The burden of leadership: Exploring the principal’s role in teacher collaboration

Abstract

Based on qualitative data collected over a 6-month period, this article examines how teachers’ experiences of principal leadership practice influence their capacity to engage in meaningful collegial interactions during structured collaboration. Similar to previous studies, our findings confirm the limitations of leadership that relies primarily on structural changes to foster collaboration. Our findings contribute further to leadership research by presenting teachers’ perspectives on why particular principal leadership practices matter to teacher collaboration and by illustrating how the principal’s enactment of leadership practices influences teachers’ sense of efficacy and motivation, both of which are critical to professional learning during collaboration.

Keywords

Principal leadership teacher collaboration teacher efficacy teacher motivation

Introduction

Since the 1980s, scholars have documented the positive effects which teacher collaboration can have on teachers and schools (Johnson, 1990; Little, 1982, 1990; Rosenholtz & Simpson, 1989). More recent research suggests that when teacher collaboration includes reflection and feedback on student learning, it can also have a positive effect on teaching practice (Garet, Porter, Desimone, Birman, & Yoon, 2001; Stoll, Bolam, Wallace, McMahon, & Thomas, 2006) and student achievement (Goddard, Goddard, & Tschannen-Moran, 2007; Johnson, Kraft, & Papay, 2012). As a result of this empirical support, schools are increasingly introducing collaborative structures as a way of fostering meaningful collegial interaction and instructional improvement.

Many US secondary schools now use what is widely referred to as ‘common planning time’ to facilitate collaboration between teams of teachers (Kellough & Kellough, 2008). Typically made up of two or more teachers from different core curriculum areas who serve the same students, the teams are expected to use this time to ‘plan ways to integrate the curriculum, analyze assessment data, examine student work, discuss current research, and reflect on the effectiveness of instructional approaches being used’ (National Middle School Association, 2010, p. 32). While over two decades of structural reforms have failed to improve US secondary schools, attempts to bolster teacher collaboration through common planning time bring renewed hope for improvement because of a focus on the social processes that occur within the collaborative structure. Thus, initiatives such as common planning time are thought to have the potential to unlock ‘critical social technology’ that historically has been underused in schools (Mertens, Flowers, Anfara, & Caskey, 2010). Specifically, social interactions among teachers during common planning time are thought to promote the following: the expectation that teachers place student needs and progress at the center of their work; the development of shared norms for behavior and academic performance; and opportunities for continuous improvement that are job-embedded, focused on relevant topics, and anchored in reflective processes.

However, while studies find that giving teachers regularly scheduled time to meet is critical to their collaboration, this alone does not guarantee that their efforts will result in instructional improvements (Levine, 2011; Little, 1990, 2002). The likelihood that meaningful interaction will occur depends instead on whether a school’s professional culture supports collaboration and on whether teachers have the efficacy and motivation needed to engage in collaborative work (Bandura, 1997; Geijsel, Sleegers, Stoel, & Krüger, 2009; Goddard, Hoy, & Hoy, 2000; Tschannen-Moran & Hoy, 2001). There is general consensus in leadership research that principals can foster an effective culture of collaboration through leadership practices and that, through these practices, they can also positively impact teacher efficacy and motivation (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2006). However, more research is needed to understand fully how the enactment of successful leadership practices influences teacher readiness for collaboration (Giles, 2007; Marks & Printy, 2003; Runhaar, Sanders, & Yang, 2010). The contribution of leadership research should be to identify the practices that are most effective in their impact on teachers and students and to explain why they work. It is the combination of ‘description, practical example, and theoretical explanation’ that contributes to a more robust understanding of effective leadership practice (Robinson, 2007, p. 5). This article, therefore, draws on data from a qualitative study of four teacher teams to answer the following research questions: How are teachers’ collaborative experiences during common planning time mediated by principal leadership? In what ways do specific practices and the ways in which the practices are enacted by principals influence teachers’ sense of efficacy and motivation during collaboration?

Principal leadership and teacher collaboration

Strong leadership is one of the most significant factors in determining whether meaningful professional collaboration occurs in a school (Marks, Louis, & Printy, 2000; Youngs & King, 2002). As such, the most effective principals are those who modify structure while also strengthening school culture in order to create optimal conditions for teacher collaboration (Giles, 2007; Talbert, 2010). Put another way, effective leaders are those who influence the behavior and attitudes of others in their organization through both formal and social controls (O’Reilly & Chatman, 1996). School administrators, however, historically have relied primarily on formal controls – directives and rules, prescribed routines, structural changes, and sanctions for noncompliance – to coordinate and promote collaborative activity among teachers (Talbert, 2010). Studies have repeatedly documented the ineffectiveness of using formal controls to implement complex processes such as teacher collaboration (King & Bouchard, 2011). Indeed, such efforts to influence collective behavior do little to create the patterns of collegial interaction needed to sustain learning among teachers (Malen & Rice, 2004; O’Day, Goertz, & Floden, 1995), and their impact can in fact be detrimental to teacher motivation (Ingersoll, 2003; Talbert, 2010).

Scholars, instead, suggest that leaders develop commitment to organizational outcomes through informational and social influence, thereby guiding the behavior of people in collectives (Martinez & Jarillo, 1989; O’Reilly & Chatman, 1996). Leveraging social processes to collectively define what is important to the organization and to identify appropriate attitudes and behaviors to guide its members is critical to creating a strong culture. It therefore is a pivotal leadership task. Practices associated with building a strong culture of collaboration are consistently cited in research dedicated to school-level leadership (Leithwood, Louis, Anderson, & Wahlstrom, 2004). Importantly, these leadership practices, when executed effectively, also bolster teachers’ motivation and efficacy and help them to persevere through difficult conversations with their colleagues (Runhaar et al., 2010).

First among these practices is establishing a vision of academic success for all students that is based on high expectations, rigorous standards, and clear school goals (Leithwood et al., 2004). How principals carry out this practice has implications for teacher commitment; teachers are not likely to internalize mandated values or a prescribed routine (Pascale, 1990), but by identifying and promoting agreement on organizational vision, goals, and values, school leaders reinforce teachers’ personal and social identification with the organization, thereby creating a sense of cohesion. This increases the likelihood that teachers will exchange knowledge and ideas with colleagues in the context of structured collaboration (Geijsel et al., 2009; Runhaar et al., 2010). Indeed, there is considerable empirical evidence to support the claim that internalizing school goals as personal goals can increase teachers’ self-efficacy and their willingness to engage in collaborative exchanges with their colleagues (Geijsel et al., 2009; Runhaar et al., 2010; Thoonen, Sleegers, Oort, Peetsma, & Geijsel, 2011). Collaboratively creating and promoting a vision for the school thus plays an important role in motivating teachers, particularly when principals involve them in decision-making (O’Reilly & Chatman, 1996; Thoonen et al., 2011).

Research also suggests that principals who provide teachers with support and intellectual stimulation help to create a culture of collaboration and continuous improvement (Leithwood et al., 2004; Thoonen et al., 2011). By acting as a role model and coaching their teachers, principals signal what is important to the organization, reduce feelings of uncertainty and vulnerability, and increase the likelihood that teachers will engage in difficult conversations about practice with their colleagues. Moreover, by encouraging teachers to ‘question their own beliefs, assumptions, and values and enhance [their] ability to solve individual, group, and organizational problems’, principals foster the belief that improving the quality of education is both an individual and a collective enterprise (Thoonen et al., 2011, p. 508). Scholars further contend that when principals employ these leadership practices and buffer teachers from issues unrelated to their practice, they foster collaboration and a climate of trust in their leadership, which is ‘a foundation for creating other forms of trust, and it allows the school to manage its critical human resources more effectively’ (Tschannen-Moran, 2004, p. 198).

Analytic framework

In this study, we sought to understand which leadership practices mattered to teachers as they engaged in collaborative activity during common planning time. We also sought to understand how the enactment of practices might facilitate or obstruct teacher collaboration. Specifically, we wanted to know how principals’ use of both formal bureaucratic and informal social processes might influence teacher efficacy and motivation as well as their internalization of values, attitudes, and behaviors associated with collaboration. We relied on Leithwood et al.’s (2004) core leadership practices to aid our analysis of which leadership practices matter to teachers. Taken together, these core practices assume that teacher workplace performance is a ‘function of teacher motivation, ability, and situation’ (Leithwood & Jantzi, 2006, p. 17). Leithwood and Jantzi’s conceptualization of leadership practice is anchored in a substantial research base that cuts across school and non-school sectors. As such, it accounts for various empirically validated leadership models that rely on both formal and informal approaches to organizing teachers’ work. Yet, because research on these core leadership practices tell us little about how they are enacted by principals (Giles, 2007; Kennedy, Deuel, Nelson, & Slavit, 2011), we included in our framework both informal social approaches to leadership and those considered more formal and bureaucratic (Talbert, 2010). Formal approaches include, for example, written policies, rules, job descriptions, and standard operating procedures, while informal social approaches might include consistently communicating and modeling core organizational values and norms, using inquiry and dialogue to help others make sense of organizational events in light of core values and norms, and positively and publicly reinforcing organizational members’ commitment to values, attitudes, and behaviors that are consistent with desired organizational outcomes (Wahlstrom & Louis, 2008) (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Analytic framework of leadership practices and means of enactment.

Methods

We spent 6 months interviewing teachers and observing their team processes during common planning time in two schools located in the northeastern United States.¹ Walsh Middle School served 751 students in grades 6–8 who were predominately White and middle- to upper-middle-class. The principal had been at his post for 5 years, and the school was moving into its fifth year of common planning time for content-area teaching teams. According to state data, Walsh consistently maintained a high performance rating, but it was struggling to meet state performance targets for its special education and low-income students. Greenpark High, which also had a predominately White, middle- to upper-middle-class population, served 1021 students in grades 9–12. The principal had been in her post for 5 years, and she had introduced common planning time when she arrived. Greenpark consistently ranked in the top 15 high schools in the state. We purposefully selected these two schools because their administrators allocated time for teachers to meet and provided professional development focused on collaboration, both of which are critical to collaborative processes that result in teacher learning (Main, 2012; Scribner, Sawyer, Watson, & Myers, 2007). We also wanted to investigate how principals motivated teachers to collaborate with their colleagues despite a lack of external pressure or any sense of urgency (Mourshed, Chijioke, & Barber, 2010).

The four teams, two from each school, included teachers at different stages of their career. This was important to our investigation, because the research has not addressed the ‘critical mass’ of experience and expertise needed for effective collaboration (Talbert, 2010). We were also interested in how differently leadership practices might affect teams at various points in the collaborative process (Levine, 2011; Slavit, Kennedy, Lean, Nelson, & Deuel, 2011), so we selected teams with varying levels of experience working together (Table 1).

Table 1.

Summary of study participants and teacher teams.

Walsh teacher	Team	Years teaching	Years on team	Greenpark teacher	Team	Years teaching	Years on team
George	SS	18	4	Mildred	WH	3	3
Alex	SS	7	4	Miles	WH	9	3
Bill	SS	14	5	Joe	WH	12	3
Gerry	SS	13	1.5	Gina	EN	15	0.8
Raymond	SS	8	2	Simon	EN	4	4
Olivia	SCI	1	1	Townes	EN	7	4
Greta^a	SCI	11	5
RJ	SCI	8	0.5
Catherine	SCI	4	1

SS: social studies; EN: English; SCI: science; WH: world history.

Returned from maternity leave to participate in the final observation and an individual interview.

We collected data through a variety of qualitative methods: audio and video recordings from four meetings of each team; post-observation reflections; two focus group interviews per team; individual teacher interviews; individual efficacy surveys; and principal interviews. Based on survey data, analytic memos, and field notes kept throughout the data collection, we drafted case studies of each team to create a full account of the membership, the nature of the teams’ collaborative work, and the broader school context in which teamwork was embedded. Themes related to principal leadership and teacher capacity for collaboration were prominent in our case studies, which helped us develop our theoretical framework.

We coded interview data thematically for core practices, attending specifically to teachers’ descriptions of how their principals carried out the practices (e.g. whether a principal attempted to build commitment to collaboration by changing school structure and introducing standardized processes and/or by engaging teachers in a dialogue about what purpose collaboration might serve and what behaviors would foster meaningful collaborative work). We then looked at how teachers’ descriptions of principal leadership practices related to the levels of efficacy and motivation they described bringing to their collaborative interactions with colleagues during common planning time (Strauss & Corbin, 1998). We followed by analyzing our observation data to uncover any further relationship between principal leadership practices and teacher efficacy and motivation. We then cross-checked teachers’ descriptions of principal leadership with principals’ self-reports from the interview data and coded video transcripts of common planning time meetings for evidence of interactions that supported or challenged patterns that had emerged earlier. We carried out this process for all four teams, noting patterns within and across teams.

Findings

Consistently emerging across all four teams was teachers’ desire for principals to establish much needed direction for teacher collaboration. They noted principals’ lack of attention to social processes and a reliance on formal approaches to promote collaboration (i.e. mandating that teachers meet in assigned teams to create common assessments, use assessment data to inform instructional decisions, and submit either documentation of their progress or the assessment data as a proxy for documentation). Overreliance on mandates, rules, and standard operating procedures did little to foster positive attitudes about collaboration among the teachers. Moreover, what teachers perceived as the principals’ lack of vision undermined the teachers’ confidence and motivation to work together on problems related to instruction and student learning.

Because the principals did little to set the direction for collaborative work, the teachers were left to define the goals of and expectations for collaboration in the isolation of their own teams. This placed a heavy burden on the teachers, and depending on the leadership capacity within the team, they either struggled or failed to fulfill them. In the following sections, we present and discuss our findings, illustrating the principal leadership practices that teachers identified as critical to collaboration, and how the absence or poor execution of these practices shaped teachers’ experiences in common planning time. Furthermore, we present and discuss data that illustrate how the teams’ differential capacity to provide leadership on their own affected what the teachers gained from their collegial exchange.

A vision of collaboration that combats the culture of complacency

Across teams, the teachers described a lack of administrative vision as one of their biggest frustrations. While they were provided time to collaborate and given training in assessment development and data analysis, they longed for their administrators to introduce a framework for teaching and learning that would eliminate the ‘guessing game [about] expectations for instruction and assessment’, as Joe, a Greenpark teacher, explained,

Take something like Montessori, whether you agree with it or not, if you are in there as a teacher you know exactly what your expectations are going to be because that philosophy truly defines everything that goes on there and it’s clear.

Teachers were also looking for goals to give them purpose, guide their collaborative work, and mark their progress. Greta, a Walsh teacher, underscored the motivational power of having a school-wide goal tied to a vision of teaching and learning:

We need to set a goal that we’re all working towards, like, ‘Our goal is to improve student achievement’. We want somebody to say, ‘This is the data that we currently have based on our grades . . . our goal is to change that in the next year, and let’s analyze it again at the end of next year and see.’ So we have some sort of motivation of why we’re [collaborating].

Both principals in the study acknowledged their lack of leadership in providing direction for teachers’ collaborative work. The Walsh principal admitted that he ‘didn’t do a good job presenting the vision’, even though he ‘felt urgency . . . that there needed to be changes’. The Greenpark principal said she needed to ‘raise the level of urgency’ and to clearly communicate that ‘this is our focus’. Without this direction, teachers were left questioning what they should be doing during common planning time and what they should say to colleagues who wanted to know why such an effort was necessary. Alex wanted his principal to help him and other teachers from Walsh Middle School answer questions like ‘Why am I doing this? Is it to close the achievement gap? Is it to ensure that all children are learning?’ Teachers at both schools asked these questions, and both principals recognized that their school’s high performance had created a ‘culture of complacency’ among teachers. According to Miles, however, no one – including the principal at Greenpark – talked about how ‘easy it was for teachers in the district to hide behind good scores’. His colleague Joe agreed, explaining that the ‘reality’ behind growth in student performance over the past decade was the result of serving ‘families with money’: ‘They somewhat value education, they are going to grow up literate. [So], even if some mediocre stuff goes on, we still kind of stumble upon some success’.

From the teachers’ perspective, if their collaboration during common planning time was to bring about real change in their teaching, the principals needed to make it clear that there were student learning problems and they urgently needed to be addressed. George, a middle school teacher from Walsh, explained that if the teams were ‘really responsible for something’, like setting goals for improvement, they would ‘double down on [i.e., increase their] motivation’ and be ‘more invested’ in collaborating. But because their principals led the collaboration solely by mandating a time to meet and requiring the use of specific practices (such as using data and developing shared assessments), the teachers had no opportunity to confront the relationship between privilege, high performance, and the need for instructional improvement. As a result, according to the teachers in the study, there was no discussion of shared goals, and many of them did not grasp the purpose of collegial collaboration. Without pressure to improve or an understanding of the value in doing so, teachers had little motivation to collaborate effectively.

A vision of collaboration that aligns with professional development

A lack of shared purpose, goals, and expectations among the teachers resulted in a lack of clarity about how to resolve problems of practice through collaboration. Formal professional development for teachers exposed them to external experts who introduced them to technical processes for developing common assessments and interpreting data, but did not necessarily help teachers uncover or address the underlying problems of student learning. This often produced more questions than solutions and left teachers frustrated with the process and unwilling to engage in hard conversations about practice.

The Walsh social studies team epitomized a need for more guidance and support from the principal as they grappled with the problem of having high academic standards for students with special needs. While analyzing data on one assessment of students’ ability, the team acknowledged that not all students were able to perform to the same high standard of performance. They questioned whether they should adopt the professional developers’ recommendations they were given by outside consultants during professional development – to maintain the same standard for all students, whether they have special learning needs or not – or to go with the special education department’s suggestion and adjust the standard for students with unique challenges. George pointed out why this was a problem, explaining that teams were instructed to ‘set goals or standards’ collaboratively but that they got ‘mixed messages’ about whether the standard should move based on a student’s needs:

We have heard the message of [professional developers] . . . the standard is set and . . . the work with the child varies to meet the standard. But in . . . some of the special ed discussions, it’s move the standard . . . And so somebody may need to . . . say ‘either we’re going to use this philosophy or we’re going to use that philosophy. That’s what we’re doing’.

George and his colleagues argued that the teams could not resolve this issue on their own. The principal needed to establish an overarching philosophy or vision for addressing the needs of all students, which would require a talk with teachers about the role of standards in assessing students with special needs. The teachers also needed professional development that would help them apply principles that were consistent with the overarching vision in their practice. But, as Alex explained, they were ‘looking for some guidance that just isn’t there’.

Uncertainty about how to support students at the low end of the spectrum and where to turn for answers made teachers feel incapable of addressing important problems of practice. It also undermined their motivation to even ask questions about the problem during common planning time. At Greenpark, Miles kept expecting his principal to provide the supports they needed, but she had not. This had an observable impact on teachers’ belief that they could persevere in the face of these problems and on their willingness to delve deeper into them. In fact, all four teams preferred to avoid the problems altogether. Townes, a high school teacher, represented the feelings of others in the study, saying that when his team faces real challenges, they ‘just sort of move to the next thing’ because they ‘don’t really have anything to offer’. While both principals assumed that putting teachers on teams, scheduling time for them to meet, and providing professional development on assessment and data use would be enough for the teachers ‘to just run with’ common planning time, the teachers in the study consistently stated that the principal needed to be more actively involved in providing support that was consistent with an overarching vision and that would help them address immediate problems of student learning.

A vision of collaboration that monitors progress and drives accountability

Teachers at both schools said their principals attempted to track the work of the teams. Greenpark teachers were asked to list their meeting times and places and what they hoped to accomplish and they had to submit their midterm assessments as a proxy for progress. The principal at Walsh required the teams to complete a form that described the common assessment they created or the assessment data they analyzed during their meetings. According to teachers, because their principals did not offer feedback or follow-up on their work or the assessments, this approach did little to support their collaborative work, promote a culture of professional learning, or hold other teachers accountable for progress. Matt explained,

We ask for feedback and we don’t get it. And sometimes that’s very frustrating for us because we’ll fill out the forms; we’ll write the right questions, like ‘What should we do next?’ And not only do the forms not get returned, but the questions don’t get answered. So that in itself is a little bit uninspiring.

Teachers also had mixed feelings about the forms required at Walsh, describing them as a ‘double edged sword’. At both Walsh and Greenwood, there was tension between a desire for guidance and feedback, that is, that their work be monitored and a desire to be left alone. Raymond explained,

On the one hand, we are not getting a lot of guidance that’s really helpful because we are not getting any guidance really. But on the other hand, . . . other than the form you have to fill out – which is not that unreasonable and they haven’t been very demanding at all about it once we start putting them in – whatever we put in was fine with them.

Raymond and his teammates wanted more guidance and support, and they hoped that filling out the form would motivate the principal to attend to their needs. It did not, however, and this was in some ways a relief to the team because it meant they could use common planning time to satisfy the survival needs of new teachers rather than dealing with assessment practices. All teachers in the study said that management tools (like the form) intended to track the teams’ needs and hold them accountable for collaborative work were ‘phony’. Gina, Greenpark teacher, explained,

So, you want minutes of the meeting, you get minutes of the meeting . . . They will have nothing to do with what really went on in the meeting . . . You go write the minutes and you hand them in and they go in a file in the principal’s office and they sit there for 15 years, and then they throw them away . . . So it’s phony accountability.

The principal’s lack of follow-through denied teachers the support they needed and wanted, and it allowed teachers who were less invested to opt out of the work altogether. According to Mildred, a lot of Greenpark teachers were ‘frustrated at how this teacher is not willing to use the same assessments or this other teacher doesn’t come to the common planning’. Her teammate Miles admitted that he gets ‘frustrated when other groups aren’t working [and the] administration allow[s] them to continue to do their own thing’. He argued that participation in common planning at Greenpark should not be on a voluntary basis and that teachers who do not participate should be ‘nudged’ by the principal, especially when other members of the team are working to make collaboration and collective improvement a priority:

Somebody should tell that outlier [non-participant], ‘Hey work with the team’. I have no control over that, but I feel a little like there are other people who want this . . . Sometimes the administration needs to nudge more.

Indeed, Greenpark teachers characterized the principal’s hands-off approach to monitoring collaboration as a game the teachers and the principal played during common planning time. Joe compared it to the implicit social contract between teachers and students that he believed was at work in many Greenpark classrooms:

I call it the deal or the game, which basically means, I’m not going to be too hard on you, and you are not going to misbehave in my class. We are going to have fun, some jokes, [everyone] is going to get decent grades, so no one complains, and I don’t have too much work to bring home, you don’t have too much to bring home.

This lack of oversight reinforced the symbolic purpose that redesigning organizational structure can serve, thus promoting a logic of confidence between the school and its constituents (Elmore, 2004). However, it did little to affect the agentic possibility restructuring offers; it instead demotivated teachers and put teacher collaboration in jeopardy. Miles spoke for many when he said, ‘Look, I’m on board, but it sort of undermines the whole thing when you feel it doesn’t matter’.

Carrying the leadership burden

Principals from both schools created structures to promote collaborative activity among teachers. They also mandated standard assessment processes that teachers received training on during externally led professional development. Both teachers and the principals remarked that these efforts failed to create a cultural context that would bolster teacher efficacy and motivation and support meaningful collaborative work. Moreover, all the study participants reported wide variability in how the teams carried out the mandate for collaboration during common planning time. The Walsh principal saw that some groups caught on right away, while others were still trying to find their way. Similarly, the Greenpark principal recognized ‘pockets [teams] in the building that weren’t working so well’.

We observed this variability across the four teams in our study; the Walsh teams were doing well with it, but Greenpark teams were not. Teachers on the Walsh social studies team were experienced, extremely confident in their practice and that of their colleagues, and they had been together for more than 3 years. In that time, they had created a context of interdependent, strength-based work that served a common purpose, reinforced teachers’ confidence that they could improve, and motivated teachers to work together. Matt described his team as being ‘dead on’ (i.e. successful) in their collaborative process, despite ‘lacking the guidance and the vision . . . from [the] administration’. Rather than waiting for direction that may never come or ‘fighting against [collaboration]’, the team ‘defined the big picture’ for themselves. George explained that the team’s overarching goal of teaching history in a way that is ‘different from what the public thinks of as a history class’ kept them motivated and ‘moving forward’. It gave them ‘a sense of identity’, without which they would be, as Alex put it, ‘running aimlessly’. Furthermore, having shared their expectations for student learning, agreed on what content to teach and on assessments they believed would reveal what students know and are able to do, the team members were highly motivated to work together. When they experienced frustration dealing with students at the low end of the spectrum, the team experimented with new practices on their own, such as using flexible grouping strategies in their classrooms. This yielded progress for students in areas that had caused problems in the past and gave teachers on the team a sense of success that motivated them to persist in pursuing seemingly unanswerable questions. George reflected on the team’s progress:

We’ve put a lot of work into it . . . there have been times over the couple of years where we felt like we were making tests for the sake of making a test. And, because we hadn’t defined some new goals, we weren’t quite as good at it. We even looked back later like, ‘Man, we were just making tests to say we made another test’.

The team clearly had matured beyond the point of simply complying with the principal’s mandate for collaboration, and together they learned the importance of setting their own goals, figuring out how to reach students, and reflecting on their progress. This sustained process revealed to team members the value of collective effort and helped them persist in their collaboration. The Walsh team’s commitment to improve through collective effort also mediated the detrimental effects of teacher autonomy that often obstruct team performance. Putting data on the table at every meeting made the team accountable to each other for meeting high standards of practice. Alex explained,

This is something that we put time into, and it’s worth doing, and maybe this worked, this didn’t work. Just a general accountability . . . that I’m not going to guess them to death and go back and do what I want but it’s deceptive, and it’s not the way I operate.

Thus, while accountability was lacking at the school level, it was created at the team level through collaborative work and was driven by expectations set within the team that fostered teacher efficacy and motivation.

There was decidedly less potential for teachers to lead collaborative improvement efforts at Greenpark, where the English team acknowledged how ‘tricky’ it was for the principal to hold teachers accountable for their collaborative work, especially at the high school. Simon pointed out that the principal had ‘very little . . . credibility in the eyes of teachers,’ and Townes concurred, recalling how past attempts to formalize common planning time caused ‘sort of a blowblack’ or negative feelings among teachers. According to Simon and Townes, even as administrators tried to foster collaboration, they made decisions that alienated teachers (Talbert, 2010), such as trying to legislate collaboration from the principal’s office. Townes explained,

The notion that we’re going to, as an institution, try to legislate [collaboration] into existence – for us would be counter-productive because what keeps us as a group together is [that] we feel a certain amount of respect for one another.

Despite their collegial regard, the English team members could not reconcile their disparate professional values, establish a shared purpose, or identify common goals that would bolster efficacy and motivate them to establish a context for collaborative improvement. After a year of working with his colleagues during common planning time, Simon carefully suggested to his colleagues, ‘We want to be careful to be more closely aligned [next year] than we were in the spring semester’. He continued tentatively,

I’m not saying we have to be lock step . . . but I do think just from the standpoint of material, it’s important that we try to commit to doing the same things. And it might require some more careful planning and sharing of what we want to do.

Townes, responded emphatically, ‘I’m still not sure – what purpose does it serve?’ While Simon conceded that he was feeling ‘pressure’ from outsiders to coordinate the team’s work more, other team members had no understanding of (or interest in) what it would mean to be aligned beyond what texts to read and standards to address. Townes’s question about purpose underscored their lack of understanding of the benefits of interdependence to both teachers and students. Gaining this would require the principal to lead a school-wide discussion that would push teachers to explore their own values and test their own assumptions about the relation between teacher collaboration, instructional improvement, and student learning.

Members of the English team also offered reasons for not sharing individual problems of practice, including that teachers are ‘all different’ and they ‘typically know when things don’t go well and why’. The teachers said their ideal collaborative exchange was ‘open-ended discussions, conversation filled with questions, and debate’. However, because team members did not share professional values or practices, their discussions, questions, and debates remained superficial and focused on individuals. The team’s lack of principled talk about practice (Horn & Little, 2010) did little to help individual teachers resolve problems of student learning, and their exchanges during common planning had the potential to erode rather than foster teacher efficacy and motivation. This was evident in a conversation Gina had with her teammates about her intention to take her college-prep students through the novel Great Expectations. Simon called her decision ‘ambitious’, and Townes chimed in with ‘admirable’. Gina got the sense that her teammates felt it was ‘crazy’ to teach that book because of the difficulty of the text would demand too much from her particular group of ninth graders. Simon qualified his comment,

[It] is not to say that you’re completely insane for trying this because you obviously have a strong confidence level with your – with this text. You know, based on my experience with the majority of our students at that level, I think it’s going to be a big leap.

According to Gina, they essentially were asking ‘aren’t you biting off more than you can chew?’ As the discussion ensued, questions were not about making the novel accessible to all students but about whether the novel was above the ‘heads’ of college-prep ninth graders. There was no discussion of what an accessible unit on Great Expectations might look like for these students, nor did they engage in collective problem-solving to anticipate solutions to some of the challenges Gina might face. The result was that Gina would teach this book on her own terms, thus providing a very different experience for her students than for those of the other members of her team. Simon and Townes inadvertently made value judgments about the students’ ability to learn and Gina’s ability to teach such a complex text to ninth graders. Gina said it provoked her to think more deeply about the challenges of teaching Great Expectations, but it also made her question her expectations for student learning and her own efficacy. Moreover, she would take on this challenge in isolation, as her team did not choose to experiment with exposing ‘students at that level’ to more challenging texts – perhaps because they did not want to confront their own beliefs, assumptions, and practices. Furthermore, Gina might have felt more confident had her colleagues told her that teaching such a text to her students was possible or if they had told her how they had accomplished similar feats in the past (Bandura, 1997). For Gina, this exchange likely had little positive effect on her belief that she could tackle Great Expectations or on motivating her to talk to her colleagues in the future about what she might try in her classroom. Because the team was not guided by a shared vision of learning for all students, collaborative goals, or expectations, this exchange – typical of others observed throughout the study – represented a lost opportunity for the whole group.

Discussion and conclusion

While our findings are based on a small-scale qualitative study, we believe they are important in light of the fact that many schools are investing resources in teacher collaboration and that such fine-grained illustrations are rare in the research literature. Albeit through negative examples, our research details what teachers perceive to be critical to making meaningful collegial interaction happen in the context of structured collaboration, thereby reinforcing the claim that principal leadership practices that flow from the leader’s capacity to leverage informal, social processes precede widely distributed teacher leadership (Kennedy et al., 2011; Marks & Printy, 2003). As illustrated in our data, some schools are just not ready to rely on teachers in the isolation of their own teams to bolster widespread improvements in teaching and learning. Even in schools with a reputation for high performance and collegiality, teachers may need strong direction and support in the early stages of such improvement efforts because it is unclear why improvement is necessary, where it should begin, and how its results will benefit teachers and students. As demonstrated by the teachers at Walsh, teams that are asked and able to carry the burden function within a vacuum of improvement that does little to validate and reinforce their efforts. Moreover, while their isolated work may support the needs of their students and teachers, it may target vastly different goals, which does little to promote collective improvement and, in some cases, may obstruct school-wide efforts to build instructional capacity.

According to our findings, informal leadership practices that target social processes and create a cultural context for collaboration are particularly important at the high school level, where instructional programming and practice tend to be ambiguous and are left to the discretion of individual teachers. Indeed, our findings reinforce the power that a shared vision, purpose, and goals have in creating a context of interdependence and collective responsibility within teams. Interdependence mediates the uncertainty teachers feel due to their isolated classroom experiences and the risk associated with exploring problems of practice with colleagues. It also has a motivating effect because teachers no longer view problems of practice as isolated events that reflect their individual weaknesses; they view them instead as collective problems that deserve collective deliberation. This was certainly true on the Walsh teams, where teachers took the initiative to lead informally within their teams, thereby establishing a purpose for collaboration and goals to work toward. In doing so, they created a context for interdependent work that motivated teachers to collaborate and made common planning time a worthwhile endeavor.

One might argue that data from the Walsh teams prove that it is neither principal leadership, years together on a team, nor professional experience that matter most to teacher collaboration; rather, it is teachers’ capacity to lead informally that matters most. Indeed, previous research suggests that once people understand what their work is and what they are working toward, achieving the goal becomes more salient than how it was set or who set it (Bandura, 1997). However, our data suggest that principals cannot assume that such leadership is inherent in teacher teams, nor should they assume that if there is such leadership, it will result in coordinated, school-wide improvements. Greenpark teams could not bear the burden of informal leadership, and Walsh teams based their collaborative efforts on the areas of improvement they deemed important, which may or may not have been a service to the broader school community. Thus, our findings should encourage principals to take more initiative in establishing a vision, purpose, and goals for their teachers’ collaborative work (Muijs & Harris, 2006), but they also prompt more questions about how principals can leverage both their formal and informal authority to do so most effectively (Talbert, 2010).

Our findings illustrate how differentiated, ongoing, job-embedded professional development that is aligned with an overarching vision for teaching and learning is critical to teachers’ mastery of new practices. Even in high-performing contexts, principals cannot assume that the knowledge and skills needed for improvement already exist and simply need to be mobilized (Elmore, 2004). As illustrated by our data, teachers on teams from high-performing schools were confronting the limits of their own knowledge and skill, and being in such a position made them question their ability to address problems of practice and, therefore, decreased their motivation to even discuss the problems during structured collaboration. Our findings prompt further questions that complicate how we think about both team-level professional development and team membership. Who is on the team and what they bring in the way of efficacy, motivation, knowledge, and skill have implications for how they respond to school-wide or general forms of professional development. Principals must provide support and guidance to address the unique needs of both the individuals on a team and the team as a collective. This is important to note because we know that school improvement is likely to be achieved when ‘individuals feel confident in their own capacity, in the capacity of their colleagues, and in the capacity of the school to provide adequate professional development’ (Mitchell & Sackney, 2000, p. 78).

Also clearly illustrated in our study was teachers’ desire to receive consistent and meaningful feedback on their collaborative work, even though it would require the principal to monitor their process. Teachers in the study were looking for administrators to effectively oversee their collaborative improvement as a way to foster ongoing professional exchange and growth (Talbert, 2010). From their perspectives, this could be accomplished through differentiated feedback and support, which in turn would contribute to teacher efficacy and motivation. Moreover, teachers in the study – especially those from Walsh – believed that through consistent monitoring administrators could feed valuable information about teaching and learning gathered at the team level back into the broader system. By doing so, the principal would play the critical role of knowledge manager and put the school in the position of establishing what Shulman (2005) refers to as ‘signature pedagogies’, which detail the critical aspects of teaching as professional work. While secondary schools are not known for having tightly prescribed curriculum and instructional practices, establishing a body of specialized knowledge and agreed-to standards of practice and protocols constrains individual autonomy (Wurtzel, 2006), serves as the foundation of a school’s internal accountability system (Elmore, 2004), and puts it on a sustainable improvement trajectory (Mourshed et al., 2010). Absent both external pressure to create a sense of urgency and principal leadership to inspire reflection, the teams would continue to operate in ‘atomistic accountability systems’ that privilege individual teacher beliefs over shared expectations for teaching and learning, thereby rendering collective improvement efforts futile (Elmore, 2004). This is an important (and under-recognized) point because, although suburban schools like Walsh and Greenpark may have a reputation for high performance, more learning may actually occur in low-income schools where teachers feel responsible for meeting collective expectations for teaching and learning, and for carrying out routines they developed together to get the work done.

Footnotes

Notes

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