Throughout my 14 years at the chalk face, I have seen many ideas come and go: Brain Gym, Learning Styles, the idea that teachers should receive fair remuneration for the work they do. But one thing has bucked the trend of fading in and out of educational fashion: collaboration between teachers is a good thing. This at least seems widely agreed upon.
I remember years ago being involved in Leading in Learning triads, where we were urged to collaborate to develop thinking skills. A few years later, Lesson Study was all the rage, and we were urged to collaborate to plan and evaluate lessons in teams. More recently, I’ve seen schools put all teachers in coaching pairs, where they are encouraged to meet and collaborate on their own development.
These were all good ideas, but all of them withered on the vine for one simple reason: time. Time was never given to them. They were not really valued.
Bold leadership
The leadership team in my current school, Heathfield Community College in East Sussex, has taken what I consider to be a bold decision to show that they really do value collaboration. They have given teachers an hour per fortnight of non-contact time above PPA, which is to be dedicated to collaboration. So, once a fortnight I meet with the same small group of teachers in a timetabled block to discuss teaching and learning. We have used this time to discuss successful strategies with our previous year’s exam groups. We have also used the collaboration time to discuss the findings of some research we did last year on how pupils viewed different forms of feedback.
As a teacher and middle leader, I find this time incredibly significant for a variety of reasons. There has been a real effect on my teaching in a far more immediate way than attending external courses ever had.
Good ideas wither on the vine for one simple reason: time
Firstly, it shows that we are trusted as professionals who have something to offer our colleagues. We are trusted to use this time well. No one is expecting a form to be filled in each session detailing exactly what we discussed and no one is checking up on us. A member of the SLT in another school recently asked me, “How do you know they are actually turning up?” to which I could only reply, “Why would you employ the kind of people who wouldn’t?”
Secondly, it shows that our SLT value our CPD. Like many schools, we often hear that “nothing is more important than the teaching in the classroom” and that we must “keep the main thing the main thing”, and here we have an example of them putting that belief into action. There is, of course, a financial cost to carrying out this initiative: a teacher’s time is valuable in every sense of the word and this has only been possible by making very careful financial decisions elsewhere. This takes strong leadership.
The third reason why I think this collaboration hour is so vital is that, at the moment, we are facing unprecedented levels of change in education. Currently, we have to rewrite the entire GCSE curriculum for new specifications that are significantly different to the last. At the same time, we are rewriting the A-level curriculum to take into account even greater changes to the content and form of assessment. Alongside this, we need to rewrite key stage 3 to take into account the removal of national curriculum levels and to prepare pupils for these new expectations. For this to work, we need the time to come together and discuss how we can respond in positive ways. The collaboration hour helps us to share our responses to change, and it makes us more flexible.
County-wide collaboration
We talk a lot about the need to develop certain cultures in schools but these cultures don’t just spring from wishful thinking. If we want a culture of trust and collaboration, we need to put in place the structures to create and support it.
This culture is starting to permeate our school: we have teachers within the school working together in innovation teams to research and share good practice; teachers going to TeachMeets and looking to set up their own in-school opportunities to share; we are seeing more collaboration between schools in our local area; and we have collaboration across the county in subject-specific hubs.
If we want teachers to collaborate and share, then we need to show that we really do value it. We need to support the culture that we wish to create, and in finding this hour for collaboration, our school has found a very powerful way of doing it.
Mark Enser is head of geography at Heathfield Community College and blogs at teachreal.wordpress.com. He tweets @EnserMark
