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One Classroom at a Time? Teacher Isolation and
Community Viewed Through the Prism of the Particular
by Alex D.M. Pomson — 2005
In recent years a research literature has developed which increasingly
problematizes the project to construct professional community in schools. This
case-based literature explores the messy complexities of teacher cooperation
and collaboration. It points to the human, cultural, and political dimensions in
schools that prevent changes in the organizational conditions of teachers' work
from achieving their anticipated outcomes. This article deepens this vein of
research by examining the experiences of those who work in a school system
where, because of its governance and curriculum organization, teachers must
work in a professional environment which provides few opportunities for
isolation or privacy. Drawing on a series of narrative inquiries into the work
and lives of Jewish day school teachers, the article helps clarify different
impulses behind the search for teacher community: those that derive from
professional concerns, such as the goal to improve student achievement, and
those that derive from personal concerns, such as the desire to belong or to
experience fellowship in the workplace. In its final section, the article brings
into view sources of teachers' ambivalence about collaboration often
overlooked in the school reform literature.
In recent years a research literature has developed which increasingly
problematizes the project to construct professional community in schools. This
case-based literature explores the messy complexities of teacher cooperation
and collaboration. It points to the human, cultural, and political dimensions in
schools that prevent changes in the organizational conditions of teachers’ work
from achieving their anticipated outcomes. This article deepens this vein of
research by examining the experiences of those who work in a school system
where, because of its governance and curriculum organization, teachers must
work in a professional environment, which provides few opportunities for
isolation or privacy. Drawing on a series of narrative inquiries into the work and
lives of Jewish day school teachers, the article helps clarify different impulses
behind the search for teacher community: those that derive from professional
concerns, such as the goal to improve student achievement, and those that
derive from personal concerns, such as the desire to belong or to experience
fellowship in the workplace. In its final section, the article brings into view
sources of teachers’ ambivalence about collaboration often overlooked in the
school reform literature.
CONTEXT
For much of the last century it was a commonplace of research into the
professional lives of teachers that they invariably worked in isolation, behind
closed doors, in the insulated environment of their own classrooms (Little,
1990; Lortie, 1975; Waller, 1961). This sociological circumstance became a
central target for reformers who argued that if teachers’ work was
deprivatized, or if, in Sergiovanni’s oft-quoted charge, schools were viewed as
communities rather than as organizations, a variety of benefits would follow
(Sergiovanni, 1994). These benefits, it was claimed, brought about through the
creation of smaller schools, magnet programs, site-based management and
teacher collaboration, would transform not only teaching and learning, but
school systems as a whole (Goodlad, 1990; Meier, 1995; Shulman, 1989; Sizer,
1984). As Achinstein (2002) explains, it was anticipated that at the individual
level, the cultivation of professional community would ease the isolation and
uncertainty inherent in the teaching profession (Johnson, 1990); at the
classroom level, it would support teacher innovation and risk (Rosenholtz,
1989); and at the school level, it would result in organizational coordination,
teacher empowerment, and the achievement of reform goals (Barth, 1990).
The benefits promised by school reformers have emerged only haphazardly and
hesitantly. As a consequence, in recent years a research literature has
developed which increasingly problematizes the project to construct
professional community in schools. This literature questions what Westheimer
(1998, p. 21) identifies as two problematic but central assumptions of schoolbased organizational reform: (a) that teachers and administrators know how to
turn organizational potential into truly communal relationships and (b) that
teachers seek such communities. This case-based literature explores the messy
complexities of community and collaboration. It points to the human, cultural,
and political dimensions in schools that prevent changes in the organizational
conditions of teachers’ work from achieving their anticipated outcomes. To
cite some examples: This research has made visible the multiple reference
groups within which teachers navigate institutional life (Little & McLaughlin,
1993); the obstructions to school change created by teacher cliques
(Hargreaves, 1994); the manifold human elements that subvert the evolution of
school community (Louis & Kruse, 1995); and numerous other cultural,
ideological, and psychological factors that complicate the cultivation of
community in schools (Merz & Furman, 1997; Westheimer, 1998). In short, this
burgeoning literature has provided a powerful sense not only of the fragility of
community (Calderwood, 2000), but also of the complex micropolitics that can
make a difference between ‘‘mature, developing, fragmented and static’’
school communities (Louis & Kruse, 1995).
This article seeks to contribute to our growing appreciation of the human and
cultural complexities involved in nurturing collaborative school communities by
examining the experiences of those who work in a school system where, it
seems, teachers must, of necessity, cooperate with peers and parents. This
private, denominational and (largely) faith-based setting allows teachers little
professional or physical autonomy and is unlikely to suggest organizational
recipes for public elementary schools as a whole. Yet to adapt an argument of
Eisner’s (1998), this special system in which almost a quarter of a million North
American children are educated might help others better appreciate the shared
complexities involved in cultivating professional community (cited by
Westheimer, 1998). Moreover, the reflections of teachers thrown together at
all levels of this system will help thicken understanding of the problems and
possibilities when teachers in other systems find themselves (forcibly) teamed
with colleagues for particular curriculum purposes.
The governance and curricular organization of Jewish elementary schools
requires teachers to work in a professional environment, which provides few
opportunities for solitude or privacy. Generally, Jewish day schools are
privately funded institutions governed by parental groups involved intensively
in day-to-day operations. All schools deliver a dual curriculum of Judaic and
general studies. Each half of the curriculum is usually delivered by a different
teacher. This means that other than in rare instances, teachers throughout the
elementary grades must share their students with at least one colleague
(chosen for them in an arranged match) with whom they must negotiate the
many dimensions of the classroom environment. In many ways, this is an
extreme form of a situation familiar to all classroom teachers who are required
to coordinate their work with music and art specialists or with second-language
instructors. In these terms, the day school also looks much like the work
environment for health care and human service providers, who increasingly are
required to conduct their work within specially formed interdisciplinary teams
(Garner, 1998).
In this setting, where there are few opportunities for privacy or autonomy, it is
possible to investigate the extent to which teachers seek out isolated
professional space or instead embrace opportunities for collaboration and
collegiality. If teachers do seek community in this context, we can explore
whether it is because they are concerned to improve student achievement
and/or whether they seek other desired personal outcomes. This special setting
provides, then, a context in which to interrogate many of the psychological and
structural categories used to explain teachers’ resistance to aspects of school
reform.
METHODOLOGIES
The data at the heart of this inquiry are drawn from three research projects
conducted over a 4-year period. These projects have asked Canadian Jewish
elementary school teachers from 16 schools of great ideological diversity to
engage in systematic or sustained reflection on their professional lives. In the
first project, 9 Jewish studies teachers from 6 different schools kept reflective
diaries over the course of a school year. Participants were asked to write at
least once every 2 weeks about any aspect of their lives and work, which they
regarded as having been important for their teaching. Individual participants
then met with a member of the research team1 approximately once every 6
weeks in order to elaborate on what participants regarded as gaps in their
accounts or to revise whatever they might have recorded. In a follow-up
yearlong study, four pairs of Jewish and general studies partners engaged in a
similarly structured process of journal writing and conversation as they
reflected on their professional lives and on their relationships with crosscurriculum partners. In a third study, 18 graduates from a university-based
Jewish teacher education program were interviewed about their teaching
careers. In this instance, the research participants had completed a Jewish
studies specialization in a publicly certified preservice program and came to
day schools after gaining some experience in public schools. The research team
developed a semi structured interview script to encourage participants to
narrate their career stories without being restricted to a linear or chronological
orientation.
In all three instances, these research projects were grounded in a view of
teaching as work that involves (in often exceptional ways) the teacher as a
person (Hamachek, 1999). From this perspective, it was assumed that not only
is the teacher’s work an important element in the definition of self, as is the
case for most workers in Western culture (Hughes, 1958), but also, as Nias
(1989) puts it, that the ‘‘the self is a crucial element in the ways teachers
construe the nature of their work’’ (p. 13). All three studies sought, therefore,
to explore the points at which personal and professional identity overlap in
teachers’ work.
Narrative provided both the substance and method for all three inquiries. The
first two journal-based studies, by inviting teachers to narrate the details in
their lives, ‘‘called’’ participants to capture/compose the stories they live
(Coles, 1989). The third study attended to what Kelchtermans (1993) calls
‘‘teachers’ career stories,’’ the career accounts teachers compose from the
facts of their lives. It was conceived as a study of teachers’ careers in which
career was regarded as a subjective construct which gives shape to individual
employment histories (Bicklen, 1986). All three projects utilized narrative
forms, which conveyed the essences of teachers’ practices, pursuing ‘‘the
secret of teaching . . . in the local detail and the everyday life of teachers’’
(Ayers and Schubert, 1992, p. v). The data they generated possess many of the
qualities of narrative inquiry: They are personal, evocative, and fraught with
moral tension.
FRAMING THE FINDINGS
The original scope of these three studies was open-ended. The first two sought
to turn to teachers ‘‘to generate accounts which might serve as significant
sources of insight into Jewish education’’ (Pomson, 2002, p. 26). The third was
interested in exploring what Jewish schoolteachers identify as central sources
of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in their work (Pomson, 2004). While the core
concerns of these inquiries focused on particular issues within the world of
Jewish day schools, the rich data they generated make it possible to examine
questions of more general application beyond their immediate faith-based
contexts. In this instance, they provide an opportunity to explore how teachers
construct their space in relation to both colleagues and parents and to
investigate the kinds of concerns that influence their search for autonomy or
community in environments that press on them to participate in collective
activity.
As suggested above, a thread running through much of the school reform
literature is a view of teacher isolationism as either (a) an adaptive strategy in
environments where the resources required to meet instructional demands are
in short supply or (b) an ecological condition, encouraged by workplace settings
where physical isolation is pervasive (Flinders, 1988; Johnson, 1990;
Lieberman, 1988). From these perspectives, teacher isolation is a legitimate,
or at least a predictable, response to circumstances where, normally, teachers
are the only professionals in the room and are left to figure out how to move a
group of 30 students through the required curriculum (Labaree, 2000).
More recent research has adopted a less deterministic view of the relation
between organizational conditions and teachers’ tendencies toward
professional community or isolation. Schools are rarely uniform cultures or
‘‘total institutions’’ where teachers respond in similar fashion to common
workplace conditions. As recent studies have shown, teachers are as likely to
see aspects of school reform, such as scheduling changes and site-basedmanagement initiatives, as opportunities or irritations (Hargreaves, 1994; Merz
& Furman, 1997). They might regard team teaching, for example, as an
opportunity for collegial support or as a threat to professional autonomy
(Guiton, Oakes, Quartz, Lipton, & Balisok, 1995).
The findings reported here shed further light on the sources of these
ambivalent responses to community-building structures and processes in
schools. They indicate that when teachers commit to professional community,
they often have different ends in mind. The following data show in evocative
fashion how (and why) teachers’ investment in community can fluctuate among
cooperation, collegiality, and collaboration, that is, among different
expressions of professional interaction which Kruse, Louis and Bryk (1995)
identify as corresponding to ever closer degrees of co-commitment. In the view
of Kruse et al. (1995), these different modes of interaction derive from
different approaches to the advance of student interests: cooperation
‘‘represents a very basic level of social interaction among teachers . . . It
entails mutual aid in order to get work done more efficiently’’ (pp. 32–33).
Collegiality, in contrast, is ‘‘characterized by mutual learning and discussion of
classroom practice and student performance’’ (p. 33). Collaboration is ‘‘an
expression of collegiality at its most advanced.’’ It is not contingent on
tangible products but ‘‘entails a shared value base about teaching practice,
students, and learning’’ (pp. 33–34).
These different co-commitments share a common concern with the betterment
of student achievement. The work of Sergiovanni (1994) indicates, however,
that teacher community can also be motivated by more immediately personal
concerns without direct consequence for the quality of student learning.
Indeed, in their more recent research, Bryk and Schneider (2002) show that a
commitment to cultivating teacher-teacher relationships can be driven by at
least three impulses, only some of which are centered on students’ needs: an
‘‘instrumental’’ impulse in which teachers seek one another’s help to carry out
the day-to-day routines of schooling; a ‘‘moral’’ or normative one, which seeks
to advance the best interests of children; and a ‘‘hedonic’’ or personal impulse
derived from an interest in maximizing the teacher’s own self-worth and status
(pp. 21, 30).
The data here open a window on the calculations that determine the formation
and subversion of these different modes of interrelationship, as well as the
goals or considerations that drive them. The data are centered on a small
number of vignettes, often told in the teacher’s own words so as to capture
qualities of human cognition and emotion in complex professional situations.
FINDINGS
THE PRESSURES CREATED BY SHARING PROFESSIONAL SPACE
In sociological terms Jewish day schools constitute a typological antithesis to
Dan Lortie’s ‘‘egg-crate schools,’’ the ‘‘cellular institutions’’ he depicted in his
pioneering study where teachers ‘‘spend most of their time apart from
colleagues’’ (Lortie, 1975, p. 23). Journal entries and interviews with
participants in the three studies indicate that the day school dual curriculum of
Hebrew and general studies undermines teachers’ isolation in profound ways.
Teachers report that because they share their students with at least one
colleague, their classroom interactions are open to the scrutiny and support of
a professional alter ego whose presence lurks over many of their pedagogic
decisions. Their relationships with parents are also open to constant
comparison with and by this significant other.
Less predictably, it is apparent that the day school dual curriculum produces an
assault on isolation, which can occur in quite physical ways. More often than
not, teachers share not only groups of children, but also the classrooms where
they teach. Classroom space must be negotiated between individuals who may
have very different ideas of what classrooms should look like or how they
should operate.
Natalie2 (a participant in one of the journal-writing studies) conveys this well
in a story about her first years in teaching:
I started my teaching career very late. I came in with all of these wonderful
ideas and I walked into this classroom with my new partner [a man who had
been teaching for more than 25 years] and the room was empty and the
students were sitting in rows. I had just come out of co-operative learning
where you want the kids to feel like it’s home and you let them make it their
space. I walked in and took a look around and I went, oh my God! I was afraid
more than anything else. It was the first year and I was reticent about
everything . . . So I had to call on my principals for help. We had a meeting,
and for the first few years, because he wasn’t happy with groups . . . we had to
change the seating everyday at lunchtime. His compromise was that at the end
of the day, he would take the last five minutes and they would quickly push all
the desks into groups so they’d be ready for me in the morning. That was our
compromise and we did that for almost the first four years of our relationship. I
had my groups, he had his singles, and we were both happy.
In day schools, teachers cannot close the classroom door and do things ‘‘their
own way.’’ Instead, they have to confront and cope with profound differences
between the ways they and their professional peers think about what it means
to be a teacher. In Natalie’s case, furniture and physical space may have been
at the surface of the dispute with her partner, but more profound issues were
at its heart. As other teachers in the sample indicate, different views about
how to decorate classroom walls or where to put the teacher’s desk derive
from divergent views of the teacher’s role in student learning. And as Natalie
reveals, in day schools, not only are teachers made sharply aware of such
differences between themselves and their colleagues, but also they sometimes
have to find ways of living peacefully and productively with these differences
within their own teaching space and in relation to ‘‘their own’’ students.
COMMITTING BEYOND COOPERATION
As teachers reflect on the invasions and opportunities provoked by the
organization of the day school curriculum, they provide very different accounts
of the experience of sharing space and students with a professional partner.
For a number of them, this aspect of their professional lives has provided some
of the greatest satisfactions in their work. For others, it has resulted in the
deepest disappointments. In positive instances, teachers recount how they
found themselves partnered with a more experienced associate who served as a
role model or how they were paired with an individual of similar age and
experience who became a fellow traveler. In painful instances, research
participants report how they were obstructed, undermined, or simply ignored
by a poorly matched colleague. Whether for good or for ill, it seems that the
association many develop with their cross-curricular partner can so much shape
their sense of professional self that this relationship takes on an intensity more
commonly experienced in the personal associations of one’s private life.
Consistently, interviewees indicate that they are not averse to participating in
some form of cooperative relationship with colleagues with whom they must
calibrate the rhythm of their work. It is just that they have very different
reasons for doing so. They are also troubled by the sheer unpredictability of
having to relate to a partner who in most cases has been selected by school
administrators without consulting those involved.
These calculations are well conveyed by the case of Ziona, a Judaic studies
teacher who raised the subject of the relationship with her cross-curricular
partner when asked to reflect on her transition from a preservice program to
the world of work. Ziona explained that the relationship with her teaching
partner contributed significantly to her smooth adjustment to teaching during a
period which others have identified as the most challenging in their teaching
careers (Feiman-Nemser, 1983; Huberman, 1989). Ziona elaborated:
I had the luxury of working half time unlike most other teachers . . .and shared
my classes with the same general studies counterpart for many years at the
school’s Brownside branch. It was amazing for the first year or two. We were
both North American and related easily to one another. We spoke the same
language. It was a huge support . . . The students benefited enormously from
our strong communication set up. If ever there was a problem with a student
we could work it out together . . .
I was transferred from the Brownside branch with this counterpart [after 5
years] and we requested, unsuccessfully, to work together because of our close
relationship. If I was starting from scratch I don’t know if I would necessarily
pursue such a close relationship.
Ziona’s remarks not only point to her ambivalent assessment of the experience
of working so closely with a professional partner, they also reveal something of
what are and what are not the sources of such a close association. To some
degree, the relationship with her partner is an expression of sociability. It is
inspired by her alienation from departmental associates in Judaic studies whom
she elsewhere identifies as being older than she and as coming from different
cultural backgrounds. As she indicates, she and her curriculum partner found
one another because of their common language, culture, and experience. Her
partner is one of the few colleagues with whom she can comfortably identify
and who, therefore, affirms her own self-worth as an educator.
Nevertheless, it does not seem that the relationship between Ziona and her
partner is motivated by what Bryk and Schneider (2002) would call hedonic
concerns. It has not come about only to serve Ziona’s personal need for
fellowship and friendship. Instead, it is grounded in an extrinsic rationale—the
improvement of her capacity to serve students—which derives from an
instrumental or moral concern. This may explain why later in the interview,
Ziona does not include her partner among those she identifies as ‘‘critical
individuals’’ in shaping her career, even though she describes her here as ‘‘a
huge support.’’ Ziona’s relationship with her partner is centered on the
betterment of students, but in the terms employed by Kruse et al. (1995), it is
a cooperative rather than collaborative relationship. It is essentially pragmatic
and does not imply a commitment to a shared vision of teaching and learning.
Undoubtedly, it enhances her work with students, but it does not change who
she is as a person or as a teacher.
Ziona’s last words on this topic (quoted previously) poignantly convey her
ambivalence about the relationship as well as what may be one source of
unease about it. As she describes it, at the very moment when she made a
public commitment to the relationship’s collegial value by lobbying for its
continuation in a different branch of the school, she learned of its limits. She
found that just as someone else had created the circumstances in which the
relationship originally came about, so it was up to a third party to determine
how long the relationship would last. In fact, this contingency may be the
relationship’s central characteristic. It was not freely chosen, as collaborative
professional relationships often are, and as personal relationships almost
always are. It was rather a freak product of good fortune an arranged marriage
that served a useful purpose but it did not express her deepest commitments.
No wonder she is reluctant to start over with another partner. Recognizing the
randomness of her good fortune in finding herself paired with such a wellmatched peer, she does not expect that it will be worth her efforts to invest
herself in a new relationship with an as yet unknown partner, even if this might
ultimately limit her capacity to support a new group of students.
RESISTING COLLEGIALITY
A different perspective on the ambivalence associated with working in close
teacher-teacher relationships is provided by Bella, a kindergarten teacher, who
describes her dysfunctional association with her immediate colleagues at the
start of her career. At first sight, Bella looks like a loner who works best by
herself or who is suspicious of cooperating with her professional associates. Of
all those interviewed in the career path study, she was the most critical of her
coworkers. She recollects her first teaching appointment:
I managed to survive without too much help. It was not a wonderful
atmosphere, and when they tried to trip me up, they couldn’t. The teachers
appeared supportive but they weren’t. I had to rely on myself. Actually, I
relied on the children in the class and in the other classes . . . To find out what
was going on, I took lunch duty in the full day class so I could see what they
were getting up to and so that I could ask the children. I would then go in my
room and do it, which infuriated the other teachers because I was getting done
what I needed to get done.
Bella’s view of her colleagues is highly combative. Her survival strategy verges
on guerilla warfare as she spies on her associates and then subverts their
efforts to discomfit her. In these respects she conforms to a teacher
stereotype, well known from fictional and research literature, of the embattled
loner who prefers the company of children to that of adults (Ashton- Warner,
1986; Haywood Metz, 1993). Yet her stance may less express a resistance to
collective activity in and of itself than a determination to exercise
discrimination over whom she works with. As she goes on to say: ‘‘I have a
cautious approach with my colleagues, certain of them for sure. But I have
developed a close relationship with the principal. I feel she respects what I do
and respects my opinion.’’
This last remark is difficult to interpret. It may indicate that Bella’s
relationship with the principal (her supervisor) serves as an additional means
for putting distance between herself and most of her immediate coworkers. (It
is, perhaps, a means to improving her own status within the school.) It could
offer another example of a Canadian-born teacher-seeking collegiality with a
professional associate (even a manager) who is one of the few professional
associates with whom she shares a common cultural background. Her statement
may also serve to affirm her capacity independently to determine the identity
of those with whom she chooses to collaborate in an environment where people
have few opportunities for such independence. Whatever her motivations, it is
noteworthy that none of these concerns have an obvious influence on student
outcomes. The dominant impulse, for Bella, when entering or resisting collegial
relationships is personal rather than professional.
It is striking that although Bella and Ziona adopt a different tone when talking
about their relationships with peers, they nevertheless give expression to a
similar deep ambivalence about participating in collaborative relationships.3
They both realize important outcomes when associating closely with
colleagues: in Bella’s case, a sense of self-respect that may translate into
professional advancement; in Ziona’s, an enhanced capacity to meet her
students’ needs. Yet they both express reluctance about participating in such
relationships. It suggests that their expressions of isolationism may not so much
communicate resistance to developing either close personal or professional
relationships but rather may indicate resistance to or avoidance of any kinds of
relationships arranged by ‘‘third parties’’ where the outcomes are
unpredictable.
The ‘‘arranged’’ nature of these relationships may also account for why
teachers in our studies talked with such intensity about the highs and lows of
their cross-curricular partnerships. As Huberman (1993) has argued, the search
for professional connection corresponds to some fundamental need for teachers
struggling with the sense of creeping infantilism many experience in the
classroom. Forced into cross-curricular associations by the structure of the day
school program, teachers in these studies give intense expression to their relief
at the randomness of their good fortune when cast into successful relationships
which enable them to counter the anomie that plagues most other teachers.
(As we saw, for Ziona this was a slice of luck she did not expect to be
repeated.) In contrast, it is no wonder that those who find themselves in
embattled relationships with their classroom partners talk so bitterly about this
experience. The day school’s curriculum promises a respite from the classroom
isolation experienced by many who work in public schools, but as often as not
it leaves teachers having to share classrooms and children with ill-suited
partners. Given the high interpersonal stakes involved, it is not surprising that
strong emotions are close to the surface whenever research participants reflect
on this aspect of their working lives.
PROFESSIONALS WORKING UNDER PARENTAL SCRUTINY
In day schools, the pressures created by the dual curriculum and its
complicated impact on teachers classroom autonomy are further exacerbated
by the ways schools are financed and governed. The mixed feelings teachers
indicate about having to cooperate with professional associates is usefully
compared with their reaction to further limitations on their autonomy created
by the governance and financing of day schools.
From the perspective of participants in these studies, the fact that parents pay
(so much) for their children’s education in a system where most schools are
operated as private institutions means that teachers experience an unusual
degree of scrutiny and interference. As one interviewee succinctly put it, when
‘‘the parents are paying, and they want it the way they want it, that’s it.’’
In some participants’ journals the sense of being scrutinized by parents
emerged as one of the most marked characteristics of day school work. Yet for
all its invasiveness, the scrutiny of teachers is a phenomenon, which members
of our various samples viewed with acceptance rather than antipathy or anger.
They were resigned to living with this feature of day school life and were
angered only by its extreme manifestations. Thus, they indicated appreciation
for the intense interest parents showed in their children’s work but were
bemused when interest became intrusion (with parents coming to argue about
the marks for a child’s essay or test). They recognized parents’ rights to
frequent reports on their children’s progress, to get ‘‘value for money’’ when
they had invested so much in their education, but resented having to provide
feedback to parents for whom the regular channels of communication were
inconvenient or insufficient. They were prepared to acknowledge parents as
customers who were entitled to hold teachers accountable but were angered
when these consumers ‘‘questioned how well [they were] doing their job’’ or
became lobby groups: ‘‘lynch mobs—to have teachers removed from the staff.’’
Many of the tensions day school teachers experience in their relationships with
parents and administrators are captured in a journal entry Jenny composed at
the start of the school year:
It’s been a confusing beginning. After the first day, I was told that the classes
were not balanced and that three girls from my class would be going to the
other class. I would have three new boys. It seemed strange, as both classes
have more girls than boys, but I didn’t question anything. The change was
made.
When I left school I checked my box and found a note from one of the parents
(of a student who had been changed) stating that the request to change her
daughter had nothing to do with me. I let the matter drop—but wondered what
was going on.
A week later I was called to the office along with the other two grade x
teachers. Apparently, the matter had blown out of proportion—social issues.
The children would be changed back to their original classes. I was left with a
strange feeling—but having taught in a Hebrew Day School most of my career
was not surprised.
I had made up my mind not to worry about politics and do my own thing in my
class. I have a wonderful group of students and that’s the main thing.
This is a fertile text. It sparingly conveys Jenny’s evolving response to a
situation whose script, although written elsewhere, is being played out in her
classroom. It captures the phlegmatic and slightly awkward weariness with
which this veteran teacher looks out on the melodramatics, which swirl around
the principal’s office with few real consequences for teaching and learning. Of
most relevance to our concerns, Jenny’s account also reveals something of why
teachers retreat from collective activity beyond the classroom whether in this
school system or in others where, as Huberman (1993) puts it, ‘‘we often
appear to be in a soap opera or an interpersonally dense, combustible social
hothouse’’ (p. 12).
Jenny’s years of experience in day schools have left her with a jaded (even
fatalistic) acceptance of parents’ rights to broad involvement in classroom
affairs. She does not fight this involvement even when it becomes invasive, and
yet she does not entirely surrender to it either. When she talks of doing her
own thing, and of finding refuge in the classroom from parent politics, it is
hard to believe that she does so without appreciating how unlikely such
autonomy is, particularly given the evolution of this particular episode. It
seems more likely that her talk of being left to herself and her accompanying
child-centered rhetoric— ‘‘I have a wonderful group of students and that’s the
main thing’’—are prompted by different expectations. In recounting her
experience of this episode and her response to it, Jenny appears to call on the
possibility of classroom isolation as a rhetorical device (an ideal) with which to
preserve her own sense of self-respect. Her talk of retaining control over her
own space offers her some dignity in constructing a sense of professional
selfhood, even if the school’s organizational norms make the expectation of
such isolation unrealistic. In this instance, her ‘‘isolationism’’ does not grow
from a principled commitment to professional autonomy. It looks more like a
comforting idealization prompted by especially trying interpersonal conditions,
which challenge her self-esteem and social status.
It is no coincidence that Jenny herself attributes her phlegmatic outlook to her
many years in day schools. In studying the career stories of day school
teachers, we found that research participants generally referred to the impact
of parents on their work in relation to the question, ‘‘What were you least
prepared for when you started work?’’ It seems that with experience in the day
school setting (and quite often as they themselves become parents) teachers
become increasingly sanguine about parental interference. As one participant
explained:
All it takes is one tough parent to make one’s life miserable. I had my one
tough parent and that’s really all it was a rabble-rouser. I think when you’re a
more established teacher you learn to take those things in your stride. When
you’re a brand new teacher and being tested by parents, you take it as a
personal attack.
It is instructive that on balance, research participants were less discomfited by
awkward parents than by problematic colleagues. When it comes to dealing
with parents, participants have been ready to adapt to a situation where they
benefit from the intense interest parents show in their children’s schooling
even if that comes at the price of classroom autonomy. They are less ready to
surrender their autonomy to colleagues because in the collegial realm, the
balance of power between teachers and their partners is more ambiguous. It is
difficult to keep parents out of the classroom when their status as paying
customers is clear-cut. And perhaps precisely because it is so hard to keep
parents out, teachers are determined to preserve the boundaries that protect
their space from colleagues.
CONCLUSIONS
In our studies of the work and lives of day school teachers, we have found few
who talk about their relationships with classroom partners in terms that
correspond with the advanced levels of co-commitment in Kruse et al.’s (1995)
depiction of professional interaction centered on a concern with student
achievement. In other words, while we found teachers who value their peers
for some of the personal and professional benefits that come from working with
them, there are few who talk about the rewards and satisfactions of crosscurricular partnerships in ways that indicate that these relationships are
valuable in and of themselves, that they are collegial or collaborative, in
Kruse’s terms, or normative, as Bryk and Schneider would put it, that is,
necessary to the work of education.
This finding is unexpected, since participants in other studies have made
evident that one of the special attractions of parochial-school work lies in how
it provides teachers with a sense of community which might otherwise be
absent in a public school setting (Bryk, Lee, & Holland, 1993; Ingall, 2003;
O’Keefe, 2003). Natalie, someone earlier quoted describing the challenges of
sharing a classroom with a poorly matched partner, succinctly communicates
this dimension of her working life when she explains why she chose to work in a
day school:
I was offered a position in the public board at the same time that I was offered
this [a day school general studies position]. And I took this. I felt comfortable.
It was home and it was my lifestyle. My children were being raised and going
through a day school system and I felt that this is where I wanted to be.
Natalie’s choice of metaphor is not casual. As we saw above, in day schools, as
in family homes, teachers find themselves having to live and work (literally
share their space) in unusually close proximity to people over whose identity
they have little choice. There are opportunities in this environment for
intimacy and fellowship, but there is also much potential for friction. As we
have seen, day school work, like family life, does not lack emotional intensity.
The lack of continuity between Natalie’s generally positive view of day school
community (a view which is representative of many teachers we have
interviewed) and the ambivalence we found in the way participants talked
about their relationships with classroom partners is surprising. But it points to
some conclusions of significance in the ongoing debate about how to nurture
community in schools.
There is a gap between both the idealization and realization of community at
the whole-school level and the messy business of making collegial relationships
work on a daily basis, where they will have a positive impact on student
learning. In the context-specific terms of the studies discussed here, we can
say that while day schools promise and often provide teachers with a sense of
belonging to a bonded community, this sense does not originate within the
cross-curricular partnerships that operate within individual classrooms.
Teachers’ sense of community connection comes from elsewhere, from the
interrelationships that occur on a departmental level, and from the
interrelationships among teachers, students, and students’ families. At the
classroom level, teachers are willing to cooperate with one another for
instrumental reasons (to get through the day or to do their job more
efficiently), but few are ready to commit to a relationship grounded in a shared
vision of teaching and learning. If this seems paradoxical, it nevertheless
provides further support for those like Little and McLaughlin (1993) who have
highlighted the multiple and often conflicting layers of loyalty, friendship, and
commitment that complicate the construction of professional community in
schools.
These studies also indicate that if teachers are ambivalent about committing to
collegial relationships at the classroom level, it is not necessarily because they
find it hard to free themselves from the notion that ‘‘everything depends on
the teacher,’’ an idea which Britzman (1991) argues is one of the most potent
myths in teaching. As we have seen, most of the participants in these studies
are not vigilantly engaged in protecting their own autonomy or in avoiding
intense relationships with others (whether parents or colleagues). Their
ambivalence about investing in collegial relationships seems to derive from
different sources.
First, it comes from simply not having learned how to cooperate with
colleagues in a mode of working which is so alien to the historical organization
of schools: Although arguments from silence in empirical research are
frequently dubious, it is surely telling that in our intensive conversations with
some 40 day school teachers (almost all of whom work in school structures that
require them to partner a cross-curricular colleague), none made mention of
having received mentoring or coaching on how to make the most of this
relationship, let alone how to make it work. In one set of cases, in a so called
integrated day school, where Jewish and general studies staff taught alongside
one another all day, teachers complained about receiving no guidance in how
to work together even in these special circumstances. It seems that schools
rarely provided cross-curriculum partners with time during working hours to
confer or even exchange information with their colleagues. Instead, teachers
described having to leave notes for one another on desks or swapping
information as they passed in the hallway.
While the curriculum organization of day schools does require teachers to
cooperate with one another, few teachers form (or are capable of forming)
solid collaborative relationships without active nurturing. In this respect, day
school teachers are much like the teachers in urban schools studied by Kruse et
al. (1995) where, despite the presence of many favorable organizational
factors, teacher professional communities did not take root. The day school
teachers in these studies also bear a strong resemblance to those social
workers, child psychoanalysts, and nurses who indicate that when they are
required to work in teams, their sense of professional isolation can
(paradoxically) be all the more intensified (Challela, 1979; Garber, 1987;
Sands, Stafford, & McClelland, 1990). Evidently, if schools (and other service
organizations) do not make available in an ongoing fashion the social and
human resources that support professional community, they will undermine any
of the advantages created by the presence of otherwise favorable conditions.
To put this in Westheimer’s terms, school-based reform requires that
administrators and teachers know how to turn organizational potential into
truly communal relationships, something that shouldn’t be taken for granted
(Westheimer, 1998).
A second source of teacher ambivalence derives from teachers’ resistance to
entering close professional relationships with colleagues chosen for them by
‘‘third parties.’’ In this respect, they are not signaling their resistance to the
kind of ‘‘contrived collegiality’’ Hargreaves (1994) depicted, in which teachers
resent being made to participate in collaborative initiatives which seem to
have little bearing on the quality of learning in the classroom. It is rather that
they object to prescribed collegiality, that is, participating in relationships, no
matter how worthwhile, concerning which they have limited input. As we have
seen, their ambivalence derives from the contingency of their professional
relationships on the decisions of administrators and managers.
It is hard to know whether this resistance to the role of third parties derives
from a genuine though perhaps naïve assumption that relationships which they
themselves initiate and terminate would necessarily be more meaningful or
whether it is because they are affronted at being so much dependent on the
decisions of others. Either way, their lack of input in the creation of these
relationships produces a reluctance to commit beyond minimal levels of
cooperation.
This resistance to prescribed collegiality calls into question the wholesale
application of ‘‘communities of practice’’ as an antidote to the anomie that
plagues so many professions. In fields as diverse as dietetics, computer
programming, occupational therapy, and library management, practitioners
have been urged to combat certain kinds of occupational stress by committing
themselves to collaborative communities (Benner, 2003; Cox & Morris, 2003;
Johansen & Vogel, 2003; Solomon, Salvatori, & Berry, 2001). This study
confirms that without careful attention to the diverse impulses that lie behind
the embrace of professional community, and without soliciting the consent of
those who are supposed to join such communities, the drive to end professional
isolation might prove self-defeating.
Jewish day schools differ from public elementary schools in numerous ways: in
their governance, in their curricular organization, and in their
‘‘intergenerational closure,’’ that is, their connection to adult networks in the
world beyond the schoolyard (Coleman, 1985). Yet when viewed as workplaces,
day schools reveal in heightened fashion aspects in the professional lives of all
teachers that are often lost in the deluge of school reform literature. The day
school studies discussed here reveal the hesitations and complications that
impede the construction of teacher community. They make clear that school
reform is not only about changing organizational structures, but also about
establishing ongoing processes that nurture teacher community. Most
importantly, they make explicit the human dimensions (the ambivalences and
anxieties) that can cause teachers to prefer isolation to collaboration. Through
the prism of the particular, through research into a private faith-based school
system, one senses how difficult the construction of school community will be
if approached one classroom at a time.
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ALEX POMSON is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at York
University, where he coordinates the Jewish teacher education program. His
research focuses on issues in Jewish education, teachers’ work, and the
relationships between parents and schools. His recent publications include
‘‘Loosening Chronology’s Collar: Reframing Teachers’ Career Narratives as
Stories of Life and Work without End’’ (International Journal of Qualitative
Studies in Education, 2004) and ‘‘Jewish Day School Growth in Toronto: Freeing
Policy and Research from the Constraints of Conventional Sociological Wisdom’’
(Canadian Journal of Education, 2004).
Cite This Article as: Teachers College Record Volume
107 Number 4, 2005, p. 783-802
http://www.tcrecord.org ID Number: 11820, Date
Accessed: 6/4/2007 3:37:35 PM
Alex Pomson
York University
E-mail Author
ALEX POMSON is an associate
professor in the Faculty of Education at York University, where he coordinates
the Jewish teacher education program. His research focuses on issues in Jewish
education, teachers’ work, and the relationships between parents and schools.
His recent publications include “Loosening Chronology’s Collar: Reframing
Teachers’ Career Narratives as Stories of Life and Work without End”
(International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2004) and “Jewish
Day School Growth in Toronto: Freeing Policy and Research from the
Constraints of Conventional Sociological Wisdom” (Canadian Journal of
Education, 2004).