TEACHER COLLABORATION AS A FACTOR FOR LEARNING AND SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT. A CASE STUDY
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/educxx1.20181Keywords:
Teacher collaboration, school improvement, educational innovation, professional development.Abstract
Research has shown that teacher collaboration is essential for boostingeducational innovation and school improvement. However, not all collaborative practices can stimulate substantial changes in teaching or develop the capacity for innovation. Therefore, this study aims to describe and comprehend which collaborative practices can potentially have an impact on teacher learning while encouraging collective capacity to develop educational innovation and improvement processes. Given the qualitative nature of our inquiry on collaborative work, we conducted an instrumental and ethnographic case study in which we analyzed two high schools characterized by a collaborative culture with satisfactory innovative processes. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews, documentation analysis and participant and nonparticipant observations. Our findings suggest that teacher collaboration can occur through different practices related to coordination, joint development and problem solving. Coordination appears as one of the weakest forms of collaborative work: it does not require shared values, no interdependent relationships are generated and it does not necessarily encourage teacher learning. Instead, the development of interdisciplinary projects and joint problem
solving demands strong teacher interdependence on the basis of shared
values, while offering exchanges with great potential to generate teacher learning.
Research on teacher collaboration therefore appears strategic towards
educational change: we need to comprehend what teachers do and what they talk about when they meet, and the impact these exchanges have on their ability to learn and their capacity to change. This will undoubtedly deepen our knowledge on educational innovation and school improvement.
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