Investigating the Role of Social Status in Teacher Collaborative Groups

Abstract

In collaborative groups, teachers negotiate the tension between working as a cohesive group and confronting differences of opinion and practice. Varied status between teachers can complicate their ability to accomplish the goals of collaboration. In this case study, we describe how a group of secondary English teachers redesigned curriculum and explain how status shaped their collaborative practice. We use positioning theory to examine how teachers managed variable status to maintain a collaborative group process. Findings suggest the high-status teacher shaped inclusive collaborative routines that afforded novice teachers the space to initiate discussions focused on problems of practice.

Keywords

professional learning communities teacher learning case study

Introduction

Schools and districts have increasingly implemented collaborative learning strategies to improve teachers’ professional knowledge and skill (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012; Kilbane, 2009; Lampert, Boerst, & Graziani, 2011) and to increase their capacity to provide more rigorous and student-centered instruction (Horn & Little, 2009; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006). Although collaboration between teachers has increased in recent years (Borko, 2004; Kilbane, 2009), research suggests there is still much we can learn about how teachers organize themselves in teacher learning communities and how teachers navigate the interpersonal demands of collaborative work (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; Little, 2002). This may be an especially fraught tension as experienced teachers increasingly find themselves working alongside novice teachers (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Zeichner, 2016). More and more, teacher collaborative groups are comprised of teachers with differing levels of experience, expertise, and status (Darling-Hammond, 2010; Zeichner, 2016) adding to the complexity they must navigate to establish productive collaboration (Hindin, Morocco, Mott, & Aguilar, 2007; Horn & Little, 2009; Little, 1982; Opfer & Pedder, 2011). Although some groups can leverage this diversity of experience and expertise to their advantage (Horn & Little, 2009; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006), such differences can also cause tension within groups (Grossman et al., 2001). Within that tension exists corresponding interpersonal factors, such as the difference between experienced and novice teachers and the difference between teachers who have varied depths of content knowledge, that can also complicate teacher collaboration.

In this study, we highlight teacher status as one of those factors and explore ways a group of high school teachers negotiated varied status to establish a successful collaborative practice. In particular, we examine the specific commitments and behaviors of a high-status teacher, which appeared to be central to the successful collaboration of our single case study group. The data illustrate a highly engaged and supportive group in which teachers both encouraged and challenged each other. Their collaborative dynamic helped them achieve their overarching collaborative goal to develop problem-based learning (PBL) curriculum in a timely manner and helped them sustain a collaborative culture that supported their learning. They accomplished this with little oversight from school or district leaders.

In this article, we address the following research questions:

Research Question 1: How do members of an autonomous, teacher collaborative team structure their collaboration?

Research Question 2: When working collaboratively, how do teachers manage varied status in a context of curriculum redesign?

Research Question 3: In what ways do high-status teachers influence the collaborative routines teams establish?

Literature Review

Teacher Collaborative Learning

Learning is an inherently social activity that can be enriched through collaboration (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978; Wenger, 1998). Wenger (1998) documents how learning arises when people form communities of practice to share problems of practice. He describes how problems are made public (participation) and how communities develop shared meaning and solutions that are then documented (reification), all of which can further the overall expertise of the group. Those same principles apply to how teachers learn from collaboration. In collaborative groups, teachers can deepen their pedagogical expertise and improve their instruction by sharing specific problems of practice and making the solutions they develop accessible and transferable to various classroom settings (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; DuFour, 2004; Hammerness et al., 2005; Little, 1990; Wenger, 1998).

Productive teacher collaborative groups share certain characteristics. Teachers establish a shared commitment to the goals of the work and establish norms to govern how they interact (Grossman et al., 2001). They focus their efforts on solving relevant and authentic problems of practice (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Horn & Little, 2009; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006). They develop routines to efficiently complete tasks and deepen their pedagogical expertise (Hammerness et al., 2005) and create a group culture that increases instructional capacity of teachers (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012).

McLaughlin and Talbert (2006) argue that teacher learning communities serve as incubators of teacher learning that improve teachers’ practice through collaborative problem solving. Their research documents how “teacher learning communities . . . build knowledge; create shared language and standards for practice and student outcomes; and they sustain aspects of their school’s culture vital to continued, consistent norms of instructional practice” (p. 5). Similarly, Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) describe how schools and districts can distribute “professional capital” to increase teacher learning. Teachers who foster professional capital in each other act through their “relentless, expert-driven pursuit of serving their students and their communities, and in learning, always learning, how to do that better” (p. 5). Both McLaughlin and Talbert (2006) and Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) suggest that schools are better served when they cultivate and pool existing teachers’ expertise to improve instructional practice school-wide.

In many collaborative settings, teachers are beholden to two goals. One goal is the production of knowledge and tools (Borko, 2004; DuFour & Reeves, 2016). Teachers develop curricula and associated tools, they determine scope and sequence for the year, they create assessment reports, and they sketch out new courses to offer in the future. McLaughlin and Talbert’s (2006) description of a collaborative math department, for example, demonstrates the extent to which prolonged and disciplined collaboration can establish practices teachers can use to improve their practice. Another goal is capacity building (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012; Horn & Little, 2009; Wilson & Berne, 1999). Delineating the difference between collegiality and collaboration, Little (1990) describes how teacher collaboration is marked by engagement in “joint work” which can significantly contribute to the collective expertise of the group. Horn and Little (2009) provide a compelling example of Guillermo, an experienced and well-respected math teacher, who uses the collaborative space to help his more novice colleagues think through problems evidenced in their practice. Both goals promote teachers’ learning in collaborative spaces but negotiating the tensions between these goals (the production of teaching material and tools, as well as capacity building) can be difficult and complex work (Opfer & Pedder, 2011), especially if the scope of teachers’ collaborative work demands they produce or redesign curriculum in a short amount of time.

Despite the promise of teacher collaboration, teacher collaborative groups can be politically, socially, and personally fraught places (Grossman et al., 2001; Little, 1982; Wenger, 1998). On one hand, teacher collaboration is shaped by the egalitarian norms of teacher culture where “a teacher is a teacher is a teacher” (Lortie, 1975) and articulating differences in knowledge, experience, and ability is discouraged (Wilson & Berne, 1999). On the other hand, in small collaborative groups, differences among teachers become obvious (Horn & Little, 2009). Teachers who bring years of experience and expertise may be eager to share their knowledge and provide some structure to collaborative experiences (Hindin et al., 2007). Fresh from teacher education programs, novice teachers may bring more current knowledge of pedagogy and methodologies to collaborative experiences, but they may be hesitant to contribute to the group. Although the expertise each brings to collaboration can benefit the group, differences in status between teachers can be stark and may complicate how each participates within collaborative settings (Little, 1982). Thus, status differences at once become a reality of teacher collaboration and a tricky division that can undermine the collective efforts of a group.

Status and Leadership in Teacher Collaborative Groups

We take a “functional” approach to status (Ellis, 1994), meaning “an individual’s status is based on the group’s collective judgments about where he or she deserves to be ranked in the [organizational] hierarchy” (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009, p. 295). Van Maanen and Barley (1984) refer to this power as “centrality,” arguing it can come from deep experience within a community and may bring with it prestige and honor. However, status is both dynamic and situated. One’s status can fluctuate depending on specific groups in which one finds oneself and the extent to which one’s expertise fits the scope of what the group is tasked with (Berger, Rosenholtz, & Zelditch, 1980). Over time, a person’s status can also shift as their reputation within an organization or a group shifts (Berger et al., 1980).

Teachers assume and are ascribed status based in part on the extent of their experience, the classes they teach, their perceived content knowledge or expertise, their educational background, and the extent of their personal connections within the school (Little, 1982; Lortie, 1975). Although the status of many teachers may vary depending on specific settings within a school, such as a staff meeting, a chat in between classes with a neighboring teacher, or a professional learning community, a teacher who has achieved high status as a result of their reputation as a good teacher or by being particularly knowledgeable in a given area may retain that status, in one way or another, throughout the school (Little, 1982).

Within collaborative spaces, teachers constantly negotiate tacit hierarchies to enhance their value within groups (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Little, 1982). As Little (1982) notes,

The status of an actor, both ascribed (e.g., position) and achieved (earned through a reputation as a master teacher), for example, tends to govern the rights of the actor to initiate and to participate in collegial experimentation. (p. 337)

Like students, teachers enter the collaborative space with knowledge of their colleagues—the “local status characteristics” (Cohen, 1997, p. 65) they bring into collaborative settings and who they are within the school. In many cases, teachers are aware of the status their colleagues have and adjust their behavior based on that knowledge, impacting how groups work over time (Berger et al., 1980; Flynn, Reagans, Amanatullah, & Ames, 2006).

In addition, the research on teacher leadership provides some insights when considering the role of teacher status in collaborative groups. The relevant research on teacher leadership largely examines the formalized role of the teacher leader within schools (Gallucci, Van Lare, Yoon, & Boatright, 2010; Leander & Osborne, 2008; York-Barr & Duke, 2004), not the informal ways teachers express their leadership within smaller collaborative spaces like professional learning communities. However, in more informal collaborative spaces, teachers may positively leverage their status in ways that align with principles of distributed leadership (Spillane, Halvorsen, & Diamond, 2004; Timperley, 2005) and distributed cognition (Salomon, 1993), to help shape the collaborative practice of the team. Meaning, high-status teachers may assert their leadership in collaborative groups by creating the social conditions necessary to establish equitable group dynamics between novice and experienced teachers (Salomon, 1993). Research on teacher collaborative groups provides compelling examples of teacher leadership in collaborative groups (Grossman, Wineburg, & Woolworth, 2001; Horn & Little, 2009) that suggest some high-status teachers intuitively leverage their status to foster collaborative spaces focused on equal and equitable consideration of problems of practice.

Positioning Novices as Equals

In nearly every social setting where differences of status between individuals exist, tacit and explicit positioning takes place (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). This can be especially true within organizations. Harré and van Langenhove (1999) describe “three basic features of interactions . . . to understand how social and psychological phenomena are constructed” which include how people are positioned within organizations, how organizations have a “conversational history” which dictates a culture of a place, and the agency individuals have to impact communities and organizations (p. 6). In this study, we refer to first- and second-order positioning to describe how teachers are positioned and can re-position themselves within schools over time.

Historically, novice teachers have occupied a place of low status within schools (Ingersol, 2003; Lortie, 1975). This initial positioning of novice teachers as low-status citizens is consistent with what Harré and van Langenhove (1999) describe as “first order positioning” which “refers to the way persons locate themselves and others within a space” (p. 20). When they start their careers in schools, novice teachers walk into highly contextualized and historically seeped environments, colored by established narratives about what novice teachers know and can do that reflect a durable culture of formal and informal norms, routines, practices, and customs. As such, new teachers may be ascribed a “first position” as unknowing novices, by their more experienced colleagues.

As teachers gain experience and expertise, they may assume and can be ascribed more status in schools (Little, 1982). Over time, colleagues may come to position newer teacher differently. We call this shift in how they are positioned their “second order position” (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). Harré and van Langenhove (1999) describe “second order positioning” as “when the first order positioning is not taken for granted” by one or more of the persons involved (p. 20). As teachers come to know their more novice colleagues better, they can develop a more nuanced perception about the expertise those teachers can contribute to departments and the school.

In their collaborative groups, teachers bring with them both the generic ways in which they have been positioned within the school as a result of their experience and expertise and the tacit ways they are positioned by specific colleagues (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). In collaborative settings, both “positions” may align and diverge in complicated ways and can impact the roles teachers occupy, and are allowed to occupy, within groups.

Because there are few robust analyses of teacher status in teacher collaborative groups, we take a socio-psychological approach to defining and describing social status (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Berger et al., 1980). We draw from positioning theory, primarily first- and second-order positioning (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), to understand the ways in which teachers’ status and position shifted over time. The socio-psychological research frames our understanding of how people gain, lose, and deploy status in groups and informs how we observed the ways English 3 teachers expressed status. Positioning theory provides a theoretical lens to understand how English 3 teachers brokered status.

Research Context

Our study is situated at Treetop High School¹ (THS), a public, comprehensive high school in the Pacific Northwest. The school serves students from various racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. At the time of the study, 41% of students qualified for free and reduced lunch and 38% of students spoke a first language other than English. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Education awarded the school a grant to support its work to (a) develop and support Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM)-focused coursework and (b) develop PBL curricula across the school in every content area to (c) close specific achievement gaps within the school evidenced by disparities of advanced placement (AP) enrollment and pass rates, students’ grades in math and science coursework, and graduation rates of various groups of students.

Starting in 2010, school leaders shifted to a PBL model of instruction, believing such a shift would increase student engagement and motivation in coursework and thus student learning. In PBL classrooms, students can learn essential skills and knowledge in the process of solving ill-defined and complex problems that mirrors the work of professionals (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Parker et al., 2013). Since the 1990s, research has demonstrated that inquiry-, project-, and problem-based coursework have several benefits for student learning, including increased engagement and motivation (Baoler & Staples, 2008; Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Belland, Glazewski, & Ertmer, 2009; Blumenfeld et al., 1991). Various studies have also shown that providing students with purposeful, interactive, and complex work more fully engages them in learning activities than in traditional learning environments (Blumenfeld et al., 1991; Parker et al., 2013; Ravitz, 2009).

From 2010 to 2014, we studied teacher collaborative groups the school called “design teams.” School leaders afforded teachers great latitude to design highly engaging PBL coursework; however, teachers were still expected to align that coursework with various national and state standards and policies such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), AP frameworks, state high stakes assessments, and district common assessments.

Research Design and Method

THS afforded us a unique opportunity to study how teachers collaborated in self-directed collaborative groups. In these groups, teachers shared a daily common curriculum planning session and worked toward an overarching goal of creating a new PBL-focused course to replace the established non-PBL course. We used a single case study approach for our study (Erickson, 1986; Strauss & Corbin, 1998; Yin, 2013). The case study method was chosen for this study because it allows researchers to capture the meaningful characteristics of real-life events, organizations, processes, and relationships (Yin, 2013). Although we anticipated finding evidence for the hallmarks of collaborative work such as norm setting, established roles, and predictable routines, our focus on teacher status as a salient feature of teachers’ collaborative work emerged from the data over time.

Participants

The English 3 team was chosen as the focus for this case study for two reasons. First, their collaborative practice reflected the successful collaborative practices documented in the research literature (Grossman et al., 2001; Horn & Little, 2009; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006). Second, the team represented a diverse membership by experience, expertise, and gender and thus increased the likelihood that the data would reveal instances in which teachers negotiated their varied status within their collaborative practice.

The English 3 design team included one veteran THS teacher of 10 years (Roger), two second-year teachers (Autumn and Deborah), and the school’s English language learner (ELL) facilitator (Isaac). Teachers volunteered or were invited to participate on the English 3 team. Autumn, Deborah, and Isaac hold bachelor’s degrees in English. Roger holds an interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree in anthropology, psychology, sociology, and history. Each teacher on the team holds master’s degree in teaching English. Roger had participated in the English 2 team the year before. In that team he was ascribed low status and he described feeling marginalized by his colleagues. He also expressed frustration with the team’s overall lack of production. In many ways, Roger’s previous experience informed how he approached his work with his new team.

Table 1 shows the years of experience, content expertise, formal role(s) within the department and school, social connections with colleagues, and educational background of each member of the English 3 team. We identified these school-based status characteristics both from the relevant research (Hargreaves & Macmillan, 1995; Little, 1982) and from what was emerging through data collection and analysis. These data were collected through interviews with teachers during the 2012-2013 school year. Although not a perfect measure of the status, teachers who are perceived as having strong content knowledge or decades of teaching experience, for example, also tend to be ascribed high status within schools (Little, 1982).

Table 1.

Teacher Status in the English 3 Team.

Domains of teacher status	English 3 teachers
Domains of teacher status	Roger	Autumn	Deborah	Isaac
Years of teaching experience	X			X
Content expertise	X	X	X
Formal role(s) within the school and department	X			X
Social connections with colleagues	X	X	X	X
Educational background		X	X

Data Collection

Data from the English 3 team represent a subset of data collected on six design teams over 3 years. The English 3 team met during the 2012-2013 school year, during which time we observed and video recorded 63 design team meetings, interviewed each teacher 3 times, and collected various documents and design artifacts. Table 2 illustrates the data collected.

Table 2.

English 3 Data Collection.

	Design team meeting observations	Interviews	Teacher artifacts/notes
English 3	Daily for 1 week in September to establish a baseline of collaborative practice.4 meetings Daily for 2 months (November-January) to observe planning of a complete PBL unit.51 meetings Daily for 1 week in early June to observe any change or evolution in collaborative practice.4 meetings	Semi-structured protocol in October.Stimulated recall protocol in March. Teachers watched video of a design team meeting and shared insights and observations.Semi-structured protocol in June.	Throughout the year.

Note. PBL = problem-based learning.

In this article, we focus on 10 design team meetings held during November and December 2012. This subset of meetings is a condensed representation of the collaborative practice the English 3 team established, whereby teachers routinely shared redesigned teaching artifacts they implemented in their classrooms. These meetings encompassed the English 3 team’s design of a new PBL unit, providing us with an indication of their interactions during the back and forth negotiations that surface when teachers collaboratively design units of instruction. In this article, we share various episodes of the team’s problem solving to illustrate how the high-status teacher modeled discursive practices, managed participation patterns, and scaffolded the contributions of lower status colleagues.

We video recorded each design team meeting and kept detailed field notes. We used semi-structured (Merriam, 2009; Patton, 2003) and stimulated recall interviews (Dempsey, 2010; Schepens, Aelterman, & Van Keer, 2007; Wineburg, 1991) with teacher participants to gain their perspective on their experience in design teams and to construct an educational and professional background of each teacher. In semi-structured interviews, we asked teachers questions about their educational and professional background, and the extent to which they were involved in department meetings and activities, as well as their perceptions of various aspects of the design team experience including their typical roles, the extent of their participation, and how the group dealt with disagreement (Merriam, 2009; Patton, 2003). Using stimulated recall interviews, we showed each teacher the same video recorded episode from their design team work. This specific slice of data was chosen because it included elements of the team’s productive collaboration and the team’s ability to manage varied status between teachers. Teachers were asked to identify interactions between themselves and other teachers and to interpret various interpersonal dynamics present in the video (Dempsey, 2010; Schepens et al., 2007; Wineburg, 1991). Each participating teacher was fully consented prior to data collection. We member checked each interview we conducted with our participating teachers, allowing them to redact any portion of the interview.

The Role of Researchers

Between 2010 and 2015, we played multiple roles within the school and were a part of a larger research team of four researchers that was conducting several studies at THS. While we served as informal sounding boards of sorts to teachers within the teams we studied, we also partnered with school leaders to provide technical assistance around the design of professional learning experiences and the development of their PBL framework. In the process we came to know the THS teachers and school leaders very well, affording us an exceptional level of access to their work in design teams. To address potential bias due to our close involvement with the school, various checks and balances in the data analysis stages of the research were implemented to ensure that the findings were valid and reliable. These checks and balances included routines such as sharing data and data memos within the larger research team and other research groups working within the institution.

Data Analysis

With the research questions and research literature in mind, we conducted content analyses of teacher interviews and video recorded meetings simultaneous to data collection throughout the year (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Working individually and separately, we open coded all interviews conducted with English 3 teachers throughout the year, looking for general themes. Then, working collaboratively, we grouped themes into codes that reflected broader concepts such as “sharing,” “problem of practice initiation,” “joint work,” and “assumed leadership.” These codes were both gleaned from the relevant research and from our experience studying other teams from the year before. We then used those concepts, taken from the teacher interview data, to interpret how teachers interacted in the video recorded meetings (Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Powell, Francisco, & Maher, 2003). During this time, we wrote and shared data memos within the broader research team focused on specific episodes of collaboration taken from design team meetings to gain a deeper understanding of interactions between teachers (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). We routinely shared findings with colleagues both within and without the larger research team in the form of data memos and data share meetings. Throughout the iterative process of writing, sharing, and revising data memos, teacher status emerged as an important facet of what happened in the English 3 group.

Findings

Our findings corroborate and extend core aspects of the literature, characterizing how the commitments and practices are established within this successful collaborative group. Our findings are broken into two sections. To address Research Question 1, we document how the English 3 team structured their collaborative work. We describe the group’s shared commitment to redesigning the English 3 course according to PBL principles and pedagogy. We also describe how the team established productive routines, such as sharing experimental artifacts, tools, and materials with each other in design team meetings. Through “sharing” (Little, 1990), teachers solidified and sustained their practice of examining problems of practice, making it a durable and reliable mechanism for curriculum redesign and teacher learning. To address Research Questions 2 and 3, we examine English 3’s collaboration through the lens of positioning theory to surface the ways the high-status teachers deployed their status within the group. We found that Roger and Isaac, the high-status teachers on the team, positioned Autumn and Deborah, the novice teachers on the team, as equals throughout the curriculum redesign process by inviting them to make substantive contributions to discussions focused on problems of practice.

Structuring the Collaborative Work: Sharing and a Shared Commitment to Designing PBL Curriculum

Early on, the English 3 team established a shared commitment to redesigning curriculum according to PBL pedagogy and principles. Based on his previous design team experience, it was of central importance to Roger that he facilitated a conversation in which his team established a shared commitment to the PBL redesign task. Before starting, the English 3 team met during the summer to set norms and brainstorm ideas for the scope of the English 3 course.

Roger pointed to that meeting as a positive first step toward a productive collaboration with the team. He explains,

We had that norming discussion and I said, “Look, guys, I just want to create a really great PBL product.” And Deborah and Autumn immediately go, “Oh my god, that’s exactly what I want to do.” I want to create the best thing possible. And that was one of the best premises we had.

Roger considered it integral that the English 3 teachers express a shared commitment to redesigning curriculum around PBL pedagogy and principles before they started working on PBL course design in the fall.

In the English 3 team, the data demonstrate that occasions of “sharing” (Little, 1990) routinely developed into instances of collaborative learning (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Little, 1990). Little categorizes “sharing” as one way teachers can make their practice more transparent by informally exchanging teaching materials. In the English 3 team, teacher “sharing” was far more robust. As we will see, many times when an English 3 teacher shared a tool, document, or artifact in a design team meeting, it prompted sustained engagement in problems of practice discussions.

One of the most notable characteristics of how the English 3 team worked together was their willingness to share their experiences implementing redesigned materials and lessons. We observed 10 English 3 team meetings from November to December 2012, and documented a total of 18 instances of sharing, including at least one instance in every meeting. Teachers shared a range of materials, tools, and problems of practice pertaining to implementation of redesigned lessons, such as providing students with more relevant ways to engage note-taking strategies and making sense of student survey data. Out of the 18 instances of sharing we observed, 10 developed into sustained problems of practice discussions. Out of this group of 10 instances, a novice teacher in the group initiated eight of the problems of practice discussions.

As Table 3 summarizes, we observed a clear, consistent pattern of sharing. This team’s repeated sharing suggests the presence of several collaborative features. First, the English 3 teachers established sharing as a routine of their collaborative work. Table 3 illustrates that each time a novice teacher shared an artifact or tool, the shared item was taken up by the group and anchored sustained conversation.

Table 3.

Instances of Sharing: Satire Unit Planning Sessions.

Topics	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
Student surveys (design, data analysis, feedback)	z		X	X				X	z	z
Scaffolding note-taking strategies	X
Class manifesto	z
Teacher developed model essay	X
Student peer evaluation/self-evaluation handout		X
English content handout (various)				X			X
Unit calendar							z
Various student work/artifacts						X			Y
Lesson plans					z		z	z

Note. Capital “X” = artifact shared by novice teacher; Capital “Y” = artifact shared by an experienced teacher; Lower case “z” = artifact shared but was not taken up by the group in sustained way.

Second, the English 3 team developed interactions around sharing that encouraged teachers to share artifacts from their practice. The data repeatedly show teachers responded to shared artifacts positively, marking their turns with “This is great,” or “I like this,” even when teachers changed or revised the artifact in the ensuing discussion. However superficial, this routine encouraged teachers, especially novice teachers, to share artifacts with the group regardless of how flawed they may have perceived them to be.

Third, teachers on the English 3 team perceived sharing as a resource for improving their practice. In interviews, Autumn anchored her learning in her experience with working closely with other teachers who held “different levels of expertise.” She spoke about the collaborative space as a place where she could “come to [the design team] and say ‘this thing happened in my class today, what do I do? . . .’” To Autumn, “Everything [the team] designed together is better than anything I designed individually.” Autumn’s responses suggest a deepening of her expertise, a growing awareness of who she was as a teacher, and a newfound respect for the power of the collaborative experience. Deborah had similar descriptions about what she learned from the experience. She talked about how design team work “made teaching feel a lot less isolated [with] a lot more processing happening externally.” Specifically, Deborah described how the design team gave her a safe place to fail. She said,

As a teacher it gave me more freedom to try things because as a team we have decided that this is a good idea so if it completely fails, it’s not all my fault. So I’m just going to go for it.

The second and third features are especially important for establishing the novice teachers as full members of the team. Consistent use of such routines provided ample learning opportunities for both experienced and novice teachers alike.

Fostering an Egalitarian Group Culture: Making Space for Novice Teacher Growth and Expertise

The interactions between and among teachers, especially those between the high- and low-status teachers, determine how successful teams of teachers can be when collaborating. At THS, PBL curriculum redesign required not just an accounting of the established curriculum according to student learning goals, but a shared commitment between teachers to accept and implement a pedagogy very few of them had ever used. Such a task demanded that teachers (a) respected and trusted whatever experience and expertise each teacher brought to the discussion, (b) established common understandings about how students learn, (c) acknowledged the strengths and weaknesses of the established curriculum, and (d) established a standard for what counted as evidence of successful curricular implementation. This task demanded that teachers move beyond interactions rooted in “first order positioning” (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999, p. 20) to negotiate new roles and expectations for each member of the team.

Over time, all four teachers came to see each other as professionals who were uniquely expert in different facets of teaching English. In interviews, Autumn spoke about her increased comfort with “disagreeing with people and saying I’m going to try out something different.” Deborah talked about how she became “more independent and assertive as the year went on.” When asked, Deborah provided an explanation for why she thinks the group developed this kind of camaraderie. She said,

I think Roger’s been really good in making that happen in some ways, because just naturally I feel like he’d be the authority because he has the most teaching experience and his personality is just kind of like that. But I feel like he’s been really great about trying to value the ideas that we all put out on the table and never coming from this kind of, like, “Well I tried that and it didn’t work.” He’s very quick to praise everyone’s ideas and to be open to suggestions that are different than his. You know, all those things I think were really huge in making it feel equal.

At the beginning of the English 3 design team year, Roger describes how he caught himself directing the trajectory of the planning within the group and how he knew he had to change his behavior to create space where Autumn and Deborah could contribute. He said,

I’m now being the person with the content knowledge that’s saying, oh, I know how to do this. And when I realized that they [Autumn and Deborah] were going to accept whatever I said I thought wow, this is going to go bad. You know, because I saw them shut down. And so I realized it that my note taking was going to be a really, really big part of this because it was going to be the only thing that could shut my loud mouth up.

Roger’s intentional moves to limit his participation and shape how the team collaborated provided Autumn and Deborah with more space to contribute and, in turn, feel more empowered and valued as members of the team.

Problem of Practice 1: Why students were not reading the common book?

For weeks in late November, the team had discussed why they thought students were not reading the assigned books in class. In a meeting the previous week teachers discussed a rhetoric unit they had planned to coincide with the national and state election. Isaac, one of the two experienced teachers on the team, suggested doing a “political content survey . . . at the beginning and end of the unit to see if they moved at all on the political spectrum.” Taking up part of that idea, the next week Deborah, one of the novice teachers, brought a draft of a paper-and-pencil survey she wanted to use to gauge students’ experiences collaborating with peers.

The conversation starts with Roger, the most experienced teacher on the team, asking Deborah about the survey.

(1) Roger:

Oh so you’re, you’re giving them that as well Deborah?//

(2) Deborah:

So . . .//

(3) Roger:

And then this piece, right here. Is that correct?

(4) Deborah:

Yeah so, I’m giving them this [student survey] today and I’m

(5) going to try to make some sense of the data and give it back to them in

(6) some form. And we’ll talk about that tomorrow and then they’re going to

(7) do this. So this is more individual, right? Like, their individual learning?

(8) Roger:

It really seems like it to me.

(9) Deborah:

Yeah.

(10) Roger:

And that’s the way I set up, um . . . It’s funny the way we kind of

(11) set up the same . . . But I think, I think that’s great too. Um, just to see

(12) what does it mean to do the same deal for you and for me . . .

It was commonplace for Roger to start most meetings informally by asking what the team wanted to get done that day or by referring to the previous day’s notes to remind the team what they said they wanted to accomplish. By assuming this role, Roger positions himself as the de facto leader of the group, if only in a procedural capacity. In Line 1, when Roger asks Deborah about her survey, asking “So you’re giving them that as well, Deborah?” he both focuses the team’s attention on her and encourages her to share the survey she designed. In Lines 4 through 7, Deborah briefly describes her intention for the survey and how she is thinking of using it. In Line 8 and then in Lines 10 through 12, Roger affirms Deborah’s thinking by saying “It really seems like it to me,” and the instructional tool she designed by saying “It’s funny the way we kind of set up the same . . .” Roger’s affirmation of Deborah’s thinking in Line 8 builds her confidence. In Line 10, his description of how they took similar approaches when designing their surveys tacitly reaffirms to Deborah that Roger believes he and she are equals, regardless of the varied status they hold within the department and team.

The last iteration of teachers’ use of student surveys occurred in mid-December, 2012. Autumn designed and administered an online survey to her students based loosely off the survey Deborah previously designed, compiled the data, and then facilitated a class discussion with her students about their survey results. The survey sought to pinpoint students’ motivation for reading common books assigned in class. The week prior to the class discussion, Autumn shared the survey results with her team and asked how she could efficiently share the results with her students. Based on this discussion with the design team, Autumn developed a plan to share the findings with her students. In the following instance, Isaac invites her to share her impressions of that discussion.

(1) Isaac:

So do we want to debrief of, like, how your data conversation and

(2) was there anything specific that you wanted to talk about?

(3) Autumn:

Um . . . I mean I think in some ways it just confirmed what we

(4) already knew that students wanted choice (inaudible) when reading school

(5) books. And there were multiple reasons for that.

(6) Isaac:

Yeah. And I heard a lot of, like, that they were very willing and

(7) interested in doing a small, a small group of texts. Because they

(8) acknowledged that it would be really hard if everyone is basically reading

(9) different books.

(10) Autumn:

Yeah.

(11) Isaac:

So they were like, no, that would make a lot of sense if we would

(12) have, like, a couple of books (inaudible) like, that people were reading.

(13) Um, so kind of like what you’re doing where you’re presenting them with

(14) some options.

(15) Autumn:

I think the thing I was, like, pleasantly surprised by how many

(16) students were willing to read if they had choice. Like, I sensed a renewed

(17) enthusiasm that I hadn’t seen in students but there’s also a lot of cynicism (18) built in about reading. And I found that students, like, felt like teachers (19) didn’t respect them because they couldn’t choose. Which I thought was (20) really interesting.

Again, in this instance, a similar pattern emerges between teachers. First, in Lines 1 through 2 the experienced teacher, in this case Isaac, invites the novice teacher, Autumn, to share her experiences implementing a new strategy or lesson. He moves the conversation past the typical veteran-gives-novice-advice dynamic to affirming her instructional choices and positioning himself as someone who could learn from her. Autumn responds in Lines 3 through 5 that much of what she heard from students matched the hypotheses the team had developed previous to Autumn’s data share discussion with her class. In Line 6, Isaac marks his turn with “Yeah,” to validate Autumn’s contribution and to elaborate on a previous agreement the team established that it might be best to provide students with a short list of options because “it would be really hard if everyone [in the class] is basically reading different books” (Lines 8-9). After Isaac expands on this idea in a later turn (Lines 11-14), Autumn takes control of the discussion to offer more encouraging insights she had from students.

Problem of Practice 2: Getting students to take better notes

In the episode to follow, Autumn shared a note-taking graphic organizer she had developed. This discussion further illustrates how the high-status teachers fostered an egalitarian culture within the group. Autumn’s problem of practice dealt with making note-taking more collaborative for students and how to make student learning more accessible and transferable to other content within the unit. When Autumn initially shared her document, the experienced teachers on the team responded positively. Roger moves to validate her document saying, “I think this is really good.” Looking past Autumn’s modest comment that “it’s nothing special,” Isaac asks a clarifying question seemingly to (a) better understand the purpose of the tool better and (b) to get Autumn to think aloud about her intended strategy regarding the tool.

Noting Roger’s and Isaac’s status as the experienced teachers on this team, their initial encouragement of Autumn and her document opens up, rather than constrains space within the group for further discussion and consideration. Whether or not Roger or Isaac intended to do this is beside the point. Their validation reinforces a sense of equality and equity within the group by ensuring Autumn and Deborah that their ideas will be taken seriously.

The discussion evolves into a conversation focused on increasing the relevance of the note-taking task and the extent to which students can use note-taking as a learning activity. We join the discussion when Roger suggests alternatives to structuring students’ note-taking tasks.

(1) Roger:

They could post their notes on Edmodo.

(2) Autumn:

(Inaudible) They could post their notes on Edmodo.

(3) Roger:

I think that’s good and bad. I think it’s good because, one, they’re taking

(4) notes in class. Then they’re typing the notes up. So it’s essentially reviewing the

(5) notes when they type them on Edmodo. Just to type them.

(6) Autumn:

Yeah.

(7) Roger:

You know? And then, other kids, maybe they didn’t take great notes or (8) don’t know what they are, so it’s kind of a modeling activity.

(9) Autumn:

Mhmm.

(10) Roger:

You know what I mean as opposed to like an enabling thing?

(11) Autumn:

Right.

(12) Roger:

Um . . . I think it’s, I think that’s fine.

(13) Deborah:

You want to have them type their notes, um, after they

(14) take their notes?

(15) Autumn:

I don’t think I’m going to have them type them. I feel like it would

(16) take so much time.

(17) Roger:

I, yeah, I, I’ll just, I just tell my kids whatever notes they take in class

(18) they have to uh, post on Edmodo. Which means that they have to retype

(19) them. Uh, which means that they have to study them. Because I think retyping

(20) is studying.

(21) Autumn:

In a way because they’re, you’re processing it again.

(22) Roger:

Exactly. And you’re formatting, you’re reformatting it and a lot of

(23) times when you take notes it’s in your own hand and then you need to think

(24) about, how do I need to reformat this so other people can understand it. So,

(25) like, that thought process.

(26) Autumn:

It’s just the time aspect.

(27) Roger:

Mhmm. It takes a lot of time.

The negotiation between Roger and Autumn (Lines 1-16) reveals the complicated way in which Roger behaved within the team. He validates Autumn’s artifact and in doing so he encourages future sharing within the group. Starting in Line 1 with the comment “They could post their notes on Edmodo,” Roger shifts the conversation away from Autumn’s document and engages her and the team in a more substantive conversation about note-taking strategies in general. Roger’s turns remain positive saying, “I think that’s fine” (Line 12) and “yeah” (Line 17) as he attempts to share alternative ways for students to take and share notes with each other. His cautiousness reflected in turns such as “You know what I mean?” (Line 10) demonstrates that he is attempting to broker an agreement with Autumn, not supplant her ideas with his (Schiffrin, 1987, p. 275).

Roger’s interactions with Autumn and his team, although somewhat overbearing, reflect Roger’s attempts to treat Autumn and his team as equals. In response to Roger’s claim about the effectiveness of having students take and post notes online, Autumn holds fast to her claim saying, “It’s just the time aspect” (Line 26). In return, Roger validates Autumn’s claim saying, “Mhmm. It takes a lot of time” (Line 27). Instead of steamrolling Autumn’s work and ideas, Roger’s discourse reveals his attempt to persuade Autumn to consider an alternative way students could take notes. When his efforts fail, he accepts her criticism. Throughout this episode, Roger chooses not to deploy the status he has to dismiss Autumn’s ideas but to accept them and make them the focus of a larger conversation on note-taking strategies in general.

Discussion

Our analysis of teacher collaboration underscores our belief that the way teachers leverage, deploy, and deemphasize and negotiate differences of status is a prominent, yet under-examined feature of teachers’ collaborative work. In intimate social settings, such as teacher collaborative groups, teachers assume and are ascribed status based on their years of teaching experience, perceived pedagogical and content knowledge expertise, formal and informal roles within the school and department, and their relationships with the other teachers within the group (Little, 1982). As such, the ways teachers broker and navigate theirs and others’ status within groups can be fluid (Berger et al., 1980). In the English 3 team, Roger manages his status in strategic ways to foster a productive collaborative culture.

Our data from the English 3 team show that Roger (a) realized the influence stemming from his high status or “centrality” within the group (Van Maanen & Barley, 1984), (b) repositioned himself as equal to, not better than, his more novice colleagues (Anderson & Kilduff, 2009; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), (c) took intentional steps to deemphasize his influence within the team and create space for his more novice colleagues to express and share their experience and expertise (Berger et al., 1980; Flynn et al., 2006), and to (d) encourage them to lead the effort to experiment with and share problems resulting from PBL curriculum implementation (McLaughlin & Talbert, 2006).

While the English 3 team’s ability to establish a shared commitment to PBL most likely inspired their robust routine of sharing and successful collaboration, the way Roger and Isaac deemphasized their status and influence to create space for Autumn and Deborah to make substantive contributions struck us as noteworthy and undoubtedly helped the team sustain equitable and productive collaborative routines. Beyond their shared commitment to PBL, the differences in status between teachers could have resulted in any number of outcomes, both positive and negative. For example, in the English 3 team, there were opportunities for their differences to result in a stalemate and hurt feelings. When that happens, it is far too easy for teachers to simply abandon the collaborative task to avoid further disagreement (Grossman et al., 2001) or rely on the experienced, high-status teacher to provide a solution. Data from the English 3 team suggest that shared commitments to the purpose and goals of collaborative work laid the groundwork for, but did not guarantee them a successful collaborative experience.

In the case of the English 3 team, Roger initially leveraged his standing within the team to shape routines that encouraged teachers’ experimentation with newly designed curriculum. He created space for his novice colleagues to share and learn from problems of practice and encouraged them when they did so. Throughout, Roger shared his expertise when appropriate and also deferred to his novice colleagues. Over time, Roger’s efforts helped the more novice members of the team become more confident and valued contributors in the group.

These teachers were working in a unique school setting. Although PBL was central to the design work they were doing, it did not heavily impact how they structured their work together. Teachers will face similar demands when working in highly autonomous groups, immersed in novel, collaborative “group-worthy task[s]” in which they work through “genuine dilemmas and authentic problems” emerging from practice (Lotan, 2003). While anomalous to many of the teacher collaborative groups documented in the research, the formalized yet autonomous collaborative design team space closely reflects the collaborative work teachers do on a day-to-day basis. In similar autonomous collaborative spaces, teachers with more status may have more currency and power within the group to dictate what routines are established and what decisions are ultimately made. This may lead to tension and conflict between teachers and can erode the ability of groups to be productive over time.

Within this context, the English 3 teachers encountered two inherent complexities of collaborative work. First, they had to redesign an English course according to a pedagogy none of them fully understood nor used to great extent in their classrooms. This dynamic could have been problematic as there were clear differences between teachers’ accumulated experience and expertise within the team. Second, teachers had to effectively manage the flow of status within the group. The magnitude of the task demanded that the team found ways to flatten hierarchies resulting from differences in status to capitalize on each teacher’s experience and expertise to produce quality curricula.

In this collaborative context, the dilemma for the high-status teacher is complicated. Colleagues may position them as the experts, looking to them to provide a creative and equitable structure to the collaborative process. Such collaborative leadership demands the high-status teacher use their standing to establish an egalitarian structure to the work to encourage collaborative routines that afford all teachers ample space to contribute equally. However, some high-status teachers may perceive this process negatively, as a dilution of their status, rather than a potentially beneficial distribution of status and expertise within the team. This can be a delicate and precarious balance for high-status teachers to achieve. The choices they make can impact the extent to which novice teachers will participate and learn from collaborative work.

It is important to note several limitations to this study. First, although status and leadership are not the same things, our study and others (Horn & Little, 2009; Little, 1982) suggest that the boundaries between how teachers leverage and enact the two remain unclear. While Roger and Isaac’s cases suggest a strong yet fluid relationship between status and leadership, more research is needed in similarly situated teacher collaborative groups to better understand this relationship. Second, the role teacher status plays in small group collaborative contexts can be difficult to isolate and examine in part because how teachers gain status can depend on the local characteristics of the collaborative groups, departments, and schools in which they are members. Even though the data demonstrate that Roger and Isaac took steps to intentionally manage their status to shape equitable collaborative routines that allowed Deborah and Autumn to make substantial and crucial contributions to the group, the English 3 team explicitly and tacitly brokered and negotiated status in real time, throughout the year. Despite these ever-constant interpersonal challenges, by the end of the year each teacher on the English 3 team had enough social capital to take up leadership positions within the team. Further complicating our examination of status is the static and dynamic nature of how status flows between teachers in schools. While some socio-psychological research offers insights (Berger et al., 1980), we suspect that more experienced, veteran teachers’ would retain their status within a school, regardless of how productive or unproductive their particular design team turned out to be. Schools are highly political and social organizations and teachers’ reputations can shift. It is entirely possible that the status teachers are ascribed may change as organizational values change or that teachers’ status will fluctuate depending on the extent to which their practice and disposition aligns with the evolving values of specific collaborative groups, academic departments, and the school.

Conclusion

School and district leaders increasingly encourage teachers to work collaboratively, both formally and informally, to improve their practice. However, for various reasons, the quality of those collaborative groups can vary widely. While some groups establish collaborative cultures that prove fruitful for teacher learning, others may not. This variability presents a dilemma for school and district leaders who believe in the potential power of teacher collaboration, but who are resistant to invest in school-wide collaborative structures that stand as much chance to be productive as they do to be dysfunctional. Although we offer no panaceas, thoughtfully designed collaborative protocols and norms can provide space within collaborative groups where novice teachers can offer contributions to group dynamics and culture and where more experienced teachers can assume leadership roles that help support novice teacher growth.

Supplemental Material

751125 – Supplemental material for Investigating the Role of Social Status in Teacher Collaborative Groups

Supplemental material, 751125 for Investigating the Role of Social Status in Teacher Collaborative Groups by Paul S. Sutton and Andrew W. Shouse in Journal of Teacher Education

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the teacher participants in this study for the generous access and insights they provided us throughout this study. The authors thank their blind reviewers and the journal’s editors for their thoughtful and instructive feedback. They also thank Dr. Wendy Gardiner for her encouragement, support, and critical commentary and feedback she provided during the revision process.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The findings reported herein were supported by funding from an Investing in Innovation Grant (i3) as awarded by the Department of Education.

Notes

Author Biographies

Paul S. Sutton is an assistant professor of education at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington.

Andrew W. Shouse is the chief program officer for Washington: STEM, an educational non-profit in Seattle, Washington.

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