Meaningful Collaboration
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academic achievement. This further supports collaboration as favorable over teachers working in isolation; it is not the individual belief of a single staff member that positively affects student academic achievement, but rather, a staff’s collective belief. Many resources are available that outline how to implement the PLC process in your school or district. They address topics such as a guaranteed and viable curriculum (Kramer & Schuhl, 2017), common formative assessments (Bailey & Jakicic, 2017), SMART goals (strategic and specific, measurable, attainable, results oriented, and time bound; DuFour et al., 2016), response to intervention (RTI; Buffum, Mattos, & Malone, 2018), and so on.
Meaningful Collaboration Versus Collaboration Lite It is important to define the term meaningful collaboration and distinguish it from what PLC resources call collaboration lite (DuFour et al., 2016). Collaborate (n.d.) comes from the Latin word collaborare combining com- and laborare to mean “labor together.” Collaborate (n.d.) is also “to work jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor.” However, we have learned through our experiences that a generic definition of collaboration impedes continuous improvement. Therefore, we strongly promote a narrower and more specific definition. In Learning by Doing, the authors specifically define collaboration as a “systematic process in which teachers work together interdependently in order to impact their classroom practice in ways that will lead to better results for their students, for their team, and for their school” (DuFour et al., 2016, p. 12). We use this definition of collaboration, as we too often observe educators misinterpreting congeniality, cooperation, and their willingness to work together as collaboration. We classify these faux interpretations as collaboration lite. Teams of educators who only address state standards, discipline issues, and other school issues will not see the improvement in student learning they desire. These activities do not embrace the foundational elements of the PLC process. The significant difference between being a true collaborative team versus engaging in collaboration lite is using evidence of student learning to inform and improve both individual and collective practices. In other words, collaboration is about teams collectively analyzing their practices, most specifically their instructional practices,
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The thread that runs through these PLC topics is collaboration: educators are more effective when they work in teams versus working in isolation, but the collaboration must be meaningful. This chapter explores what makes collaboration meaningful, the dilemma of singletons and collaboration, and common approaches for singleton collaboration.
