Meaningful Collaboration

CHAPTER 1

The most valuable resource that all teachers have is each other. Without collaboration, our growth is limited to our own perspectives.

—Robert John Meehan

K–12 schools and districts face daunting challenges as they strive to ensure all students learn at high levels and are prepared to be successful when they exit the school system. These challenges, such as student mobility, family trauma, and inconsistent preschool preparation, multiply as educators work with diverse student populations with a wide range of learning needs. Coupled with increased federal, state or provincial, and local accountability, schools and districts face an intensified need to eliminate the ineffective practice of educators working in isolation—when educators are left to themselves to determine what to teach, how to best teach it, how to assess, and how to respond to the varying needs of their students.

Most educators have had experience being part of a team at some point in their lives; maybe it was on an athletic team, in the school band, or at work, such as Jon’s first job as a busboy. In Jon’s team experience, the cooks prepared food and placed it on plates. The servers served the plates of food to the customers. Jon cleared the plates, washed them, and returned them to the cooks. They worked as a team. As a Coast Guard officer, Brig was part of lifesaving teams conducting dangerous rescues,

and everyone on the teams played a critical role in accomplishing the mission. As the navigator, Brig would receive the distress call and direct the ship to the right location, while the driver of the rescue boat would make adjustments based on weather conditions to safely get the boat crew near enough so the rescue swimmer could jump in the water to save the person in distress. In each situation, Brig worked together with a team to accomplish a task and members depended on one another. To be successful, the members knew they had to work as a team; Jon’s job as a busboy and Brig’s job as a Coast Guard officer required more than any one person could do alone.

The power of teamwork has been extensively discussed and written about. Research shows organizing staff in teams that ensure frequent collaboration is a practice educators must embrace (Eaker, 2020). National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future and WestEd study coauthors Kathleen Fulton and Ted Britton (2011) state:

We now have compelling evidence that when teachers team up with their colleagues they are able to create a culture of success in schools, leading to teaching improvements and student learning gains. The clear policy and practice implication is that great teaching is a team sport. (p. 4)

According to DuFour and colleagues (2016), collaborative teams are the building blocks of a PLC. In their landmark book introducing the PLC process, Richard DuFour and Robert Eaker (1998) state, “People who engage in collaborative team learning are able to learn from one another, thus creating momentum to fuel continuous improvement” (p. 27). Coauthors Richard DuFour, Rebecca DuFour, Robert Eaker, Mike Mattos, and Anthony Muhammad (2021) share:

A PLC is composed of collaborative teams whose members work interdependently to achieve common goals—goals linked to the purpose of learning for all—for which members hold one another mutually accountable. It is difficult to overstate the importance of collaborative teams in the PLC process. It is equally important, however, to emphasize that collaboration does not lead to improved results unless people focus on the right issues. Collaboration is a means to an end, not the end itself. (p. 14)

Professor of education John Hattie’s (2017) research supports the importance of collaboration (as cited in Waack, 2018). In his meta-analysis, Hattie (2017) ranks 252 factors related to student achievement (as cited in Waack, 2018). The numberone influence he identifies is collective teacher efficacy (1.57 effect size—the equivalent of more than three years of academic growth in one academic year; 0.4 is considered normal academic growth; Hattie, 2017, as cited in Waack, 2018). Collective teacher efficacy is the belief of staff in their combined ability to positively affect student