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Collective Practice, Quality Teaching: VUE Number 27, Spring 2010
Policy-makers and partners seeking to catalyze sustainable growth in school and system instructional capacity need to broaden the prevailing policy focus beyond teaching as an isolated act.
This article grew out of the discussions at a series of four cross-sector gatherings on teaching quality in 2008–2009 by the Annenberg Institute for School Reform and Kronley & Associates, in partnership with the Ford Foundation. The article draws on a summary of convening themes developed by Annenberg Institute research associate Tracie Potochnik, with help from Annenberg Institute research associate Joanne Thompson and documentation by Kate Shropshire Swett of Kronley & Associates.
How many of us have read, or written, in the past few years, a variation on this line: the quality of teachers and teaching is the single most important in-school factor in student learning? Recognizing teachers as the most important actors in learning improvement has become a new orthodoxy of education reform.
In many ways, this is a common-sense assertion. What else would we expect it to be? It is hard to imagine any form of technology, any single curriculum, or any school-level environmental issue trumping the human knowledge base and delivery system around which the traditional classroom is organized. But several well-regarded and definitive studies over the past decade have also put real and useful data behind common wisdom.1
While that evidence base was being built, the teaching landscape
and both student and teacher demographics were changing dramatically. Frustration with achievement gaps, stagnant performance, and bureaucratic inadequacy led to a search for new means for getting better teachers in classrooms. Many urban school districts have ongoing partnerships with organizations like Teach for America and
the New Teacher Project to recruit,
hire, and train teachers, especially for their hardest-to-staff schools. Teacher
residencies and grow-your-own programs are beginning to spring up as joint efforts of school districts, reform support organizations, and universities. And the very nature of the economy and changed attitudes toward work and careers means that there is no longer one pathway into classroom teaching.
These changes in on-the-ground practice and the growing evidence base about the importance of effective teaching combine powerfully to produce today’s policy spotlight on teaching quality. The collective emphasis on the “teaching solution” may also reflect a recognition that concentrating on the critical in-school factor in learning improvement, as challenging as it may be, seems less daunting than influencing the array of economic, health, social, cultural, and political factors that are not containable within school walls.
The Importance of Collective Practice: A Growing Knowledge Base
The desire to understand what makes for effective teaching and how it can be measured and compensated, incentivized and mandated, is the focus of a great deal of current philanthropic initiative, think tank attention, and federal funding. With teaching quality one of the four assurances required for Race to the Top competitiveness, the federal definition of effective and highly effective teachers is enormously influential, even though only two states, thus far, have been awarded funds.2 Final RTTT guidelines allow “multiple measures” of teaching effectiveness, and other aspects of education stimulus funding support teachers working together. But the weight of attention, policy, and resources is disproportionately directed to the individual teacher. In the current policy environment, there is also strong pressure at state and local levels for individual accountability, propelled by new technologies that enable value-added assessment.
It is neither surprising nor inappropriate that increased calls for test-based student accountability are paralleled 
by new pressures for individual teacher accountability. But while more accountability – and support and reward – for individual practitioners is a necessary condition for widespread improvements in adults’ teaching and students’ learning, it is not sufficient.
The lack of attention to teaching as a collective activity ignores a significant and emerging knowledge base about collective practice. In the private sector, collaborative work is increasingly the norm among skilled professionals. And among systems considered global leaders in educational achievement, professional collaboration is increasingly the preferred approach to educators’ continued learning, as well as their teaching (McKinsey Education 2009). The articles in this issue of VUE present several aspects of the growing knowledge base. Other leading researchers in school improvement and system change have also recently published works that weave together aspects of collective practice with these larger aims.
Reporting on fifteen years of data from public elementary schools in Chicago, the Consortium for Chicago School Research identified five key ingredients that work, in combination, to improve urban school success: strong leadership, strong instructional guidance and materials, a welcoming attitude toward parents, a stimulating and nurturing learning environment, and development of professional capacity. The researchers’ definition of professional capacity includes not just quality of teaching staff, but also belief in the possibility of school change, good professional development, and collaborative work. As an author of the study, Penny Bender Sebring, noted, “This is a counter-narrative to a lot of the policy debates you hear now” (Viadero 2010).
Michael Fullan (2010), whose research and advisory work is based in both the public and private sectors, names “collective capacity” as one of seven big ideas for whole-system reform, calling it an underappreciated “hidden resource that we fail to understand and cultivate” (p. 4). Fullan details four examples of successful districtwide reform efforts that cultivate collective capacity: Tower Hamlets in London, Long Beach Unified School District in California, York Region District School Board in Toronto, and Ottawa Catholic District in Ontario. Fullan concludes:3
It is going to take the United States twenty years to transform the teaching profession provided that they combine individualistic and collective strategies. This is not a complaint about individual teachers: It is a system problem that will require a system response. (p. 81)
Recommendations Emerging from Cross-Stakeholder Discussions
The concept of collective capacity was powerfully captured and reinforced in a series of convenings our two organizations (the Annenberg Institute and Kronley & Associates) conducted in partnership with the Ford Foundation. In late 2008 and 2009, we brought together a diverse group of stakeholders with different perspectives on a host of topics related to teaching quality in hard-to-staff schools. Nearly forty leading superintendents, central office staff, school practitioners, charter network leaders, heads of reform support organizations, researchers, and policy-makers engaged in candid discussion during four facilitated meetings.
The following recommendations are informed by this exploration. The collective nature of teaching was a recurring theme in the expert stakeholder gatherings, with heavy emphasis on the relationships between school culture and educator capacity. The recommendations envision schools – especially those characterized as “hard-to-staff” – as learning communities for both teachers and students. In these communities, teaching is more than an individual task performed in isolation from colleagues. These schools vest responsibility and authority for effectively educating all students in collaborative efforts that consciously and actively promote professional growth. They are places where capacity is continually nurtured through connections both inside and outside the school building, and they are places that recognize and value other voices and different perspectives – especially those of families and nearby residents – in children’s education.
Interest in teaching as collaborative work does not seek to diminish the continuing emphasis – from federal and state policy-makers, district and school leaders, foundations, and reform support organizations – on the capacity of individual teachers and the need for every classroom teacher to meet high expectations. Understanding that teaching is not a solitary enterprise recognizes that teacher performance is inextricably intertwined with how schools are organized, how teachers view themselves, their students, and their work; the working conditions that support or hinder teachers’ efforts; and their relationships with students, families, and the communities in which they teach. Promoting teaching as a collaborative venture is not a mechanism to allow individuals to avoid accountability. In connecting individual effectiveness to organizational culture, this effort seeks instead to ensure that rigorous approaches to teaching permeate and help define a school.
We are far from the point where everyday focus on collective capacity is the norm in schools. For this to occur, we must first expect and enable teachers to work together consistently to improve student learning. This is a fundamental shift in how schools are organized and teachers deployed. Engendering this change requires commitment and actions on the part of multiple sectors, not all of which are public. The exploration that the Annenberg Institute and Kronley & Associates undertook with the Ford Foundation underscored the seminal roles that funders, reform support organizations, and community-based organizing groups can play in identifying, fostering, and leveraging opportunities to promote collaborative and ongoing work by teachers.4
