do not align with the personal meaning that
teachers find in their work.
The following study
examines how three teachers (one middle school and one high
school mathematics teacher and two high school English teachers)
deepened their development of agency and initiative to work
towards personal self-renewal and school change by collaborating
with their peers. These teachers were each anonymous in the
sense that they were not department chairs or members of any
organized teacher groups. They also all worked in schools that
may be characterized as having non-collaborative
cultures.
The following questions
guided this study: What did some of the teachers' collaborative
structures look like over time? How did the teachers perceive
contexts of support from both within and outside the classroom
for their collaborative efforts? And, how did this support
change at different points as these teachers' careers
unfolded? The larger issue of how teachers through their own
initiative can work together for personal renewal and school
reform frames these questions.
Supporting Teachers
Who Collaborate
A balance of conditions
and elements undergird more successful approaches to teacher
collaboration. These elements include school cultures,
department sub-cultures, the development of meaningful content in
context, and specific resources, such as time. Little is known,
however, about how teachers who emerge as leaders find and
structure support for their activities. In addition, little is
known about how these elements may change or unfold at different
points in their careers.
School
Cultures
School
settings with norms of collaboration greatly support teachers who
collaborate (Lieberman, 1995; Little, 1982, 1993a; McLaughlin,
1993). Such norms go beyond social interaction to indicate
innovation and learning "in which teachers are enthusiastic about
their work and the focus is on devising strategies that enable
all students to prosper" (McLaughlin, 1993, p. 94). Cultures of
collaboration facilitate "a sense of mutual security and
encourag[e] interpersonal and interprofessional openness" (Nias,
1989, p. 2). A number of characteristics distinguish collegial
schools. Elements include teachers' frequent and concrete
talk about teaching practice; frequent and honest observations of
teaching; the collaborative design, research, and evaluation of
teaching materials; and peer teaching and coaching of teaching
practice (Little, 1982, p. 331). Key to the formation of norms
of collegiality is making "development of effective
instructional practices for all students the top
priority" (McLaughlin, 1993, p. 96). Ideally, the setting
supports a community of "collective responsibility—of
mutual support and mutual obligation—for practice and for
student outcome" (McLaughlin, 1993, p. 97).
The
character of the school's collegial environment matters as it
fosters mutual problem solving and planning (Hargreaves, 1996).
McLaughlin (1993), states:
teachers
within the same school or even within the same
department
developed
different responses to similar students depending on
the
character
of their collegial environment. Which response a
teacher chose
was a
product of his or her conception of task as framed and
supported
by a
particular school or department community (p. 89).
This process involves a
complex match between school and teacher goals and school support
for teachers' conceptions of their meaningful practice
(McLaughlin, 1993).
Department
Subcultures
While these
influences can take place on a school-wide level, considerable
variation in levels of support and teachers' responses to
students can take place on the departmental level. Leadership on
a departmental level helps determine whether and how teachers
collaborate (Hargreaves, 1996; McLaughlin, 1993). Indeed,
subject-matter departments can create subcultures with distinct
approaches to curriculum and pedagogy within the same school
(Grossman & Stodolsky, 1994; McLaughlin & Talbert, 1993;
Siskin, 1994). Given the subject-matter organization of
secondary schools, departments can represent an important context
for teacher interaction, the "most prominent domain of potential
interdependence among teachers" (Little, 1993b, p. 149). The
department can be the "professional community of greatest
significance to teachers' norms of practice, conceptions of task,
and attitudes toward teaching and students" (Siskin, 1990, as
cited in McLaughlin, 1993, p. 92). The character of the
departments—its norms of collegiality—plays a key role in the
way teachers construct their practice and relate to students.
The clarity of vision of the department can also help focus the
collective and individual curriculum response to students (Ball,
1987; Ball & Bowe, 1992). Given the central position of
departments to teachers' interactions, departments represent a
potential to limit forms of interdisciplinary and
cross-departmental forms of interaction. Little (1993b), for
example, found that limited cross-departmental collaboration
existed within survival-oriented departments whose teachers
worked together only to secure resources for
themselves.
Meaningful Content
in Context
A further
support for teacher collaboration stems from how well teachers
perceive that the collaborative work actually has meaning for
them in their work with students. While most educators support
the process of collaboration for teachers, some question whether
teacher collaboration is authentic or contrived (Hargreaves and
Dawe, 1990), explicitly professional or implicitly communal
(Huberman, 1993), and pedagogically sound or undermining of more
spontaneous, idiosyncratic, and context-specific teaching
methods. Huberman (1993), for example, suggests that teaching is
highly context specific and personal: "To plan
collaboratively...is to reduce the degree of freedom required for
the multitude of context-sensitive, continuously evolving,
interactive responses that many teachers call on" (p. 19). This
concern assumes that teachers cannot either explicitly articulate
or gain the perspective necessary to reveal their classroom
dynamic, instead often engaging in a unique form of
"communion." Supported by how similar teachers' teaching
philosophies and approaches are and by a lack of explicit teacher
reflection, this form of collaboration might serve to reinforce
existing forms of teaching without promoting self-reflection or
problem-solving behavior.
Related to the
view of teaching as context-specific and idiosyncratic is the
issue of the actual substance of the collaboration. Huberman
(1993), in referring to the teacher as artisan, suggests that
teachers who collaborate take a more "tool-centered" rather than
substantive approach. A study by Zahorik (1987) of 52 teachers
in six schools supports this view. Seventy percent of the time
he found a student focus to the teachers' collaboration:
materials, discipline, activities, and individualization,
reflecting, in his view, an emphasis on student behavior.
Collaborating teachers were less willing to discuss topics with
more of a substantive teaching focus: evaluation, methods,
objectives, reinforcing, lecturing, questioning, and room
organization. Reasons that might encourage teachers to refrain
from exchanging information about teaching strategies include the
maintenance of professional respect for the core work of peers
(Bishop, 1977), the tolerance of individual preferences and
styles (Little, 1990), and the avoidance of arrogance (Huberman,
1993).
Many of
these criticisms underlie Lortie's (1975) statement that
"cooperation could be extensive outside the classroom but
teachers preferred to keep the boundaries intact when they
actually worked with students" (p. 193). Given that teachers
receive crucial intrinsic rewards from students, teachers may
wish to safeguard their student interactions, suggesting that
team-teaching between teachers may be a risky and complex act.
Huberman (1993) states that it is difficult for two teachers to
be responsible for the same students at the same time: "The
response set of one person would collide, early on, with that of
the second, whose reading of the situation and whose rapid,
on-line responses would necessarily be different..." (pp.
17-18).
However,
many studies have shown that teachers can benefit from exposure
to new forms of practice with an instructional focus that they
perceive as meaningful to their students' learning (Grossman
& Stodolsky, 1994; Mclaughlin & Talbert, 1993; Siskin,
1994; Wasley, 1992). One approach that might facilitate such an
instructional focus in teachers' work is their examining teaching
and learning situations within classrooms—the learning of new
teaching knowledge within context. A contextualized study of
teaching can present teachers with curriculum in relation to
students—their responses and learning. In discussing this
notion of learning "content-in-context," Lieberman
(1995) writes that "teachers' understanding of
student learning and development must grow as a result of their
continuous inquiry into classroom practice" (p. 22). This
"experiential learning with learning related to the
classroom culture" (Lieberman, 1990, p. 532) presents teachers
with focused instructional inquiry and growth. Related
approaches include the process approach to teaching writing,
whole-language learning, cooperative learning, and the Foxfire
experience (Lieberman, 1990).
Resources
Resources
play a key role. One seemingly crucial resource is time for
collaboration (Little, 1993a; Raywid, 1993), which may be more
important than facilities or even staff development. Raywid
(1993) calls time the "scarcest resource," needed for
teachers to observe one another's classes, assess their
work, and design curriculum, as well as to develop habits of
reflection about practice (Huberman & Miles, 1984; Schon,
1984). Little (1993a) states that teacher growth "calls
...for adequate ‘opportunity to learn' (and
investigate, experiment, consult, or evaluate) embedded in the
routine organization of teachers' work" (p. 5). A
central feature of resources is their ability to build capacity
for reflection feedback, and problem solving (Fullan & Miles,
1992; McLaughlin, 1993; Lieberman, 1994).
A Narrative
Method
The study
draws from data collected as part of a much more extensive
ten-year longitudinal study of the recruitment, preparation,
teaching, induction, and retention of alternate route and college
prepared teachers (Natriello and Zumwalt, 1992). In the interest
of space, this article presents only brief narratives of these
teachers' growth as collaborators. These narratives are
then subsequently used as the basis for a more analytical
discussion of emergent elements of support for these
teachers.
A narrative
method was selected to allow for the study of continuity in the
lives of the individual teachers. Both descriptive and
explanatory narrative (Polkinghorne, 1988) were used. In
descriptive narrative the purpose is "to produce an accurate
description of the interpretive narrative accounts individuals or
groups use to make sequences of events in their lives or
organizations meaningful" (Polkinghorne, 1988, pp. 161-162, as
cited in Clandinin & Connelly, 2000, p. 16). In explanatory
narrative, "the interest is to account for the connection between
events in a causal sense and to provide the necessary narrative
accounts that supply the connections" (Clandinin & Connelly,
2000, p. 16). A narrative approach was used to attempt to
capture some of the richness and nuances of meaning, as well as
ambiguity and dilemma, in human affairs (Carter, 1993).
Narrative places an emphasis on the connections between what
humans think, know, and do as well as the reciprocal relationship
between the way that human thinking shapes behavior and knowing
shapes thinking" (Behar-Horenstein & Morgan, 1995, p.
143).
The study
relied primarily upon participants' self-reports of their work
and subsequent discussion of narratives constructed from surveys
and interviews. Participants were presented with four surveys
and four semi-structured interviews over the first six years of
the study and four additional semi-structured interviews over the
following four years. The interviews were the same for both
respondents with the exception of follow-up probes and
prompts.
In addition
to the interviews and surveys, the three teachers were given a
reconstructed narrative of their history as collaborators in the
classroom over their first ten years of their teaching lives.
Special care was taken to ensure that the reconstructed narrative
was faithful to the teachers' situation and their perceptions of
their history. The data in these narratives were drawn from
existing interview, survey, and observational data. These
narratives were developed by the researcher and presented to the
participants initially in written form in advance of an in-depth
conversation with them about their collaboration history. This
process allowed participants to examine and reflect on the
reconstructed narratives before discussing their history as
collaborators with the researcher. The written and spoken
narratives allowed the three teachers to check, challenge, and/or
contribute to the narrative. Through this process, the
participants interpreted the data and discussed their view of how
their collaborative life had been composed.
Constructing
the narratives from data as it emerged year by year allowed first for the viewing of development as it
unfolded, not recalled from a distant vantage point filtered
through a veil of increased experience. The subsequent
discussion by the researcher and the participants of the
reconstructed narratives allowed for a more analytical discussion
of the events and the meaning of their history as
collaborators. Thus, narrative was both "phenomena under
study and method of study" (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000,
4).
Data
analysis
The data in
this study were analyzed in a multi-step process, with their
reconstruction into narratives as the basis for a discussion
between the researcher and the participants. Following the
discussion of the narratives, the data-analysis process was
repeated again with the subsequent data.
The data
analysis process took the form of a series of compressions
(Huberman, 1995; Merriam 1988; Yin 1989) in the search for
patterns (Bernard, 1994). The data first moved from edited
initial interview, to secondary coding table, to primary coding
table. The researcher analyzed the data by hand, holding "a
conversation with the data" (Merriam, 1988, p. 131), in which he
jotted down general thoughts and reflections and searched for
regularities and patterns to transform into
categories.
The
interviews were organized (or chunked") into "meaning
units" and placed on the secondary coding table. Each
meaning unit was a direct quotation from the interview (Huberman,
1995). Care was taken to maintain data integrity,
contextualization, and narrative sequence of the responses. Data
were, therefore, entered in these tables in chronological order
in the smallest chunk possible, which still provided adequate
contextual information. The secondary code (or codes) assigned
to the meaning unit was then given to each meaning unit. These
codes used key words from the initial quotation, in essence
"low inference snippets" (Huberman, 1995), to keep
the code as faithful to the data as possible.
The third step
in the data analysis process was the assignment of the primary
codes. The primary codes were developed by grouping together and
then organizing into patterns and themes the secondary codes.
The name of an emergent overarching theme would then become a
primary theme. Following Yin's suggestion that a
theoretical orientation can guide the analysis (1989), the
primary coding tables were organized under research question into
categories related to elements of support found either inside the
classroom or outside it. Finally, the interviews were read
again to identify additional and possibly stronger examples of
such themes and patterns as well as to search for irregularities
and contradictory cases (Huberman, 1995; Merriam,
1988).
Contribution
Few studies
have systematically examined how teacher collaborators have
arranged elements of support over time for their collaborative
work. Furthermore, few studies have examined how school
culture—either conservative or more progressive—intersect over
time with independent teachers who go about establishing
collaborative arrangements for themselves. However, findings
from the limited number of participates are not offered as a
basis for the formation of generalizations, but rather as a
demonstration of plausibility (Behar-Horenstein & Morgan,
1995). As Carter states, "Generalizations of this latter form
are…explanatory propositions with which we can make sense
of the dilemmas and problematics of teaching. (1993, p. 10).
The contribution is "intended to be the creation of a new sense
of meaning and significance with respect to the research topic
than it is to yield a set of knowledge claims (Clandinin and
Connelly, 2000, p. 42).
Unfolding
Collaboration
The
following three narratives briefly describe the collaborative
activity in which Marilyn, a middle-school mathematics teacher,
Ellen, a high school mathematics teacher, and Susan, a high
school English teacher, engaged over ten years (including their
student teaching). These teachers each entered teaching at the
same time but worked at separate schools and did not know each
other.
Marilyn in
Mathematics
In her first
ten years of teaching mathematics on the middle-school level,
Marilyn engaged in a range of collaborative efforts. Her
introduction to collaborative work began in her first year of
teaching when she herself began to initiate a loosely structured
collaboration. At this time, Marilyn and three other teachers,
including a science teacher, organized a ski trip for "at risk"
students. Initially, her goals were to combine her interests and
talents with those of her students, while reinforcing her
students' learning of mathematics in a real-life context.
Marilyn envisioned that on this trip her students would at least
discuss making mathematical applications (e.g., speed, distance,
and angle problems) as they skied downhill, developing, in the
process, greater self-esteem, academic motivation, and hands-on
interdisciplinary knowledge. The other, more experienced
teachers, however, did not carry-through on their intentions to
inject structured interdisciplinary study into the fieldtrips.
Frustrated, Marilyn alone could not have her students make the
intended mathematical-science applications.
Marilyn and the science
teacher continued to organize and sponsor this and other similar
trips for the next nine years, though dropping their more
contextual learning aspects. These fieldtrips contributed to her
belief that positive social interaction could promote
students' positive feelings about their class and school.
In addition to these field trips, starting in her first year
(and running through her ninth year) Marilyn began having a
series of conversations with another mathematics teacher about
developing new approaches for district-mandated proficiencies and
tests.
A second form of
collaboration that Marilyn engaged in from her second to her
sixth years was initiated and structured by her school, not her.
Examples of this form of collaboration included an
interdisciplinary teacher-cohort planning team and summer
curriculum committees. Marilyn found in the cohort situation, to
her annoyance, the science, English, and social studies teachers
banded together and did the minimum level of work they thought
the administration would allow. Starting in her second year, she
also engaged in summer committees that collaborated to change
course proficiency lists, course outlines, departmental or
district tests, and textbook adoption. Much of the work on these
committees was susceptible to arbitrary last-minute
administrative decisions, usually related to inadequate
implementation of committee work. Marilyn thought that the
cohort teams were considerably more contrived in that many of the
teachers at the school had to take part in them. The
administration's influence in both of these collaborations was
centered more on initiation than on follow-through. This lack of
follow-through played to the advantage of the cohort teams,
allowing them to disregard administrative program goals.
Unfortunately, the lack of follow-through was frustrating to the
teachers on the textbook adoption committees, who wished that the
administration would support and implement—rather than
disregard, as they did—their recommendations. Still, these
school-initiated situations presented Marilyn with relatively
structured opportunities to learn to share and critique knowledge
about teaching and learning with her peers.
Starting in her eighth
year, Marilyn began a third form of collaboration. Now, both she
and the school together initiated and structured a collaborative
team of teachers to design a new Algebra I program to be
implemented the following year. While either Marilyn or the
school initiated the other two collaborations separately, Marilyn
and her collaborative peers as well as the school jointly
initiated and structured the Algebra I committee. The school and
the teachers mutually agreed upon program goals which focused on
student learning. In addition, the school gave the team greater
autonomy to design the program and its follow-up evaluation based
on positive impact of student learning. As Marilyn began this
committee, she expressed cautious hope that the school would
implement the new Algebra I Program as planned.
Marilyn thought that the
collaborative process was successful in its goal of establishing
an entirely new Algebra I program. Working together, the
committee devised and followed a clear collaborative process.
The committee began by raising explicit questions related to
their knowledge of student learning, content coverage issues,
course-sequence issues, and the proposed textbooks under review.
They then evaluated these new textbooks by way of these
questions, which were drawn from their own practice. One
question, for example, was how well the books supported
students' in-class use of manipulatives, such as triangles
and scales and supplemental problems. The committee then
designed a two-year curriculum for the new algebra
program.
Marilyn thought that the
committee's success in finding consensus was related to its
member's camaraderie, as well as similar teaching
backgrounds and general educational philosophies, within a
context of mutual respect. At the end of her tenth year, Marilyn
was waiting with some guarded skepticism to see if the school
would follow through and implement the committee's
recommendations.
Ellen in
Mathematics
Teaching
mathematics on the high school level, Ellen engaged in a series
of collaborative arrangements in her first ten years in
teaching. All of these collaborations were relatively conflict
free. Interestingly, they also followed a pattern that was
seemingly consistent with how she evolved as a teacher. In the
classroom, she went from being relatively prescriptive in her
first couple of years, to more open and experimental in years
three though five, to more hands-on and experiential after her
fifth year.
Ellen began her first
collaboration in her first two years of teaching, in which she
team-taught a basic math class with a veteran teacher. Initiated
and supported by the school as an induction program for new
teachers, this classroom-based collaboration benefited Ellen in a
number of ways. Ellen and the other teacher had daily classroom
interaction, daily shared planning and discussion time, and a
complimentary sharing of experience.
From her
third through sixth years in teaching, Ellen's collaborative work
changed. After teaching algebra for two years, she saw a need to
change the sequence of mathematics courses, to place a beginning
geometry course between the first two algebra courses. This
collaboration was marked by a sense of mutuality of interest
between Ellen and the school, initiated by both the school and
Ellen, organized around specific task goals, and, for Ellen at
least, relatively focused on classroom-based knowledge of student
learning. Unlike the type of collaborative work beginning in her
sixth year, the committee outcomes were relatively consistent
with Ellen's then current approaches to teaching. This
collaboration never encouraged her explicitly to examine or
challenge her assumptions to teaching and learning. The
following year, the school implemented the sequence of
mathematics courses in agreement with her
recommendations.
In her sixth
year of teaching, Ellen began to realize that the district-set
midterm exam in geometry was focused on students' basic recall
knowledge and basic skills. She knew that the test had to be
changed, but wasn't sure how. Getting district permission, she
and a mathematics teacher from the same district but a different
school, began to plan a new assessment program which facilitated
students' performance-based learning.
This collaborative work
was similar to that of the previous ones in that it was focused
on established course curriculum and allowed Ellen to work with
people she knew and liked. It differed from previous efforts in
that Ellen showed much greater initiative and experimentation.
Also, the process of the collaboration encouraged her to
challenged and change many of her teaching practices, if not
teaching beliefs. There was now more clear oversight of the
process, more conscious experimentation, more recognition of the
student-context to the assessment format, and more reflection
routinized into the collaborative process.
She and her
partner approached their collaborative goals by first clearly
establishing a rationale related both to district goals and
student-learning considerations. In working together, they
focused on changing approaches to mathematical format, rather
than content. The projects they devised for students built on
student creativity and critical thinking skills related to
problem-solving processes more than products. Ellen and her
partner consciously built oversight and reflection into their
collaborative process, viewing the first year of the new program
as a pilot program. In devising their new midterm collaboration,
Ellen and her partner developed a systematic approach to evaluate
each other's knowledge of teaching and learning, including
the use of classroom artifacts and an explicit discussion of how
students in their classes learn. Sharing a sense of creativity
with her partner, she and the other teacher began to examine ways
of teaching that were very different from how they had both
taught in the past.
While a stated district
goal of the collaboration was the implementation of the new math
assessment program, Ellen downplayed the importance of greater
school or district implementation to her feelings of satisfaction
with the collaboration outcomes. This collaboration ended
positively with the school implementing and establishing their
new assessment program as an optional midterm exam. Ellen and
her partner made plans to review the midterm program in its
second year.
Susan in
English
Susan took
part in a number of collaborations with her peers. While these
collaborations initially were somewhat distant from her classroom
(e.g., a school accreditation evaluation), they eventually came
to reflect her interests and influence her
curriculum.
In her first two years
of teaching, Susan engaged in three school-initiated
collaborations, activities which every teacher was required to
join. In one effort, she took part in a Middle States School
Evaluation. Susan later dismissed this work as obligatory and
meaningless. A second effort was a cooperative teaching
situation in which she worked with a writing-lab teacher at her
school. She thought the lab presented her and her students with
an opportunity to change their approaches to the writing process,
promoting a process of more substantive revision to increase the
depth of content within their compositions. And in the third
early collaboration, Susan attended a hands-on workshop on
"advanced teaching strategies." After attending this
workshop, she began to design her lessons in relation to the four
student learning styles discussed at the workshop.
In her third
year, Susan took a one-year sabbatical in order to earn a Master
of Arts in Teaching degree at a prestigious Ivy League
university. Back at her school, she wished to implement her
master's thesis, an effort which led to her establishing an
English/history interdisciplinary humanities program with a
history teacher. Susan initiated this beginning period of
collaboration, unlike the earlier one that was established by the
school. Conceived of as a pilot program, it may also be
distinguished from the following one by its emphasis on
reflection and change.
Before actually
beginning to work together, they discussed how they would do this
and what their collaborative goals were. They decided that they
would actually team-teach in a blocked class, twice as long as a
regular class. They also established a daily shared preparation
time, which let them monitor the class, anticipate directions and
needs, develop foresight, and reflect on the process. While
buoyed by a number of successes in this class, their reflection
focused on perceived issues in the class. After the first year,
they thought that this approach was too focused on the lockstep
chronology of history, with the social studies curriculum
dominating the English curriculum. This reflection led them to
add a year-in-review project in the second year to make the
course less doctrinaire and routine. In this project, each
student adopted a year as the focal point for a detailed
project. This project then formed much of the curriculum as the
students presented it to the rest of the class.
Susan then took another
sabbatical to study writing. When she returned to her school,
she continued to teach and develop the interdisciplinary
humanities course. During this year, Susan and the history
teacher continued to teach and meet together as in the initial
two-years of the program. They discussed their curriculum in
relation to a framework which considered teaching-and-learning
aspects of their course: a desired balance between presenting
students with a defined course structure and promoting their
independence, imagination and creativity; and the use of student
work to promote student creativity and curriculum
ownership.
This time period in her
humanities collaboration was marked by a number of
characteristics. First, she and the history teacher established
a reflective process which was focused at times on relatively
nuanced classroom specifics and at times on the way that school
structures could either support or hinder the humanity
course's sustainability. For example, they wondered how to
promote the institutionalization of their program within the
school as well as how their program could change the culture of
their school. Also at this time, a conflict arose between Susan
and her partner's efforts to institutionalize the program
and the growing hostility of the school to it, creating in
Susan's words, a "systemic nightmare" to it.
The intersection of these situations led them to a decision to
terminate the program. Ironically, this experience prompted her
to realize that to become the teacher that she wished to become,
she would have to find a new school in a new system. As Susan
stated in her last year of teaching, "You need an entirely
new system…Ironically, I couldn't stay in that
system. And I can't go back to that
system."
Teachers' Elements
of Support for Collaboration
The particulars of these
three teachers' collaboration with their peers differ. Similar
patterns, however, appear in their perceptions of support for
their collaborative work.
Personal
Characteristics
Personal
characteristics played an important role in how these teachers
emerged as collaborators. Each of these teachers shared an
overriding concern for the learning of all of their students.
Each teacher brought about collaborative situations that
reflected personal questions about teaching and learning. Each
teacher was willing to expose her own work to public scrutiny,
and each believed (to different degrees) in experiential
learning. Each teacher thought that being able to select her
collaborative partners was crucial. By their sixth year in
teaching, each teacher had developed peer selection criteria
involving complementary (e.g., educational philosophy and views
of student learning) yet contrasting (e.g., different approaches
to practice) elements. And, each teacher thought that a shared
philosophy of teaching and learning was more important to her
collaboration than a shared approach to teaching.
Structured
Approaches to Critiques of Practice
Perhaps the strongest
level of support that these teachers found to motivate their
collaborative work was their awareness that this work was
directly helping them to improve their classroom instruction for
all their students. Reluctant to talk about the concept of
"teaching practice," each of these three teachers
preferred instead to discuss more specific issues and questions
of teaching and learning. A network of relationships existed
between their evolving views of practice and their participation
in these collaborations. A scaffolding process appeared to be at
play in which at different points in their careers there was an
appropriate balance between support of existing curriculum
knowledge with positive tension from critiques of practice.
Related to how their view of support changed over time, these
critiques focused in the first year or two on preexisting
examples of curriculum which they did not develop. However, by
the third or fourth year, they focused more on personal examples
of curriculum. This balance may be seen in their evolving
process of reflection in these collaborative efforts. This
process of reflection was structured to allow them to critique
and question forms of practice in ways that became increasingly
more centered on or more systematically critical of their
evolving practice. This process is found in the collaborative
work of all three cases when examined over the course of their
teaching careers as a whole.
Initially, each teacher
began to critique and reflect on curriculum—but in ways that did
not directly expose or threaten her own curriculum. They often
discussed preexisting curriculum, for example changing a course
sequence, redesigning district tests, or revising existing
assignments (e.g., the research paper). A possible exception to
this pattern may be found in Susan's work with her
establishment of the humanities program. But initially, this
curriculum often had a relatively prescriptive, subject matter
emphasis. At this point, they critiqued less their own practice
or views, than curriculum that was relatively consistent or
similar to it, allowing them to guard their still fledgling
curriculum making from public inspection while possibly examining
it by proxy.
As each of
these teachers gained classroom knowledge and expertise, however,
much of their reflection on practice consistently revolved around
questions and dilemmas related to curriculum that supported their
students as active learners. By their sixth or seventh year, all
three teachers directly critiqued their own practice in their
collaborative work, framed by questions that they drew from their
work. Eventually, each teacher intentionally established
collaborative frameworks within which to weigh and evaluate
multiple approaches to curriculum. On a relatively large scale,
for example, Susan, Marilyn, and Ellen actually established pilot
programs to supply feedback for subsequent evaluation and
revision of their programs, again focused on their impact on
student learning. These processes then allowed the collaborators
to share and generate knowledge about the same leaning context or
environment. And, within this emergent context of
shared-and-generated knowledge, each of these teachers and their
partners developed subject content with pronounced process
elements.
Evolving Notion of
Subject Matter
Initially these teachers
were each relatively traditional in their teaching. Over time,
however, each teacher's notions of their subject matter and
disciplines changed. Eventually Ellen, whose later collaborative
work was confined to geometry, thought that the flexibility and
relatively open-ended nature of the content of and approaches to
geometry supported her work with the other teacher. Marilyn
thought that the relatively fixed nature of the content and
sequence of mathematics coupled with notions of multiple
approaches gave her shared ground to discuss algebra with other
teachers. Susan found that English easily lent itself to an
interdisciplinary pairing with social studies. She did not
collaborate on curriculum related to honors English, though,
where she may have had a more fixed notion of coverage. They all
found that criteria for standardizing testing that was becoming
more open-ended supported their collaborations related to
curriculum.
As they developed as
collaborators, their approaches to teaching were also changing.
Over time, they each began to show a tolerance for the ambiguity
or the multi-layeredness of curriculum, both within themselves
and between themselves and collaborative partners. In all three
cases, a growth in pedagogical content knowledge (Shulman, 1987)
coincided with their synthesizing from their collaboration into
their curricular planing views of curriculum that they may at one
time have rejected.
School
Support
Each of these teachers
stressed that support from the administration, department, and
school was essential to her collaboration. Ellen's
creative-midterm math program, arguably the most sustainable
collaboration of these teachers, enjoyed the full support of her
department, school, and the district (if not peers).
Susan's remarkable interdisciplinary program, on the other
hand, while a powerful experience for its students, suffered
immensely from a hostile administration. These teachers'
views of structural supports also evolved over the course of
their collaborative work with their peers. Through their third
to fifth year of teaching, they appreciated a greater emphasis on
the direct contribution of the administration in structuring
situations to support their sharing of knowledge and growth of
curriculum. By about their sixth year of teaching, they each
began to appreciate support from their administrators for their
deeper and more personal involvement in their collaborative
projects themselves, rather than that for more decontextualized
innovations in teaching, innovations found, for example, in
in-service workshops. A further form of administrative support
was a shared sense of purpose or mission, in which the goals of
the collaboration were consistent with those of the school and of
specific individuals, such as the principal and curriculum
supervisors.
These
teachers also found that the collaborative process itself was
supportive to their involvement in collaboration. While no
school had a coherent program toward collaboration, certain
approaches to collaboration may have fostered greater teacher
involvement in this type of work. Ellen, for example, valued her
sequence of collaborations, going from more-to-less
administratively supplied structure, undergirded by general
school support. These teachers increasingly found meaning in
collaborative work that allowed them to create cycles of growth
for themselves. These cycles linked personal questions about
teaching and learning to peer discussion, experimentation,
reflection, and the generation of new questions about teaching
and learning.
The Evolving Nature
of Support
As these teachers grew
in experience and level of reflection, the form and amount of
support that they viewed as important to their collaboration
changed. Initially, they each valued collaborative support that
was more one-on-one and classroom specific. In addition to
meeting their initial needs as new teachers, this form of support
facilitated their growth in knowledge and experience in the
actual process of collaboration. By about their sixth year in
teaching, however, all three of the teachers began to seek and
value support for their collaborative work that was broader and
encompassed the school as a complex but changeable organization.
This latter form of support was more systemic and compatible with
their growth in knowledge about the relationship between
meaningful instruction and school culture and
structures.
Discussion: Islands
of Agency and Initiative
The unfolding narratives
of Marilyn, Ellen, and Susan show the unique ways that they
developed and acted on personal meaning in their work. Their
actions at work became increasingly grounded in their developing
knowledge, questions, and theories about teaching and learning.
This grounded knowledge informed and was informed by the various
ways that they constructed curriculum contexts to help students
learn. They not only persevered in their efforts to work with
their peers. They also helped to establish greater contexts of
support in order to collaborate with their peers. In addition,
these three teachers encountered and challenged — often with
considerable personal effort — individualism, conservatism, and
presentism (Lortie, 1975) inherent in school
structures.
Marilyn, Ellen, and
Susan's narratives suggest that collaborative goals and
activities intersected with their school's culture and structure
and that this intersection became more meaningful for them as
they developed greater knowledge and experience from their
teaching. As these teachers' personal practical knowledge of
teaching (Clandinin & Connelly, 1995) developed, the
relationship between their schools' structures of support and
their growing personal practical knowledge became increasingly
important to these teachers.
Given this backdrop, a
question emerges from their narratives: Did these teachers
develop a sense of initiative and agency for personal
self-renewal and school change? These questions are
complicated. First, each of these teachers, at least for a time,
did develop a growing sense of initiative and agency in her work,
both within the classroom and within her collaborations.
However, the degree of self-renewal and satisfaction related to
the achieved or intended outcomes of this agency was related to
their perceived level of success in reaching their goals. Ellen,
for example, was arguably the most successful in her
collaborative work through her tenth year of teaching.
Collaborating with the teacher from the neighboring school to
change the midterm exam in geometry, she changed both district
guidelines impacting her work as well as the curriculum she made
in class. In a way, she established an island of agency for
herself, basically centered on her classroom. Whether on not
other teachers in her school also changed their midterm exams in
response to the new guidelines did not directly affect her
curriculum changes, which she could still carry out. This
revision to her curriculum led to an invigorating sense of
self-renewal for her in her teaching.
Susan, on the other
hand, was much more ambitious in her collaborative goals. She
initially developed a context to support her interdisciplinary
course and then established a new program at her school.
However, the relationship between her program and greater school
change became increasingly problematic for her. For a time, her
increased agency and initiative also led to a profound sense of
self-renewal. Ironically, it also contributed greatly to her
leaving the classroom to work for the charter school movement to
empower teachers to start their own schools.
This difference in the
career pathways between Ellen and Susan echoes findings of Martin
Huberman. In his well-known study about the professional life
cycle of teachers, Huberman (1989) suggests that the teachers in
his study experienced multiple career paths at different stages
in their teaching lives. At the end of a long teaching career,
some of the teachers in his study were relatively satisfied and
content with their teaching careers, whereas others experienced a
sense of frustration and a lack of closure: "Depending on
the previous trajectory, this final phase can be either serene or
acrimonious" (Huberman, 1989, p.38). This outcome was partly
related to the teachers' perception of how successful they had
been in achieving their goals in teaching. Those teachers who
attempted to bring about relatively large-scale change were often
the most dissatisfied when retiring from teaching.
Restructuring
Schools As Sites of Authentic Leadership
Authentic leadership
(Evans, 1993) values "the head, the heart, and the
hand" (Sergiovanni, 1992) of leadership and builds from the
multiple voices and unique strengths found at a given site
(Miller and O'Shea, 1992). It recognizes that teachers
develop and change over the course of their careers. This form
of leadership is necessary for schools to become places of
self-regulated learning, not only for students, but also for
teachers and other staff members—at different points along a
teaching continuum from novice to more experienced teacher.
While teachers who emerge as collaborators and leaders may
arrange structures of support for themselves in culturally
impoverished schools, these teachers often pay an emotional and
professional price. Instead of supporting emergent leadership
characteristics in teachers, many schools expose teachers to
conditions that facilitate contrived and superficial forms of
collaboration (Hargreaves & Dawe, 1990).
There are many ways for
schools to value and build from the unique voices and strengths
of teachers like Marilyn, Ellen, and Susan. The following
elements might be included in such a consideration. It is
helpful to recognize that teachers' agency, voice, and sense of
meaning matter greatly to them as they work with each other and
their students. Efforts to control the quality of teaching
through rigid, centrally mandated accountability measures can
create sites of contention for teachers.
In addition to personal
efficacy, the teachers in this study were supported in meaningful
collaboration by a dynamic notion of curriculum. They each
realized that for curriculum to engage their students, the
students must engage the curriculum. Thus they began to view
curriculum as a dynamic gestalt of student input, teacher input,
classroom materials, and inside-as-well-as-outside classroom
contexts (Clandinin & Connelly, 1992; Sawyer, 1998; Schwab,
1978). This more open notion of content calls into question
authoritarian views of what knowledge is of most worth in the
classroom. Given that curriculum is a dynamic interaction,
teacher support for collaboration that involves curriculum will
change for each individual teacher at different points along his
or her career. Furthermore, successful collaboration is itself a
support for further collaboration as it deepens and extends
knowledge and expertise about teaching. Schools run the risk of
losing good teachers by devaluing and dismissing their meaningful
collaborative efforts.
Over time and with a
growth in teaching experience and knowledge, these teachers began
to value structural support that facilitated their efforts to
bring about not only classroom, but also program and school
change. At least for a time, each of them carved out sites of
personal growth and renewal, sites which included unique support
structures. Ellen found professional renewal in change efforts
that were primarily focused on her classroom. On the other hand,
Susan's questions about student learning led her to
establish an interdisciplinary program that bridged classroom
walls. The degree to which the three schools helped or hindered
these two teachers, as well as Marilyn, in their quest for the
improvement of education for all students greatly influenced
these teachers' decisions to remain or leave the teaching
profession. The grounded knowledge that teachers generate and
share within collaborative islands ought to support the
predictable success of school reform.
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About the
Author
Richard Sawyer
Washington State
University, Vancouver
College of
Education
14204 NE Salmon Creek
Avenue
Vancouver, WA
98686-9600
Phone: (360)
546-9658
Email:
Sawyerr@vancouver.wsu.edu
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times since October 1, 2001