Anyone who has been following my work and this blog for a while will know that I am quite interested in collective teacher efficacy and collective student efficacy. This post is related to the first of these concepts.
Depending on the type of school you work in, there are subject departments, working groups, professional learning communities, joint training days, consultation meetings, and, of course, team meetings. The latter are particularly popular at this time of year. The idea behind all these ways of getting together is pretty logical. When people work together, they learn from one another, support one another, and ultimately become a stronger team.
But is that last part necessarily true? Because, according to a new study, we may sometimes be skipping a step. The key message for anyone who does not want to read any further (although I would): working together is not the same as having good relationships with the people you work with.
This is one of the starting points of a new study by Alison Kington and colleagues on the social and emotional dynamics in teacher relationships. The researchers make an explicit distinction between collaboration and collegiality. Collaboration is about what teachers do together: planning lessons, consulting with each other, teaching together, and participating in professional development. You could call it the formal side of things. Collegiality is much more about how colleagues experience one another. You can probably work perfectly well together on a task without there being trust, connection or mutual support.
The researchers collected data from 334 teachers in England and then conducted in-depth interviews with 10 teachers about important moments in their professional relationships throughout their careers. Combining both parts of the study, they identify four elements that they believe are important in relationships between colleagues:
- implicit agreements about how you treat one another,
- the quality of professional relationships,
- concrete interactions between colleagues,
- the broader culture of the school.
For three of these elements, the team found a fairly clear statistical structure in the questionnaire data. The fourth element, culture, was added based on the interviews and therefore still needs to be tested quantitatively.
Fine, but what I find more interesting is the possible explanation for what connects all these different aspects. Kington and colleagues use the concept of mattering. Loosely translated: the feeling that you matter, that your colleagues see you. That your opinion counts with your colleagues. That they trust you.
They call the opposite anti-mattering (I suspect there are some nerds on the team): the feeling that you barely count, are not trusted, or do not really belong to the group.
According to the model, two things determine whether such a feeling can develop. On the one hand, there is the school’s professional culture, which is linked to trust, autonomy, recognition, leadership, and the broader way people treat one another. One can recognise quite a lot here from the literature on both CTE and motivation. Next to this is the other layer of everyday social interactions among colleagues, where all of this becomes concrete.
These two levels constantly influence one another. A good culture makes positive interactions more likely, but positive or negative interactions can in turn strengthen or undermine that culture.
When both are working well, the researchers argue, trust, connectedness, and collegiality are more likely to develop. When they are not, alienation and stress can emerge. I have to admit: this reads as both logical and a bit like a half-open door.
But here is something important if you take this a bit further: this does not mean that everyone automatically needs to collaborate more. It may even be that certain forms of collaboration reduce mattering rather than increase it. And, a question of my own here, perhaps the amount of collaboration can benefit or hurt too?
In the literature cited by the authors, imposed or superficial collaboration can sometimes mainly result in increased workload, compliance, or the reinforcement of existing hierarchies. This means that the value of collaboration depends on the quality of the underlying relationships, the autonomy people experience, and the purpose for which they are (required to be) working together.
In other words, more bluntly: you can organise a team meeting every Thursday from four until five without ever actually getting a team.
What is more, some of the most important contacts for teachers occur outside formal structures. Think of the staffroom. A conversation in the corridor. A quick chat after a difficult lesson. These informal moments can help teachers let off steam, get advice or simply feel that they are not on their own. And all of this fits very well with what we already know about CTE.
A word of caution, though. This does not mean that the staffroom, which I sometimes call the decompression room, is automatically paradise. Informal groups can also exclude people and reinforce existing hierarchies. Simply putting people in the same room does not turn them into a team either.
For me, the paper goes quite far in its recommendations. The authors argue, among other things, for leadership that places greater emphasis on trust and professional autonomy. Also there is a plea for more attention to relationships between colleagues in professional development, and even for protecting or reintroducing informal meeting spaces such as staffrooms and peer networks.
Perhaps something to talk about in the corridor or staffroom…
P.S. The study also contains sections on the link between teachers staying at or leaving their school. I found this to be one of the weaker parts of the study, which is why I have not included it here.