"Teaching is a lonely profession," educators sometimes observe. When teachers must spend nearly all their time with students in classrooms or planning lessons and grading papers alone, it is not surprising to hear them say they feel isolated from their colleagues. It would almost seem that teaching is supposed to be an isolated occupation—a completely self-reliant profession—that you shouldn't be doing if you can't do it all on your own.
Dennis Sparks questions this tradition. Executive director of the National Staff Development Council in Oxford, Ohio, Sparks asserts that teaching is a complex, demanding task, and that it only makes sense for teachers to collaborate. "Just as doctors often collaborate on difficult cases," he says, "teachers need time to collaborate on planning challenging lessons and finding ways to help students who aren't doing well to meet high standards."
It can be difficult to find time for collaboration, yet all schools can find time once they develop a shared vision of what's important, insists Rick DuFour, superintendent of the Adlai E. Stevenson High School District in Lincolnshire, Ill. The first step, he says, is to ask teachers what kind of place they want their school to be. No faculty would want to be part of a school "where each teacher is an island and works alone," states DuFour. When teachers work together, "they're more effective and creative in helping students learn," he believes.
Once teachers and administrators acknowledge that they value a collaborative work culture—that they want to work together to help all kids learn—then they can begin to create a structure and a process to pursue their goal, says DuFour. His own school district is a model of what a collaborative culture can accomplish. Principal Dan Galloway points to the fact that teachers at Stevenson High School came up with a plan that has pleased everyone. In addition to scheduling daily common planning time for most interdisciplinary teams, the teachers voluntarily agreed to come to school 15 minutes early on the first day of each week. By delaying the start of school 30 minutes on that day and reducing each class period by 5 minutes, the entire faculty gains 45 minutes of collaborative planning time, plus 15 minutes before the first class. "We wouldn't have had as much buy-in if we had designated Saturdays or after-school time," notes Galloway. "Teachers didn't want collaborative time in addition to the school day—they wanted it as part of their school day."
In support of this plan, the Stevenson school board agreed that this time would be reserved exclusively for teachers to work together in collaborative teams, Galloway says, adding that the plan hasn't cost a penny, doesn't require students to arrive at school later, and hasn't created problems. "At the beginning of the year, we were a little worried about 3,000 students coming into the building without teachers around," he recalls, "but we've had no problems whatsoever." The students like the extra time as much as the teachers do, says Galloway. They spend it in the tutoring center, the testing center, the computer center, the library, the gym, the counseling office, or with the social workers—faculty who have discretionary time between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m.
As for the teachers, DuFour reports that they are "sharing ideas and materials, asking big questions, making presentations to one another, critiquing them, doing joint planning and collaborative action research. I think it's been the best staff development I've ever seen." Galloway agrees. "Collaboration improves instructional quality all around. When teachers collaborate, students benefit from the best ideas of all the teachers rather than receiving only one teacher's best efforts," he observes.
To keep teachers from using the collaborative planning time for routine activities like grading papers, Galloway requires his teachers to produce common assessments, rubrics, data analysis on assessment, and strategies for improving. "We don't ask them to create agendas or minutes of meetings," adds DuFour. "We just ask them to show us the fruits of their labor."
The collaborative culture is valued even more than the planning time, DuFour emphasizes. "People can plan by themselves," he says. "We don't want people working by themselves. What's driving our time commitment is a commitment to continuous improvement. This faculty takes the notion of success for every student very seriously. That's why we value collaboration."
Other Models
The schedule at Stevenson High School is only one of many ways to create time for teachers to collaborate. Dufour suggests that given 45 minutes, any school faculty could come up with at least a half dozen scheduling strategies that would create more time without violating teacher contracts. "This isn't a question of know-how," he states. "It's a question of want-to."
At Belvedere Elementary School in Falls Church, Va., teachers struggled for years trying to schedule time for collaboration. But before Belvedere became a "Success by Eight" school this year, with the goal of having every child read by 3rd grade, faculty members' "want-to" wasn't strong enough to induce them to set aside the time that such a challenging goal requires. Now, although teacher contracts stipulate that the official starting time is 8:40 a.m., teachers have mutually agreed to devote 8–9 a.m. every Tuesday morning for team and committee planning time.
Principal Sandra Allison reports that in addition to the Tuesday morning meetings, the master schedule gives grade-level teams common planning time at least two or three times a week during music, art, and physical education. The experience of fine-tuning their schedule was "nerve-racking," she concedes, but says the benefits are worth it. Now Belvedere has not only grade-level planning times but also horizontal "family" planning times for kindergarten, 1st, and 2nd grade teachers.
"But what we're most proud of," says Allison, "is our buddy class schedule." This arrangement gives teachers an additional hour of collaborative planning time twice a month. Every Wednesday, for example, 2nd grade classes join 5th grade buddy classes for partnered activities, allowing 2nd grade teachers an hour of collaborative planning. The following week, it's reversed.
"Kids love it," states Allison, "and the teachers have come to see it as absolutely necessary. It's kids helping kids while teachers are helping teachers." Allison hastens to add that it's not the master schedule that drives instruction but rather "our focus on children and instruction that drives how we design the master plan."
Michael Rettig, director of the Center for School Leadership and an associate professor in the School of Education at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., describes an innovative solution for finding collaborative planning time in high schools. By trading and rearranging time in four-by-four block schedules, teachers can take advantage of day-long planning sessions once a month or even once a week, depending on their goals.
In the most popular version of this plan, students attend all four classes as usual on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. On Wednesdays, they attend only one daylong class while teachers for the other three classes have daylong collaborative planning sessions and professional development. By the end of four weeks, teachers in all four classes have had their turn. Variations on the cycle permit teachers to collaborate more or less often, depending on their needs.
"Some teachers roll their eyes when they first hear about this," admits Rettig, "but a daylong class is perfect for a field trip or for writing research papers—activities that require a big chunk of time." Also, he notes, students need not miss any classes because of field trips.
But the purpose of schedules and collaborative planning is neither field trips nor programs, experts say. "The focus has to be on outcomes," says Principal Galloway. "Our whole purpose for doing this [schedule] is to create a learning climate that offers higher potentials for student learning." When teachers and administrators are equally interested in student achievement, he says, finding time for collaboration is not as hard as it sounds.
Roadblocks to Collaboration
Common beliefs about teaching often get in the way of devoting time to collaborative planning, says Dennis Sparks, executive director of the National Staff Development Council. "If your goal is high levels of learning for all students," he says, "you have to let go of certain assumptions about schools, schedules, and time."
One such assumption is that teaching is a semiskilled occupation, notes Sparks. "If you've never quite identified that assumption, you might operate from it almost unconsciously," he says. "After all, you've seen lots of people teach, and it doesn't look that hard." Sparks cites people who announce plans to go into teaching at the end of their career, "as though if you've lived a while, had some experiences, and know something, you can teach."
In reality, he argues, teaching is a complicated, sophisticated task. "Planning and teaching powerful lessons is a job for highly qualified professionals. But if you start with the assumption that teaching is not a very difficult task, then what need is there to collaborate with other teachers?" he asks.
Likewise, the belief that standards and more rigorous assessments will induce teachers to work harder and students to learn more may keep educators from devoting time to collaboration, says Sparks. "This belief rests on the assumption that teachers already know all they need to know—they just need to be prodded into teaching harder," he says. Actually, teachers need generous amounts of time for continuous professional development and instructional planning, argues Sparks, so that they can maintain "a deep knowledge of what they teach and a broad repertoire of instructional skills to deal with today's diverse student body."
A "factory model mind-set" also keeps schools from devoting more time to collaboration, says Rick DuFour, superintendent of the Adlai E. Stevenson High School District in Lincolnshire, Ill. "Schools running on the factory model assume that when the teacher is not in the classroom, the assembly line has been shut down," he says. "I cringe when I hear superintendents say, `There's no substitute for the teacher. I don't want my teachers going off to conferences or visiting with colleagues. I want them in the classroom.'"
The issue is not whether a teacher is working with students for a certain number of minutes, but rather "the quality of those minutes," argues DuFour. He insists that working with colleagues, examining student work, developing rubrics, looking at data, reading professional literature, identifying problems, and coming up with strategies for solving those problems are all parts of good teaching that improve achievement but require time—time that wise educators build into the teaching day.
