Why don't we collaborate more?
Reflections on the loneliness of teaching, and why team teaching isn't an easy fix
Despite the fact that you’re rarely alone during the school day, teaching can be strangely lonely. Most teaching, certainly in the English state school system, is built upon what some call a “single cell” model - where one teacher always teaches their one class of students in a single room.
Now this has its advantages for teachers. It’s always super clear who is responsible for planning and teaching (you), who is accountable for results (mostly you) and who is, or should be making the key decisions about how to structure learning within the classroom (you, again). Yes, you might have a progressive approach to co-creating the curriculum with your students, empowering them to shape their own learning, but the extent to which they are enabled to do that is still ultimately determined by you, the teacher. Even in schools where there are high-control strategies used to guide teaching approaches, by and large, teachers have a reasonable degree of autonomy about how they do things in “their” classroom. This can be a great strength, but also a huge responsibility. As the late Haim Ginott, school teacher and child psychologist put it:
“I have come to a frightening conclusion.
I am the decisive element in the classroom.
It is my personal approach that creates the climate.
It is my daily mood that makes the weather.
As a teacher I possess tremendous power to make a child's life miserable or joyous.
I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration.
I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal.
In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis
will be escalated or de-escalated, and a child humanized or de-humanized.”
Working in silos
One of the downsides to the independence of standard models of teaching is that it leads to a way of working which can be strangely siloed - opportunities for learning from and with other teachers are too often seen through the lens of scrutiny and inspection, and this can be a breeding ground for anxiety and imposter phenomenon. If you rarely see others carrying out their day-to-day teaching, and they rarely see you, it’s easy to worry whether you’re doing it right at all. It also means a lot of professional development can feel quite distanced from the reality of the classroom - listening to someone describe their practice or give a lecture about a teaching strategy is very different to seeing it in action.
Teaching in teams
There are alternatives. Team teaching is becoming more common in some parts of higher education, partly due to the development of more distributed and international modes of delivery, but also due to increasing multi-disciplinarity in courses, such that students benefit from the expertise and insights of different teachers. More and more teachers are recognising that there are pedagogical advantages to team teaching approaches, as well as the pragmatic ones around avoiding a single point of failure or being able to offer synchronous teaching sessions in multiple time zones. Team teaching can enrich the learning environment with more diverse perspectives and approaches, and allow each teacher more opportunity to reflect on and develop their practice.
And there are school examples. I had the pleasure last week of meeting Heath McNeil, Principal of a New Zealand primary school, and in his school, teachers team teach larger groups of students - sharing responsibility for planning, delivery and student support. The teams of teachers have a very high degree of autonomy about how they structure the learning and support for their groups of students. They work together to draw on each other’s strengths, sharing knowledge, ideas and ultimately workload. It’s a model which Heath reports is working very well for the school by a number of important measures - the school has an excellent track record for inclusion of students with even the highest levels of need, and extremely low (certainly by English standards) rates of exclusion. Many teachers thrive in this environment, having not only daily, but moment-by-moment opportunities to learn from each other and develop their practice.
The cost of collaboration
But any collaboration is not without its drawbacks, and perhaps it’s a bit the case of when team teaching is good, it’s very very good, but when it’s bad, it can be horrid. And that’s especially around the team culture and the relationships between those in the teaching team. When these are good, and the team has high levels of psychological safety, they can perform very well. When they are not, perhaps because the team don’t have good resources or support to work through conflict, things can deteriorate quite quickly.
Because the thing is, most teachers are not used to sharing their classroom and their autonomy. Collaboration can be empowering; however, it also demands a willingness to loosen your grip, as it involves ceding some personal decision-making authority to the team. Even if it seems obvious what might benefit your students' learning, it's likely that your colleagues may not always concur.
Talking to Heath made me wonder how I would feel teaching in that kind of set up (learning in larger classrooms is another question, and one to consider another time). Part of me, if I’m honest, recoils at the idea of team teaching all the time. It sounds unfamiliar, awkward, and difficult to manage. But largely that’s to do with the time pressure I remember being under as a teacher. In order to survive the workload, I got very good at “getting things done”, and quickly. I made quick decisions, I planned quickly, I adopted strategies to mark and assess more quickly. I’m sure more time and reflection would have improved the quality of my teaching, but sometimes you have to do whatever it takes just to keep your head above water.
Although team teaching might eventually lighten the workload, short term, all that additional communication and negotiation feels like it would be slow and potentially emotionally draining too. A lot would depend on the team and how I felt in it - would I feel safe enough to speak up with ideas and concerns, and would my voice be heard? At the outset, it feels like a lot to get my head around.
Worth the effort?
But then I remember the challenges of handling a difficult class alone and feeling immense pressure as an individual teacher to achieve certain results and perform in a particular way. And I think actually, having supportive colleagues to tackle that alongside would be brilliant. In the long run, I’m sure my teaching would be much better for it - it would be easier to stay open, inspired and continually improving when surrounded by fresh ideas and different perspectives.
So, I don’t think team teaching would be an easy option at all, but I do think it has the potential to be more supported and supportive, collaborative, inspiring and ultimately less lonely.
Of course, a lot of it hinges on collaborative teaching being managed well. It takes time and effort to establish ways of working, and to challenge some of the tacit assumptions about collaboration. Team teaching is not (yet?) the norm in the teaching profession so there’s not a great deal of practice and evidence to draw on. Embracing this approach requires courage to try something different and a willingness to experiment to make it effective. However, hearing about collaborative teaching models in action is inspiring, and I’m keen to learn more about places where such models are implemented, and to understand how they impact both teachers and their students.