What Does Effective Collaboration Look Like?

By Dr. Douglas Reeves

February 2, 2020

This week I was asked by an educator, “What does collaboration look like?” It’s a profound question, because the answer is much deeper than educators and administrators sitting around a table and being pleasant to one another. Collaboration is hard work and often requires a level of vulnerability that does not come easily to many faculty members.

First, we must decide what we will collaborate about. The four central questions of Professional Learning Communities help answer the question. We must collaborate about:

1.     What we want students to learn.

2.     How we will know if they learned it.

3.     What we will do if they have not.

4.     What we will do if they already have.

The shorthand I use for these four essentials is: learning, assessment, intervention, and extension. My experience is that faculty are much better at collaborating on learning – lesson planning, learning objectives, priority standards – than about the other three. But here’s the challenge: If we don’t have common formative assessments and the willingness to share actual examples of student work with our colleagues, then we really can’t answer the first question about learning. Faculty that only do unit planning and learning objectives are focused on delivery – what the teachers say – and not on learning – how the students respond (or don’t) to instruction.

Therefore, it is absolutely essential that faculties committed to collaboration devote at least one of their collaborative team meetings every month to looking at real student work. The best protocol for this is when teachers bring a set of folders to the team meeting and share one randomly selected piece of work either on a projector or with copies distributed to other team members. Everyone should already have agreed on the scoring guide, or rubric, for how the assignment will be evaluated. But the tough part is actually applying that rubric to the student work. Effective collaboration requires acknowledging when we have disagreements about how to score the student work and then working with one another to clarify the wording of the scoring guide so that the teachers agree on what the word “proficient” means. Then we can proceed to the other questions: What do we do if the students have not yet met their learning objectives, and what do we do when they already have?

I’m not naïve. I understand that many people who claim to value collaboration and Professional Learning Communities have a very difficult time sharing the work of their students with their colleagues. It requires trust and vulnerability – but it is absolutely essential. Think about it this way: If college-educated professionals disagree about how to apply a scoring guide to student work, then how will students ever understand it? When we disagree, let’s work to resolve the ambiguities and create the most clear and consistent scoring guides possible. Remember, the enemy is never one another; the enemy is ambiguity.

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