Professional Perspectives – Eastern Middle School - DEMO

Kenneth Leithwood

Dr. Leithwood defines "collaborative culture".

I don't think that you affect the school culture by deciding one day that you're going to change it. I think you decide to do business a little differently and as a consequence of doing that the culture gradually begins to shift. If we think of culture as the norms, values, beliefs and practices that are routinized in the school, the typical distinction in schools between collaborative and isolated cultures begins to capture the continuum that has to be spanned, if cultures themselves are going to foster learning. If you imagine a teacher isolated in his or her own classroom, not talking very much to his or her peers about the nature of practice in the classroom, there is very little opportunity for them to acquire the collective wisdom that's captured in the school as a whole. So a collaborative culture is simply an organization in which people have the opportunity and inclination to speak together about things that really make a difference to the quality of instruction in their school. Culture and structure are two sides of the same coin. You can't really expect people to engage collaboratively in figuring out how to make these better in their school unless the structures give them the opportunity to meet together and to talk together, to participate in decisions together. So those two dimensions of schools are very important and together make perhaps the largest difference to the quality of collective learning that goes on in school.

Sam Stringfield

Dr. Stringfield discusses obstacles to collaborative problem solving in case studies of KEYS schools.

An example of an obstacle that quite a few of the schools in our study faced was that different teachers within the same building weren't aware of each other's concerns or strengths or limitations. And the very fact of going through the process of filling out the questionnaire and then having conversations about the data when the results came back was often very helpful to the entire faculty. Every one of them appreciated the opportunity and the structured way to work together to solve problems. And so I don't think that any of them identified the fact that they were all isolated as a problem going in. But that within months all of them were talking about how they were communicating. I want to say that differently. "All" is too big a word for this. Within a month, teams were talking about how they had not been communicating as much earlier [m] and so they were not communicating more. And it was interesting because it was something that lots of groups identified as problems sort of ex-post facto. But at the start, if you had asked them if that was a problem, they probably would have said "No." But it clearly was, and I think most of their principals would have said it was. Faculty would later say that this was a problem we solved.

Another obstacle—in some ways a cousin of that first problem—was an ignorance about how the whole school was addressing problems. In the management literature people sometimes talk about "silo effects." You have all these different silos and they're right beside each other but you can have completely different things going on and there's nothing there to tell you that. Breaking that down and getting communication going between the Title I and the regular classroom, between the special education and the regular classroom, between the Third Grade and the Fifth Grade. A lot of people did say that the KEYS process helped break some of that down.