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Building a culture of collaboration in schools
Article in Phi Delta Kappan · April 2016
DOI: 10.1177/0031721716641653
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Building a culture
of collaboration in
schools
Collaboration builds teacher trust
and expertise and enables schools
to implement changes in instruction
with greater ease and comfort.
By Paul S. Sutton and Andrew W. Shouse
In a monthly staff meeting, several groups of three
to four teachers assemble in the school library to
review a sample of a student’s writing. Teachers
represent several departments and are intentionally
grouped to calibrate writing supports across departments.
The math and science teachers have their computers propped open passively checking email while the
English teacher reads the protocol aloud. The science teacher stops working on his computer and asks,
“Sorry, what are we supposed to be doing again?”
The math teacher mutters, “What does this task
have to do with teaching math?” The English teacher
PAUL S. SUTTON (suttonps@plu.edu) is a visiting assistant professor of education at Pacific Lutheran University, Tacoma, Wash.
ANDREW W. SHOUSE is a chief program officer at Washington
STEM, Seattle, Wash.
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leads the group in diagnosing problems she sees in
the student’s work. Five minutes into the task, the
math teacher again voices frustration, saying, “I get
that writing is important, but what my ELL students
could really use is help comprehending the language
in long word problems.” For the rest of the task,
the English teacher leads the group while the other
two teachers occasionally chime in with “that sounds
right,” and “that makes sense.”
Instead of relying on outside consultants
or district leaders, the school leveraged
the expertise of existing staff to
design and lead relevant professional
development and redesign established
curriculum.
This is how many teachers experience collaborative work. Groups are organized to build a common
understanding of a particular issue in teaching, but
to many the experience of collaboration rings hollow.
The collaborative task may be driven by a top-down
mandate. Teachers may see the task as inauthentic or
irrelevant to their daily practice. It may be unclear
to teachers why they are grouped with colleagues
from other departments. Or it may be that the tasks
teachers are asked to complete are not worthy of
collaboration to begin with.
Teaching is complex; teachers and school leaders
crave meaningful, collaborative experiences to make
sense of that complexity. However, the structural,
cultural, and historical factors involved with schooling impede teacher collaboration. Teachers spend
five to six periods of the day teaching classes, largely
working in isolation from each other; they spend
their remaining time tending to administrative tasks,
answering emails, or grading. When we ask teachers
to begin collaborating with colleagues in meaningful
ways, they often perceive it as more of a hindrance
than a help.
For schools to work around the structural constraints to establish sincere and thoughtful collaborative cultures present in the research literature
(Cochran-Smith, & Lytle, 1999; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012), they must
approach collaboration differently. Collaborative
cultures emerge from authentic and relevant problem solving. Teachers see collaboration as an integral
feature of their work when the problems we ask them
to solve are specific to their practice, common to a
70 Kappan
majority of teachers in a particular school, and have
a solution that can only be reached via collaboration. In the example provided above, the issue was
what teachers were asked to do, not how they were
asked to do it.
Collaboration at Sammamish High School
The authors have spent the last five years in a close
partnership with Sammamish High School (SHS),
a public, comprehensive high school in the Pacific
Northwest. To stem decreased enrollment, persistent achievement gaps, and a sense that students
simply were not sufficiently motivated to engage in
required coursework at a high level, teachers and
administrators began work to transform their school
from a traditional high school to a problem-based
learning (PBL) environment. Much of this work was
funded by a federal grant in 2009. Since that time,
we have participated in, observed, and collected data
on multiple activities related to the school’s renewal
process, including data collected on multiple design teams where teachers redesigned curriculum,
consulting, and in some cases codesigned multiday
professional development experiences. We offered
technical assistance to teachers implementing PBL
coursework, participated in leadership team meetings, and worked with school leaders to write the
school’s Key Elements of Problem-Based Learning
guiding document.
The questions that emerged were weighty. How
would they shift their practice to support students’
learning in PBL classrooms? How would they redesign established curriculum into PBL curriculum
while aligning it with multiple standards such as the
Common Core, Advanced Placement (AP) frameworks, and the district’s common curriculum? How
would they redesign professional learning to support
that work? Doing this work, collaboration became
central to the school renewal efforts.
Collaborative curriculum redesign
A team focusing on the Social Studies I class was
one of the first to design a PBL course. Originally,
the team included six teachers representing a diversity of teaching experience and expertise. The team
included a second-year teacher and a teacher with
deep expertise and extensive experience teaching
the specific content of the course. The school had
recruited the teacher with the content expertise to
help redesign this specific course. This and other
teams worked largely autonomously throughout the
school.
When teachers were designing a challenge cycle
in which students would redraw the school district
attendance lines, the team considered including elementary and middle schools in the challenge. One
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teacher said doing so would make the challenge
“way too complex.” As the conversation continued,
another teacher suggested creating mega groups of
nine students and splitting them into elementary,
middle, and high school groups according to feeder
schools. That prompted one teacher to ask, “Will
there be enough buy-in for the kids who are doing middle and elementary schools?” After further
discussion, the team decided that having students
work on high school attendance lines would suffice
if the point of the challenge cycle is to have students deeply engage content-specific concepts and
use them to make attendance boundary decisions.
The team decided that task would lose some authenticity, but students would find the overall task more
relevant to their lives.
Throughout the redesign experience, Social Studies I teachers did not hesitate to ask each other clarifying questions and challenge each other’s suggestions.
Teachers interacted as equals with no one teacher
assuming leadership over the group or attempting to dominate the process. They disagreed often,
but those disagreements were resolved by deciding
what option(s) best aligned with PBL principles and
served the interests of students and student learning.
The Social Studies I team did not stumble across
a healthy collaborative working relationship by
happenstance. In October of their design year, the
team took a retreat day to establish clear norms and
a shared commitment to and vision for their curriculum redesign work. Interviews with each Social
Studies I teacher strongly supported our observations. Teachers often referred to the “we” of the team
and the department. They discussed how they spent
ample time both in design team meetings and during lunch trying to define a PBL class, how that is
different from a traditional class, and how to begin
to plan for it. One team member described how the
department “collaborates a lot” and how “at lunch,
we [they] talk about how we can work together better
as a department.” In this group, there was a sense of
accountability and responsibility present in the “we”
that seems to be an extension of the culture of the
department. One teacher said, “I’ve never been in
a department that talks so much about history and
cares so much about the lessons.”
Teacher-led professional learning
As the teacher teams worked on curriculum design, the school redesigned the way teachers learned
in formal professional development spaces. Every
summer school, leaders and teachers led a voluntary professional development experience called
the Sammamish Institute of Learning and Teaching
(SILT). Planning for SILT would begin the previous
winter and involved teacher leaders, school leaders,
When we ask teachers to begin
collaborating with colleagues in
meaningful ways, they often perceive it
as more of a hindrance than a help.
teachers, and university partners. Each SILT experience was focused on specific principles of PBL to
support the work teachers were doing to design and
implement PBL curriculum. Teachers who demonstrated mastery in implementing specific PBL principles such as authentic assessment or student voice
were asked to design and lead 45- to 60-minute SILT
sessions. Teacher surveys, compiled over four years
of SILT, show that more than 90% of teachers “came
away with something specific today I will be able to
use in my teaching this year.” The following example, illustrating how a well-respected math teacher
facilitated a discussion on the perils of group work,
shows why.
Judy Smith (a pseudonym) teaches several sections of AP math. Like many teachers, she struggles with facilitating student collaboration between
native and non-native English speakers in her AP
classes. She opened her 45-minute SILT session by
revealing to teachers that this is a chronic problem
in her classroom and that she was hoping they could
help her find some solutions. “I’m going to make
myself vulnerable and share with staff my failings
with facilitating student collaboration,” she said.
“I think that might work.” She focused teachers’
learning on several case studies from her practice
that showed why group work did not meet the needs
of her ELL students, her native speaking students,
or both. Working in both discipline-specific and
interdisciplinary groups, teachers shared common
struggles with Judy’s problem and quickly got to
work on solutions.
On the end-of-the-day survey, all 31 teachers who
attended Judy’s session rated it highly, saying that it
was relevant to their teaching and learning goals for
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the upcoming year. One teacher said she “really enjoyed being able to work through some actual problems and form solutions to things that come up in
almost every class.” Another teacher bluntly stated,
“We need more of this . . . real kids, real problems
we all share and working to solve them and hear what
others have done.”
Distributed leadership in action
Teachers see collaboration as an integral
feature of their work when the problems
we ask them to solve are specific to
their practice, common to a majority of
teachers in a particular school, and have
a solution that can only be reached via
collaboration.
72 Kappan
Eight people sit around a conference table in a
converted office space at Sammamish High School.
It is the second year of their PBL transformation
work, and a group consisting of teacher leaders, the
principal, a university researcher who is also one of
the authors, and a representative from an educational
nonprofit organization discuss the merits of an externally validated assessment to measure students’
college readiness. At this point in the project, the
leadership team was facing a quandary. Although student performance on AP exams and the various statemandated exams gave them data on yearly student
progress, those same assessments gave them little
insight into how students were developing creative
problem solving, critical thinking, and research skills
needed in college or a career.
Once they had decided to pilot the new assessment,
one of the teachers presented a dilemma: “Given the
school has to administer any number of high-stakes,
standardized tests throughout the year, how will the
team persuade teachers — who already are implementing PBL coursework — that the additional time
they will need to give up to administer the multiple
day exam is worth the investment?” The partner representative asked how the assessment aligns with the
Common Core standards, suggesting that this exam
could serve multiple purposes. A teacher leader suggested face-to-face conversations with those leading
implementation on each design team to gauge the
willingness of the design teams. At one point, the
school’s ELL facilitator asked, “What accommodations would be made for ELL and special education
students, and how much extra time and support they
would be provided?”
The discussion continued for more than 15 minutes with no clear resolution. Then, after listening
to the discussion, the principal suggested that they
“don’t know of a better way to assess students on
college-readiness skills” and that this test may help
the school “establish an externally validated way, beyond AP exams, to assess students’ progress within
the PBL framework. This as an opportunity for us to
learn,” he argued. “We need to be clear with staff why
we think this is a good idea and get creative in how
we support them.” After his input, the group transitioned to identifying teachers whose classes would
be asked to pilot the test and the various ways they
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could alleviate the extra work they would have to do.
By the end of the conversation, the group established
a clear argument about why they wanted to pilot the
assessment, and they identified concrete ways to help
support teachers who administer the test.
In many schools, this decision would be made in
a top-down manner. At Sammamish High School,
a group or groups of people will deliberate policy
decisions that affect the whole school. Sometimes
the school’s leadership team makes the decision.
Other times, the principal works with other teachers to better understand the implications of various decisions. In the example above, the principal
deliberated with the leadership team for most of
one hour to solve this problem. In this case, all participants had ample space and time to express their
opinions, and each opinion was weighed equally.
The decision-making process was open, transparent, and candid.
Keys to a collaborative culture
In our work with Sammamish High School, we
observed several key practices that helped create a
strong and durable collaborative culture. The first
were explicit moves to empower teachers and involve them in every facet of the school improvement
process. At Sammamish High School, the principal
built strong relationships with teachers by developing a vision for school improvement with them, not
for them. From the beginning, teachers were provided the space and time to diagnose problems such
as decreased enrollment, weak inclusion of students
of color in STEM-related coursework, and chronic
achievement gaps. From that work came a shared
understanding of problems facing the school and a
shared vision for how the school could address those
issues.
Strong partnerships between teachers and school
leaders should extend to redesigned professional
learning for teachers. Instead of relying on outside consultants or district leaders, the school leveraged the expertise of existing staff to design and
lead relevant professional development and redesign
established curriculum. This approach has several
advantages. Teacher-designed and teacher-led professional learning will, in most cases, focus on problems of practice most relevant to other teachers (Ball
& Cohen, 1999; Cochran-Smith, & Lytle, 1999).
When teachers design and lead professional development, they simultaneously deepen their expertise and establish themselves as a resource for other
teachers (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). By trusting
teachers to design and lead thoughtful professional
learning, in small- or large-group settings, schools
position teachers as instructional and pedagogical
leaders within the school.
Most important, their school improvement efforts focused on shifting how students learn and
how teachers teach. Across the school, teachers
collaborated to redesign coursework. Their work
was supported by highly relevant and engaging professional learning experiences designed and led by
teachers. To support teachers’ PBL implementation efforts and their ongoing professional learning, the leadership team charted long-term goals
for the school and designed professional learning experiences based on feedback from teachers.
Taken separately, each characteristic demonstrates
the increasingly collaborative ways teachers worked
together. Over time, however, Sammamish High
School’s collaborative culture emerged from sustained, collaborative, problem solving occurring
across multiple settings within the school around
local, yet universal, problems of practice. Teachers
came to see that work as not only meaningful and
purposeful but necessary in order to better address
the needs of students.
Sammamish High School has taken a decidedly
long-term, ecological approach to collaborative
school improvement. To them, collaboration is more
than a tool of professional development. It is “about
the process of individual and organizational change,
about nurturing the intellectual connections in the
lives of educators working together to understand
and improve their practice . . . and about continuous, critical inquiry into current practices and principled innovation” (Sirotnik, 1999, p. 607-608). As
one teacher describes it, “Collaboration is how our
work gets done now. I couldn’t imagine it being any
different.”
K
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References
Ball, D.L. & Cohen, D.K. (1999). Developing practice,
developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of
professional education. In L. Darling-Hammond & G. Sykes
(Eds.), Teaching as the learning profession (pp. 3-32). San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. (1999). Relationships of
knowledge and practice: Teacher learning in communities.
Review of Research in Education, 24, 249-305.
Hargreaves, A. & Fullan, M. (2012). Professional capital:
Transforming teaching in every school. New York, NY:
Teachers College Press.
McLaughlin, M.W. & Talbert, J.E. (2006). Building schoolbased teacher learning communities. New York, NY: Teachers
College Press.
Sirotnik, K.A. (1999, April). Making sense of educational
renewal. Phi Delta Kappan, 80 (8), 606-610.
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