Creating organizational structures to facilitate collegial interaction among teachers

Abstract

Emerging from concerns about “contrived collegiality” in schools is also the recognition that breaking existing patterns of collegial interaction (or lack thereof) might necessitate some level of leader-initiated (or otherwise organizational) intervention. This paper presents the case of Middleville, a high-performing Midwestern US district, and changes in patterns of collegial interaction which occurred during their first seven years of implementation of the Success for All program—a program which employs a cohesive set of formal organizational controls. Utilizing qualitative data from interviews and focus groups with over 60 elementary school and district staff, we endeavored to better understand the ways in which the Success for All program and its various components have spurred collegial interaction and collegiality in Middleville. Findings reveal the utility of formal controls in pushing teachers to interact in ways which represent a break from past practice. Program facilitators, a unique teacher leader role within each school, played a key role in this process by mitigating the conflict and tension that invariably arises as a result of increased interaction. Findings also emphasize the importance of critically examining the purposes behind the cultivation of collaborative practice and the norms of collegiality to go along with it.

Keywords

Collegial interaction comprehensive school reform deprivatized practice collaboration school improvement Success for All

Introduction

Salient in the school improvement/effectiveness literature is the enduring promise of teacher collaboration to facilitate reform efforts, sustain school improvement, and boost learning outcomes for teachers and students (Honingh and Hooge, 2014). This stream of inquiry emphasizes the role of direct and indirect “culture management” on the part of the school leader, whether it be organizing professional development or vision-building to promote collegial interaction (Lavié, 2006). A contrasting view is one which emphasizes the normative state that is teacher collegiality and the limitations of technical/managerial approaches for enhancing teacher leadership and professionalism (Brundrett, 1998; Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012; Torrance and Humes, 2015). In this view, educational practices that promote intellectual renewal, deep collaboration, and teacher professionalism are seen as antithetical to practices that rely on rules, policies, and/or procedures to artificially induce these behaviors (Hargreaves and Dawe, 1990).

Yet emerging from concerns about “contrived collegiality” in schools is also the recognition that breaking existing patterns of collegial interaction (or lack thereof) might necessitate some level of leader-initiated (or otherwise organizational) intervention (Datnow, 2011; Feys and Devos, 2015; Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012; Lam et al., 2002). Hargreaves and Fullan (2012), in their description of arranged collegiality, acknowledge that: “collaborative cultures don’t happen by themselves. Some deliberate or even required arrangement is usually necessary in establishing them” (Hargreaves and Fullan, 2012: 118). Questions about how much intervention is needed and what forms such “arranged collegiality” might take remain largely open, yet have significant implications for leadership theory, policy, and practice.

Current study

As Bryk (2009) has noted, it is risky to assume that simply getting teachers together to talk ensures that good things will happen—this is often not the case absent a specific instructional system around which teachers can organize and/or structure their collective activity. Comprehensive school reform (CSR) models are one such approach to school improvement that attempt to organize and carry out the work of teaching and learning in a cohesive, systematic manner (Ford, 2014). When these programs are initially adopted, the schools which adopt them often undergo significant changes to their school organization, particularly with respect to teaching and learning. This can make them appealing contexts in which to study the changes that occur with respect to, among other things, working relationships and professional interactions among school colleagues.

While support for the Comprehensive School Reform Demonstration Program (Title I, Part F) was discontinued in 2007, Success for All, one of the most popular of these CSR programs, currently partners with over 1000 schools worldwide, including the US and the United Kingdom. While the effects of the SFA program’s approach to literacy instruction on achievement are well-documented (see, for example, Slavin et al., 2009), less explored in the literature are the ways in which SFA organizes the school and its personnel for that effort.

SFA employs a cohesive set of formal organizational controls as part of its design and implementation strategy (e.g. instructional “scripting,” detailed pacing guides, routine assessment, and monitoring of fidelity to the model by program facilitators), that are of particular interest in the present study. In prior research, scholars have noted that these features might create organizational conditions more amenable to collegial interaction (Harris, 2003; Peurach, 2011), but an explicit examination of these features and their role in this process remains largely unexplored. Our purpose in this study was to elicit the perspectives of elementary school personnel in Middleville, our focal high-performing, urban Midwestern district, on the changes they have witnessed in collegial interaction among teachers since the implementation of Success for All and the features of this program which may have spurred these changes. We hoped, through an examination of the Middleville case and their implementation of the SFA program, that insights into how to structure school organizations to facilitate the strengthening of professional relationships among teachers could be gleaned.

Defining “collegial interaction” in relationship to collegiality, collaboration and deprivatization of practice

In many countries around the world, teaching has largely been isolated, personal work (Goddard et al., 2007; Hadar and Brody, 2010; Lortie, 1975). A great deal of the appeal of collaboration as a means to improve school outcomes can be traced back to social learning theory, which posits that the most fruitful learning occurs in interaction and communication with others (Bandura, 1997). Even a cursory review of the literature reveals that “collaboration” is a term whose meaning fluctuates substantially depending on the study. The most basic definition of collaboration might be the following: “to work with at least one other in the collective pursuit of a particular goal or end,” and this definition, or some variant of this definition, is often implied in many of educational contexts in which it is used (noting that it is generally synonymous with “cooperation”). Yet others define collaboration in terms of collegiality—a more normative state of teacher relations characterized by commonly held goals, trust, and a greater share of decision-making power at the school and classroom levels (Brundrett, 1998; Torrance and Humes, 2015; Tschannen-Moran, 2001). Most agree that the deepest, most meaningful types of collaboration in service of teacher learning are characterized by locally determined and controlled efforts at the co-construction of knowledge and practice for curriculum and instruction (Hargreaves, 1991; Levine and Marcus, 2010; Little, 1990).

Conceptualizations of teacher collaboration of this latter type are closely related to the concept(s) of teacher professional community, or professional learning communities (PLCs). Although the literature on this subject is vast and many conceptual guises exist, beneficial PLCs share some common features: shared values and vision, collective responsibility for (and focus) on student learning, reflective inquiry, and collaboration (and by extension deprivatization of practice) (Stoll et al., 2006). From this perspective, collaboration is viewed as an essential component of the successful growth and development of strong professional communities when accompanied by the development of more normative commitments/perspectives on the part of collaborators (i.e. collegiality).

What seems clear is that variation in the definition of collaboration is, at least at the outset, primarily one of degree. In other words, collaborative practice among teachers could be viewed as a continuum which, at one end, requires a modicum of professional interaction and, at the other, involves serious (and oftentimes difficult) intellectual discussion and interaction around matters of teaching and learning (Honingh and Hooge, 2014). Because our study is primarily interested in how leaders and organizations can provide structure to joint work, we appropriate the term collegial interaction from Johnson (1990) and Little (1990) in order to capture a wider range of behaviors, actions, and activities that mark the larger process of moving from isolation toward authentic collaboration and professional community.

Creating organizational structures to build collegial interaction: the case of “Success for All”

Developed by Robert Slavin and Nancy Madden at Johns Hopkins University in the 1980s, SFA is an elementary-based CSR program which, since its initial development and implementation in a single Baltimore school in 1987, has been adopted by over 1200 schools across 46 states and in many countries around the world (Peurach, 2011). SFA features a school-wide curriculum in literacy for grades K–8 and schools that adopt the model are provided with materials, extensive training and professional development, and detailed instructions on how to implement and sustain the model.

From an organizational perspective, SFA establishes a quarterly assessment and regrouping system to place students with peers of the same reading level, a “solutions team” focused on parent education and involvement, and places a program facilitator in every school who is responsible for on-site instructional coaching, management of the assessment system, and ensuring all staff are communicating with one another (Peurach, 2011; Slavin et al., 2007). SFA schools are required to hold “component meetings” that enable feedback loops and ongoing dialogues between on-site staff and SFA foundation staff as well as provide monthly opportunities for school staff to interact with one another as part of teacher learning communities (Harris, 2003; Slavin et al., 2007).

Rowan and Miller (2007) noted that the SFA program addresses consistency in implementation by means of procedural controls—in other words, a set of formal control mechanisms. Formal control mechanisms are those which establish explicit rules and expectations for behavior and/or desired outcomes by means of any of the following: “policies, procedures, rules, hierarchy, forms, direct supervision, and evaluation” (Forsyth et al., 2011: 110). SFA’s use of instructional “scripting,” detailed pacing guides, routine assessment, and monitoring of fidelity to the model by program facilitators are the most widely recognized components of SFA’s formal control system (Rowan and Miller, 2007).

As critics of “contrived collegiality” have pointed out, there is good reason to be dubious of formal control mechanisms and their capacity to foster genuine collegiality and collaboration among teachers (Hargreaves and Dawe, 1990). However, some research suggests that formal control systems are not necessarily antithetical to fostering collaborative work environments, provided that the control system is strong and well-matched to the organizational context in which it is being used (Kirsch, 1996; Tenbrunsel and Messick, 1999). Organismic Integration Theory, an extensively studied facet of self-determination theory, posits that when individuals are not intrinsically motivated to exhibit desired behaviors, these tasks or behaviors can be externally prompted; over time, the individual’s natural tendency is to internalize these behaviors (along with the values that instantiate them). The more that these values and behaviors are internalized, the more self-determined (i.e. autonomous) these actions become in the future (Niemiec and Ryan, 2009). Some studies of incentivized collaboration generally support this explanation, suggesting that while externally imposed efforts at collaboration are not a sufficient long-term strategy, with the right conditions they do provide initial motivation for developing collegiality—the norms of which sustain collaboration (Feys and Devos, 2015; Lam et al., 2002).

An important precondition of increased collegial interaction is the gradual deprivatization of practice, and we hypothesize that aspects of SFA’s formal structure may create conditions more favorable to the meaningful engagement of colleagues in dialogue about instruction and student learning matters. The common curriculum, shared learning goals, and language around instruction provided as part of the SFA instructional design could also potentially serve as a framework for meaningful and productive collegial interaction around instructional matters across the school (Ford, 2014; Tschannen-Moran, 2014). These structures, as well as their manifestations in SFA practice (e.g. pacing guides and instructional coaches) assist in coordinating collective work and meaning making (Newmann et al., 2000; Owen, 2014). Over time, collective work where joint goals and values among members are shared increases the likelihood of group identification and the subsequent development of trust (Kochanek, 2005; Tschannen-Moran, 2014).

Moreover, “component meetings” provide a structure in which teachers have the opportunity to routinely work with other colleagues in the examination of achievement data and regroup students in reading levels based on these data (Harris, 2003; Slavin et al., 2007). These team meetings are led by teacher leaders, including the program facilitator, and require sustained formal and informal conversations to be effective. Other studies have indeed found the focus of school personnel on data-driven decision making (DDDM) to be a point in which meaningful and substantial interactions among colleagues about instructional matters could coalesce, provided that norms of collegiality like trust and collective responsibility are present (Datnow, 2011; Datnow and Hubbard, 2015; Kruse, 2001).

As the person designated to coordinate the component meeting process as well as ensure fidelity to the SFA instructional approach, the Success for All Foundation (SFAF) defines the ideal facilitator as an experienced classroom teacher with good interpersonal skills, and who has the respect of his or her colleagues (Slavin et al., 2008). Teacher leadership, one form of distributed leadership (DL), is defined in various ways, but perhaps the most common is the formal and informal roles that teachers play in leading collective activity and facilitating shared relationships and connections among individuals within a school (Muijs and Harris, 2007). However, as is the case with contrived collegiality, scholars have been skeptical of the nature, purpose, and function of various DL forms in schools, suggesting that these approaches might simply represent highly adapted forms of control disguised as more autonomous, collegial, and/or collaborative systems (Crawford, 2012; Lumby, 2013; Woods et al., 2004). As such, DL forms should not be seen as inherently democratic or collegial; rather their democratic potential is realized by examining how enactment supports the growth, effectiveness, agency, and self-determination of both the organization itself and its members (Woods and Gronn, 2009). The nature and degree of leadership distribution within a school shapes the decision-making authority and autonomy of its members by setting limits on employee voice, what is open for discussion or change, and, consequently, the quality of the relationships between members of the organization (i.e. authentic or transactional) (Woods et al., 2004; Woods and Gronn, 2009).

The formal roles assigned to the facilitator within the SFA model certainly raise questions about the degree to which the goals of democratic DL can be realized. The potential of teacher leaders guiding in instructional improvement and shared DDDM is necessarily circumscribed by the instructional system itself and its approach to limiting variation in practice. On these matters, there is arguably little open for discussion or dispute for those tasked with implementing the model. At the same time, the SFA does allow teachers some decision-making power and flexibility. For example, the SFAF requires a minimum of 80 percent of teacher agreement to adopt the model (via voting process) for adoption to even take place. Further, once teachers become proficient in SFA instructional delivery, they are allowed to modify the “script” and incorporate other materials, strategies, and activities (Peurach, 2011; Slavin et al., 2008). Whether these nuances of formal program implementation are sufficient to support more authentic forms of collegiality and teacher leadership remain to be seen.

Method

Middleville school district is the local educational governing body for an urban, largely working-class community of 20,000 residents, serving about 2500 students across four elementary schools, a middle, and a high school. District student body demographics have remained stable over the past ten years: approximately one-third African American, 60 percent European American, and 49 percent economically disadvantaged—a percentage which remains more than 20 percent higher than the state average.

Despite the significantly larger representation of African American students in the district as compared to the state average, Middleville has historically experienced little in the way of achievement gaps between its white and black students. In 2001, Middleville implemented SFA reading across all of its six elementary schools (later consolidated to the current 4 elementary schools), and one year later followed with SFA math, achieving 100 percent buy-in among elementary school staff in adopting both components. Thus, at the conclusion of the current study in 2008, SFA reading and math had been in operation in Middleville for approximately seven years. Prior to the adoption of these SFA components, each of the original elementary schools had been essentially free to make their own curricular decisions. Implementation of the SFA program in Middleville continues to this day.

Data collection and sample

The data presented in this investigation were collected by a research team at a Midwestern university as part of a larger study of high-performing districts in the US. The Middleville school district (a pseudonym), was chosen as a high-performing district for the larger study based on several criteria, the most important of which were that despite the relatively high number of students in poverty, its students had consistently outperformed the state mean on state reading, writing, and math tests at several grade levels, and had sustained a pattern of high and equitable achievement over a period of years. This pattern of high achievement, as well as identification of the school district as a high-performance outlier for the purposes of qualitative case study inquiry, was determined by means of an HLM growth model analysis similar to that outlined in Bowers (2010). Acknowledging the time that has passed since our original study, we undertook an analysis of recent district data contained in the new Stanford Education Data Archive (Reardon et al., 2016) (https://cepa.stanford.edu/seda/overview), to ascertain Middleville’s current status. This analysis revealed that the Middleville school district remains a high-poverty, high achieving outlier—having maintained this status for over 15 years.

For the larger study, this district was examined as a qualitative case study (Yin, 2014) in which semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with all administrators (the superintendent, assistant superintendent, and principals), the SFA program facilitators (an experienced teacher acting as an instructional coach), and a significant cross-section of teachers across the elementary, middle, and high schools. The bulk of these interview data were collected in two separate waves—an initial wave in 2005, and a follow-up approximately one year later. In an attempt to answer the research questions occupying this study, one final wave of data collection was conducted with an opportunistic sample of Middleville school staff which, it was hoped, would allow us to more closely examine emergent themes of central concern in this article. Opportunistic sampling is a type of purposive sampling which is intended to target specific types of participants along themes/theory from initial data analysis with the purpose of investigating them more in depth (Miles et al., 2013). Thus, teachers in this supplementary wave of interviews were selected based on their number of years in the district so as to probe perceptions of the ways in which the district had changed since the adoption of SFA.

Because SFA was implemented at the elementary level in the Middleville district, interview data selected for further study were limited to those staff members apart from central office staff at this level. These selection criteria resulted in a final set of 61 interviews: 42 elementary teacher interviews, three elementary principal interviews, all five SFA facilitators at the four elementary schools, and 11 central office personnel, including three interviews each with both the superintendent and assistant superintendent. Finally, the supplementary follow-up sample consisted of 15 district staff: three of the four elementary principals, four out of five SFA facilitators (one from each of the four participating schools), and eight elementary teachers at assorted grade levels (three from Wilson, two from Redding, two from Linton, and one from Babbitt, all pseudonyms).

Data analysis approach and procedures

All interviews in all waves of data collection were guided by semi-structured interview protocols (see Appendix 1) and were recorded and transcribed upon the completion of each visit. Additionally, classroom and school observations of the Middleville elementary schools were conducted during these periods. The observation protocol was open-ended in design and was used primarily in the broader study as a data triangulation tool. In this analysis, we rely primarily on the perspectives of Middleville school personnel gathered in the interviews and focus groups with the research team.

The Middleville case study employed a mixture of deductive and inductive first-cycle and second-cycle coding schemes to analyze the interview transcripts. These coding schemes were updated and modified at the beginning of each subsequent wave of data collection. Interview transcripts were coded by individual members of the research team using ATLAS.ti coding software, with enough of an overlap to ensure that each transcript was coded by no fewer than two researchers. Early on, these separate codings were compared in order to ensure inter-rater reliability, and second readers were always used to confirm individual raters’ conclusions during the coding and data analysis process, which took place over several years.

With each elementary school site as the unit of analysis, case reports were written and data arrays constructed along theoretically guided and emergent areas of inquiry to examine both the depth and breadth of focal themes within each school as well as across the school district. Concepts germane to the present study found in these initial waves were: teacher collaboration/interaction; the norms and values of the district; evidence of professional community and academic press; social/relational trust; and, of course, the nature of SFA implementation in the district and its effects on school personnel and operations. For the present study, our primary focus was on understanding the perceptions of faculty and staff on the relationship of SFA organizational structure on collegial interaction within each school site and then the degree to which there was a pattern of consistency in this relationship across the district elementary schools as a whole.

Member checking was conducted in two distinct ways. First, during the interviews, key aspects of participants’ responses were restated/summarized for participants to confirm that researchers’ understandings of phenomena aligned with those of the participants. Second, informal member checking was conducted at the commencement of the next data collection cycle as a way to begin the conversation again and to provide an opportunity for participants to respond as to the accuracy of prior assessments and reflect upon any changes to this prior account which had occurred between the two time periods. In all cases, participants did not propose significant changes to provided summaries after being afforded the opportunity to do so.

Results and analysis

Changes in collegial interaction and deprivatization of practice after SFA

The question most central to this investigation was what Middleville elementary school personnel saw as qualitative change (if any) in collegial interaction and deprivatization of practice in Middleville elementary schools before and in the time after the adoption of SFA. When Middleville school personnel interviewed in the supplemental wave were asked to reflect on the nature of collegial interaction after SFA adoption, 14 out of 15 staff members noted that there had been marked movement of teachers out of their own classrooms to working with other teachers in their buildings since SFA began. They cited a strong norm of privacy within the district regarding instructional practice prior to SFA, a norm many teachers and facilitators referred to as “shutting the door.” The Linton elementary SFA facilitator, a teacher with 35 years of teaching experience, remarked:

I think that before SFA we were, we were sort of like islands. I mean we were still friends, but we all kind of shut the door and we did our own thing (SFA facilitator, Linton Elem).

A first grade teacher at Linton, also noted:

I think there’s more interaction with the teachers, I think you have to have more interaction. You know, before—I think prior [to SFA]—you saw each other, you went in your room and that was it (First grade teacher, Linton).

The principal of Wilson, unwilling to take credit for the increases in interaction since SFA, cited a specific example of how collegial interaction had changed for the better, leading to, among other things, increased ownership and decision making on the part of teaching and learning. She reflected on the first grade teachers’ plan to separate boys and girls for the SFA math program:

Actually, in my 1st grades [the first grade teachers], they actually came up with the plan, it wasn’t my plan…So we have those kinds of things [that] would have never happened, I think, seven or eight years ago [prior to SFA]. Teachers would have pretty much stayed in their own room, did their own thing (Principal, Wilson elementary).

As if symbolic of this shift to more openness in orientation to teaching and learning in their classrooms, our observations of classrooms and lessons throughout the study yielded few instances of teachers with shut doors, particularly during the 90-minute SFA reading block. The reason often given for this behavior was to give the SFA facilitators and other administrative staff an opportunity to “pop in” and observe the lessons, something they did frequently. There was a degree of positivity toward collegial interest in teaching practice that was somewhat unusual when reflecting on our experience with other school districts. When questioned about SFA procedures, in particular the monitoring of practice and frequent visits by the SFA facilitator, one fourth grade teacher said it best:

Well, it doesn’t bother me when someone comes in my room because we’re so used to it by now. Our facilitator, she’s in here every single day…We’ve had principals and teachers from other buildings. The Success for All evaluators come in three or four times a year. I think it’s great (Fifth grade teacher, Babbitt).

Features of the SFA program implicated in increased collegial interaction

While metaphors like “island” and phrases like “shutting the door” were commonly invoked in reference to norms of privacy that prevailed prior to SFA, school personnel noted this had given way to increased collegial interaction in the years since SFA’s adoption. The question remained, what aspects of the SFA program’s design and implementation approach may have facilitated more collegial interaction?

In reflecting on SFA program structures, many school personnel referenced the common curriculum and shared learning goals as key facilitators of increased interaction. Discussions among teachers, for example, were more useful because they could (among other things), coordinate instruction in adjacent grades—teachers could effectively preempt learning gaps by checking in periodically. One teacher described the nature of these types of interactions in detail:

I think because all the teachers talk, it’s not like you get your next group and say “oh the second grade teacher didn’t do anything.” I think because all the teachers talk. We’ll say, “Well what do you need me to do for next year?” (First grade teacher, Wilson).

Another teacher echoed these perceptions of the common curriculum and shared learning goals:

[With the SFA curriculum], I think now you find that the teachers interact…because if I end up seeing kids struggling or whatever, I can go back to the kindergarten teacher and say, “Hey, I’m seeing this, what did you see happen with it?” (First grade teacher, Linton).

According to Bryk and Schneider (2002), the teacher-teacher role relation is characterized by a dependency of teachers in the higher grades on those in the lower grades to do an adequate job of preparing students. This dependency creates vulnerabilities which, if left unaddressed, could threaten the development of trust and collective responsibility for learning. In our interviews with Middleville teachers and facilitators, we often heard teachers describe the ways in which the SFA instructional framework (as defined by the common curriculum, carefully regimented instructional delivery, and shared language and learning goals around instruction), seemed to play a role in reducing this vulnerability. Linton’s facilitator, when describing how things used to be, explained:

[y]ears ago, I had no clue. [Now I know] when they start talking in sentences in Kindergarten, and in first grade keeping a log, that this is working toward what they have to do on that third grade [or fourth grade] math test. [SFA] has opened it up that we are all in this together. It’s not that poor fourth grade teacher that used to get pounded—where nobody wanted to [teach] fourth grade (SFA facilitator, Linton).

SFA employs a great deal of DDDM as a part of improving student achievement, and these “component meetings” are used to periodically regroup students in order to optimize their learning experience. More specifically, however, the component meetings provided an opportunity for the SFA facilitator, teachers, and others to come together and pore over student assessment data every nine weeks for the purpose of addressing student issues and making adjustments in their placements. As a mainstay of the SFA “routine,” and buttressed by a school-wide curriculum and adequate time, many teachers and facilitators remarked that the component meetings had precipitated more interaction with colleagues. A Wilson teacher explained: “I would say that it definitely kind of forces you to have more interaction and they allow more time for that” (Kindergarten teacher, Wilson).

The principal at Babbit elementary upon discussing the student regrouping process reflects on how the SFA program “forces the issue” to some extent:

[The] format has opened up that collaboration because you do have other kids from other classrooms come into your reading groups…Really, the whole [SFA] program forced the issue (Principal, Babbit elementary).

A “new” role for the SFA facilitator: facilitating collegiality

The SFAF defines the ideal facilitator as one who is an experienced classroom teacher with good interpersonal skills, and one who has the respect of his or her colleagues (Slavin et al., 2008), and this was certainly the case for all of the facilitators in Middleville. These teacher leaders were carefully chosen from among the most experienced and respected teachers in the district and exuded commitment to helping their fellow teachers, school, and district achieve success for their students. The facilitators we observed in the study schools were a constant presence in the school hallways and classrooms and always on the move, folders of papers in hand.

Aside from their formal roles, we also witnessed program facilitators performing other roles—ones not necessarily a part of their job description. Our analysis revealed that the SFA facilitators played a key role in fostering collegiality by mitigating the tensions and vulnerabilities among teachers and other school staff that invariably arise as colleagues begin to interact and work more collectively on challenging tasks. Because the SFA facilitator had daily contact with a significant number of teachers and school staff throughout the school, they had perhaps the greatest opportunity of any individual staff member to impact the quality of relationships and sense of collegiality within their particular building, save the principal. In an analysis separate from the study reported here, preliminary findings of the impact of the SFA facilitators in Middleville revealed that facilitator-led professional development opportunities fostered an environment whereby teachers were encouraged to ask questions, share and model instructional methods, talk openly about their practice, and collaborate with fellow teachers on individual student needs (Bowers, 2008).

The findings of the present study extend these initial understandings by revealing that not only do SFA facilitators work in the above capacities to improve teacher relationships and the quality and substance of their interactions, but, because of their centrality within the social network of the school, they often served as a buffer when teachers wished to vent but did not necessarily want to voice their concerns to the principal (or fellow teachers, as the case might be). Every facilitator in our sample made mention of their role as a buffer between school leaders and staff. When asked about her role, Redding’s facilitator stated:

I think teachers feel comfortable with being able to say something to me that they can’t say to the principal, they can’t say to the child, they can’t say to another teacher. So I’m just kind of that buffer who buffs the thing that is going on at that time.

Principals, to some degree, also understood this as an acquired role of the facilitator. The principal of Babbitt explained:

[Our facilitator] is a good person, she sort of mends fences and keeps everything flowing…Curriculum gaps, for example. We found curriculum gaps between second and third grade math and we are trying to fix that without the teachers and the second grade thinking that we’re picking on [them].

Furthermore, teachers too were aware of this informal aspect of the role of the facilitator, often requesting assistance in coping with new demands and challenges. A Kindergarten teacher at Wilson explained: “They just came up with a new form we’re doing in kindergarten, and I’m like these forms are driving me crazy and she’ll sit there and help you go through it.” A fourth grade Redding teacher also describes the collegiality which she has experienced in working with her building facilitator and teaching colleagues: “We [the teachers] do a lot of collaborative thinking and [the facilitator] is good at making sure that we’re where we need to be.”

But what exactly was the nature of the teacher leaders’ role with respect to teacher empowerment and decision making? This same Redding teacher expounded on her experiences with her colleagues, including the facilitator:

[In the beginning] I felt like I had to do every single thing exactly…Once we started to get together with the facilitators and the other teachers…we started questioning and they [the facilitators] were like, yeah, you have to tweak it [the program] to make it work…We have some younger, less experienced teachers and they’ll come into the lounge at lunch time and say “I don’t get this particular lesson.” We try to help one another. We’re a pretty close knit group here so I think we kind of monitor one another too and try to help each other out.

As the quote above as well as those following below describe, the confluence of actions on the part of facilitators had tangible consequences for the growth and development of staff collegiality in a number of dimensions that went beyond improved interaction: the development of trust and collective responsibility as well as some level of agency. In a focus group with the SFA facilitators, they reflected on their role as teacher leaders with respect to these normative developments in regard to themselves and their colleagues within and across sites:

And I think there’s trust, like [another facilitator] said, if a teacher comes to us and they just really need to let down, it’s not like going to their principal. They can do it with us. I think there’s a big trust there that we built also (Facilitator focus group).

When asked to describe their school in a few words since SFA, a Linton teacher described the collective responsibility for learning that has been fostered as a result:

Togetherness. My class is not just my class; other teachers are free to walk in at any time. [The children] know that the whole entire staff, everyone here is responsible for them, which is wonderful (First grade teacher, Linton).

Discussion and implications

In this study, we sought to investigate the role of a school’s organizational structure on facilitating collegial interaction and deprivatization of practice among teachers by examining whether Middleville elementary schools experienced a shift in their patterns of interaction following the implementation of the SFA program. In the years after SFA was initially adopted, our evidence suggests that school personnel perceived a marked change in the patterns of interaction among teachers within the Middleville elementary schools. Staff recalled a high degree of privatized practice among teachers prior to SFA, and they described this former pattern in unique but similar ways. Some referred to teachers as “islands” while others described norms of isolation as teachers “shutting the door.” Since the implementation of SFA, however, Middleville teachers, by their own recollection, had made strides in breaking free of this pattern and were working more with one another around school matters.

Professional development opportunities, common planning time between teachers, physical proximity, and common technical language are all well-known structural (and leader-malleable) facilitators of teacher interaction, collaboration, and the closely related concept of teacher professional community (Kruse, 2001; Lai and Cheung, 2015; Owen, 2014). When asked, Middleville staff pointed to particular components of the SFA program they felt scaffolded the process of collegial interaction by first providing teachers with a common curriculum, language, and routine around instruction. The prescription of these key components of SFA necessarily led to the development and discovery of shared learning goals for students, which opened up spaces for further interaction.

The emergence of trust and collective responsibility among a work group is strongly predicated on addressing the interdependence associated with collective work (Bryk and Schneider, 2002; Forsyth et al., 2011). Armed with a common language and routine around instruction, for example, teachers did not have to worry whether kids in prior grades were being adequately prepared for future work—they could count on it and each other. The collective work of developing student learning goals in the “component meeting” was yet another example. Because of the prevalence and frequency of these component meetings across the school year and the number of school staff involved in the decision-making process, teachers recalled that these spaces provided varied stakeholders with opportunities to reach consensus regarding the learning needs of their students—a collective goal only achievable with trust and some degree of professional community (Newmann et al., 2000).

The evidence presented above suggests that the program facilitators might have also contributed to this process in Middleville. SFA facilitators were reported by various school personnel as playing a key role in helping to maintain respectful and collegial relationships within each Middleville elementary school. According to teachers, facilitators were viewed as teacher leaders rather than administrators, and thus felt comfortable discussing concerns/frustrations with them instead of the principal or other teachers. By their own accounts, school staff found that this eased tensions that might otherwise have existed if these teachers had served in a more formal evaluation capacity.

Furthermore, we submit that the position of facilitator may have, in and of itself, represented a break from earlier tendencies toward privatized practice in Middleville. The role of facilitator entailed the willingness of teachers to allow others into their classrooms to observe their practice, and to accept constructive feedback. This process necessarily engenders vulnerability and risk, but our evidence suggests that the careful selection of facilitators coupled with the SFA instructional program worked effectively to mitigate these vulnerabilities in Middleville. By formally controlling instructional delivery in and across classrooms, we surmised that this may have facilitated teachers’ willingness to open up their classrooms for increased scrutiny: It allowed them to focus more on how to improve what they were doing and less on what their practice said about them as a teacher.

However, scholars have argued that collegiality among school staff cannot (or more to the point, should not) be “contrived” if it is to be truly beneficial to teachers (Hargreaves, 1991). Similarly, scholars have argued that the utilization of DL approaches should not be employed for the purpose of controlling and/or constraining the work of teachers, and in their efforts to develop agency, voice, and growth as professionals and colleagues (Lumby, 2013; Woods et al., 2004; Woods and Gronn, 2009). Indeed, our findings in this study necessarily led to complex conclusions with respect to these issues. On the one hand, though SFA did “force the issue” of teacher interaction, it did lead teachers (and facilitators) to find meaningful ways of working together, and these sustained interactions seem to have had a substantial effect on various aspects of collegiality, including trust and collective responsibility. They found space, with the help of the program facilitator, to challenge the prescribed program and tweak it to suit their needs. Yet on the other, the SFA program does advance a particular instructional approach and philosophy, and thus the actions of teachers (and the facilitators who support them) are necessarily constrained by this reality. Certain aspects of the program are, by definition, not negotiable. With the help of the program facilitators, teachers were given opportunities to exercise their voice and decision-making power, albeit from within the constraints of the program design and purpose.

Conclusion

We recognize that collegial interaction as described by Middleville elementary school staff may seem far from the deep, meaningful interactions which encapsulate the desired (yet elusive) practices of more collaborative and/or professional communities. Our findings highlight the inherent complexities in the use of control mechanisms for increased collegial interaction, showing that, at times, formal control mechanisms such as those employed by the SFA program may be effective at, as Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) refer to it, “arranging collegiality.” While at the outset SFA teachers were compelled to try out new patterns of interaction, it is our contention that, through their participation, they began to see value in collaboration, and from there other opportunities for interaction became salient. While Bryk (2009) reminds us that simply getting teachers together does not guarantee that good things will happen—and that is certainly true—we submit that “good things” are even less likely to happen if teachers do not get together at all. This being said, we do concede that this study is limited in what it reveals about what is lost when interactions are arranged in such a way. The findings of this study reveal the critical importance of examining the driving purpose behind the cultivation of collaborative practice and the norms of collegiality to go along with it—these are not just ends in and of themselves.

Another important limitation to this study is the age of the data with which we are working and concerns this raises for the applicability of the findings to current issues of theory, policy, and practice. Current trends in policy and practice suggest a continued increase—not decrease—in instrumental or otherwise “technocratic” solutions to issues of leading, teaching, and learning (Mehta, 2013). Philosophical questions notwithstanding, the question of how leaders can enhance and/or support quality teaching and learning in these contexts is perhaps more critical than ever. At the very least, the Middleville case and the changes its staff experienced as a result of school improvement, might prove illuminating to schools and school leaders who are looking for ways in which to disrupt the status quo of collegial relations (i.e. strong norms of privacy/isolation) in their school.

In conclusion, we submit that creating organizational structures which provide opportunities for teachers to interact meaningfully around issues of teaching and learning is a necessary (but admittedly insufficient) condition in moving toward a more collaborative work environment for a school. Indeed, current challenges that school leaders face in adopting Common Core State Standards highlight the need for mobilizing collective effort in schools to a greater degree. The lack of curricular and pedagogical specificity inherent in the Common Core design—as well as the demands on teacher learning needed as a result—only heightens the importance of these efforts. While it remains to be seen, we predict that this lack of specificity will only serve to enhance disparities between schools which have chronically strong norms of isolation and those that do not.

Footnotes

Appendix 1 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 author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors would like to acknowledge that this work has been supported by a generous grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (grant number #2004–4151).

References

Bandura

(1997) Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. New York: Freeman.

Bowers

(2008) Promoting excellence: “Good to Great,” NYC’s District #2, and the case of a high performing school district. Leadership and Policy in Schools 7(2): 154–177.

Bowers

(2010) Toward addressing the issue of site selection in district effectiveness research: A two level hierarchical linear growth model. Educational Administration Quarterly 46(3): 395–425.

Brundrett

(1998) What lies behind collegiality, legitimation or control? Educational Management and Administration 26(3): 305–316.

Bryk

(2009) Support a science of performance improvement. Phi Delta Kappan 90(8): 597–600.

Bryk

Schneider

(2002) Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Crawford

(2012) Solo and distributed leadership: Definitions and dilemmas. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 40(5): 610–620.

Datnow

(2011) Collaboration and contrived collegiality: Revisiting Hargreaves in the age of accountability. Journal of Educational Change 12(2): 147–158.

Datnow

Hubbard

(2015) Teachers’ use of assessment data to inform instruction: Lessons from the past and prospects for the future. Teachers College Record, 117(4): 1–26.

10.

Feys

Devos

(2015) What comes out of incentivized collaboration: A qualitative analysis of eight Flemish school networks. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 43(5): 738–754.

11.

Ford

(2014) Trust, control, and comprehensive school reform: Investigating growth in teacher-teacher relational trust in Success for All schools. In: Van Maele

Forsyth

Van Houtte

(eds) Trust and School Life: The Role of Trust for Learning, Teaching, Leading and Bridging. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer Science, pp. 229–258.

12.

Forsyth

Adams

Hoy

(2011) Collective Trust: Why Schools Can’t Improve Without It. New York: Teachers College Press.

13.

Goddard

Tschannen-Moran

(2007) A theoretical and empirical investigation of teacher collaboration for school improvement and student achievement in public elementary schools. Teachers College Record 109(4): 877–896.

14.

Hadar

Brody

(2010) From isolation to symphonic harmony: Building a professional development community among teacher educators. Teaching and Teacher Education 26(8): 1641–1651.

15.

Hargreaves

(1991) Contrived collegiality: The micropolitics of teacher collaboration. In: Blase

(ed.) The Politics of Life in Schools: Power, Conflict, and Cooperation. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, pp.46–72.

16.

Hargreaves

Dawe

(1990) Paths of professional development: Contrived collegiality, collaborative culture, and the case of peer coaching. Teaching and Teacher Education 6(3): 227–241.

17.

Hargreaves

Fullan

(2012) Professional Capital: Transforming Teaching in Every School. New York: Teachers College Press.

18.

Harris

(2003) Behind the classroom door: The challenge of organizational and pedagogical change. Journal of Educational Change 4(4): 369–382.

19.

Honingh

Hooge

(2014) The effect of school-leader support and participation in decision making on teacher collaboration in Dutch schools. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 42(1): 75–98.

20.

Johnson

(1990) Teachers at Work: Achieving Success in Our Schools. New York: Basic Books.

21.

Kirsch

(1996) The management of complex tasks in organizations: Controlling the systems development process. Organizational Science 7(1): 1–21.

22.

Kochanek

(2005) Building Trust for Better Schools: Research Based Practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

23.

Kruse

(2001) Creating communities of reform: Continuous improvment planning teams. Journal of Educational Administration 39(4): 359–383.

24.

Lai

Cheung

(2015) Enacting teacher leadership: The role of teachers in bringing about change. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 43(5): 673–692.

25.

Lam

S-F

Yim

P-S

Lam

TW-H

(2002) Transforming school culture: Can true collaboration be initiated? Educational Research 44(2): 181–195.

26.

Lavié

(2006) Academic discourses on school-based teacher collaboration: Revisiting the arguments. Educational Administration Quarterly 42(5): 773–805.

27.

Levine

Marcus

(2010) How the structure and focus of teachers’ collaborative activities facilitate and constrain teacher learning. Teaching and Teacher Education 26(3): 389–398.

28.

Little

(1990) The persistence of privacy: Autonomy and initiative in teachers’ professional relations. Teachers College Record 91(4): 509–536.

29.

Lortie

(1975) Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

30.

Lumby

(2013) Distributed leadership: The uses and abuses of power. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 41(5): 581–597.

31.

Mehta

(2013) The Allure of Order: High Hopes, Dashed Expectations, and the Troubled Quest to Remake American Schooling. London: Oxford University Press.

32.

Miles

Huberman

Saldaña

(2014) Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

33.

Muijs

Harris

(2007) Teacher leadership in (in)action. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 35(1): 111–134.

34.

Newmann

King

Youngs

(2000) Professional development that addresses school capacity: Lessons from urban elementary schools. American Journal of Education 108(4): 259–299.

35.

Niemiec

Ryan

(2009) Autonomy, competence, and relatedness in the classroom: Applying self-determination theory to educational practice. Theory and Research in Education 7(2): 133–144.

36.

Owen

(2014) Teacher professional learning communities: Going beyond contrived collegiality toward challenging debate and collegial learning and professional growth. Australian Journal of Adult Learning 54(2): 54–77.

37.

Peurach

(2011) Seeing Complexity in Public Education: Problems, Possibilities, and Success for All. London: Oxford University Press.

38.

Reardon

Kalogrides

. (2016) Stanford education data archive. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/db586ns4974 (Retrieved July 10, 2016)

39.

Rowan

Miller

(2007) Organizational strategies for promoting instructional change: Implementation dynamics in schools working with comprehensive school reform providers. American Educational Research Journal 44(2): 252–297.

40.

Slavin

Madden

Datnow

(2007) Research in, research out: The role of research in the development and scale-up of Success for All. In: Fuhrman

Cohen

Mosher

(eds) The State of Education Policy Research. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp.261–279.

41.

Slavin

Lake

Chambers

. (2009) Effective reading programs for the elementary grades: A best-evidence synthesis. Review of Educational Research 79(4): 1391–1465.

42.

Slavin

Madden

Chambers

. (2008). 2 Million Children: Success for All. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin

43.

Stoll

Bolam

. (2006) Professional learning communities: A review of the literature. Journal of Educational Change 7: 221–258

44.

Tenbrunsel

Messick

(1999) Sanctioning systems, decision frames, and cooperation. Administrative Science Quarterly 44(4): 684–707.

45.

Torrance

Humes

(2015) The shifting discourses of educational leadership: International trends and Scotland’s response. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 43(5): 792–810.

46.

Tschannen-Moran

(2001) Collaboration and the need for trust. Journal of Educational Administration 39(4): 308–331.

47.

Tschannen-Moran

(2014) Trust Matters: Leadership for Successful Schools. 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

48.

Woods

Gronn

(2009) Nurturing democracy: The contribution of distributed leadership to a democratic organizational landscape. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 37(4): 430–451.

49.

Woods

Bennett

Harvey

. (2004) Variabilities and dualities in distributed leadership findings from a systematic literature review. Educational Management Administration and Leadership 32(4): 439–57.

50.

Yin

(2014) Case Study Research: Design and Methods. 5th ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications.