What is Collaboration at school?

What is Collaboration at school? 

One of the school goals for this year is to define what we mean by collaboration, and what it looks like for us.

During our staff retreat in January we tackled Greg Carroll's post, Collaboration - More than parallel play and discussed what we thought of his definition, and how our practice fit into it. The response was what I wanted, a critical look at what we do...and how easy it is to throw the term around. The general consensus was that we co-operated more than we collaborated.

We also looked at Waitakiri Schools 7 Co-Teaching strategies, which are based on the work of Villa, Thousand and Nevin (this blog describes them well). They gave us a starting point for considering how we might operate this year. In 2015 there were pockets of 'collaboration' in the school, so staff needed some ideas.

In June the Leaders reviewed progress towards the Annual Plan goals and it was noted that we still haven't developed the idea of collaboration very much, and confusion still reigned. Collaboration still meant whatever people wanted it to mean, and a shared understanding hadn't been furthered. As the school works in 4 distinct teams, operating in different ways...some with open spaces, some without, some sharing children, some not, some meeting often, some less so...planning a staff PLD to meet these needs was going to be challenging. I decided to take the approach that Collaboration is more than just sharing...more than sharing a space, more than sharing ideas, more than sharing resources, and more than just sharing the students out.

Hattie's recent work 'The Politics of Collaborative Expertise' became the basis of the session. I wanted to look at teachers working together, to improve practice...and to become effective evaluators of the learning that happens in the shared spaces. He argues that unless teachers work together to agree on the learning needs of their children, what progress will like for them, how will they know they have been successful as practitioners, that teachers fall into the trap of doing what they know and shifting the 'blame' for lack of progress to other issues (class size, student background, behaviour etc).

In this way I was able to make the session applicable to all teams, as the actions of shared spaces/ideas/students became strategies of collaborative practice, and collaboration then is teachers working together to improve practice, and outcomes for learners. We looked more in depth at 2 of Hattie's 'tasks', those related to evaluation of teacher practice and learning. He gives broad detail, so talking about what that would look like for teachers day-to-day was interesting.

We used George Couros ideas around what todays classes could look like, and applied it to a collaborative pair...replacing student with teacher in the descriptions (image below).

The discussion was great, but more will be needed. 

So, we still don't have an answer to 'what is collaboration', but have taken a few more steps towards that.