How to help teachers collaborate

School district leaders often say they want teachers to collaborate and support each other. But in Tennessee, one district is backing up that statement with policy changes that enable teachers to truly improve their practice.

Loudon County Schools, one of six Tennessee districts implementing a model of teacher collaboration and peer support used in Shanghai, is demonstrating that both district- and school-level involvement is necessary to implement and sustain improvement in teacher practice.

One important component of the Teacher Peer Excellence Group (TPEG) approach, which educators from the six districts traveled to Shanghai to observe, is that teachers will regularly visit each other’s classrooms and critique each other’s practice. Another “non-negotiable” piece of the model is that teachers’ work will be collected over time and shared so others can benefit.

In Loudon County Schools, however, the time allowed for teacher collaboration and the way the district had structured professional learning communities (PLCs) has made implementing this model challenging.

For example, most collaborative lesson planning has taken place at the school level and was not being used as a resource across the district. And teachers were spending unpaid time after school and holding professional development days on holidays in order to work with their colleagues.

“While teachers might plan units and lessons together, they were not visiting each other’s classrooms, and there were not opportunities to truly critique and improve classroom practices,” says Jennifer Malone, the district’s supervisor of technology and K-4 curriculum.

The fact that Shanghai teachers teach only two to three classes a day—compared to full-day class loads for most U.S. teachers—also means that adapting the Shanghai approach for Tennessee schools has required some adjustments.

Pushing the changes forward is the district’s new TPEG Advisory Council. Made up of teachers and district- and school-level administrators, the group has been empowered to plan professional development and make changes to meet the goals of the new model.

One plan is to use technology “to make it easy for teachers to upload lessons and supporting materials so that they can be shared and replicated district-wide,” Malone says.

Another plan is to allow teachers to use paid “flex time” to hold their TPEG meetings. TPEG members also review videos of each other’s lessons, and Malone says schools are already using a variety of methods to make sure the TPEG members get to spend more time in each other’s classrooms.

“Principals are being creative with staff allocations by providing substitutes, reassigning paraprofessionals, and,” Malone adds, “even covering the class in person.”

As a result of these changes, “our teachers are moving beyond the walls of their classrooms to have very honest, sometimes tough, conversations about instruction and student learning,” Malone says. “They are collaborating routinely and becoming more comfortable examining their practice.”

This article is published in collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

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Author: Linda Jacobson is a freelance education writer based in Southern California. 

Image: Nils Westerlund of Sweden, Sofia Braendstroem of Sweden, Alessandro Contini of Italy  and Emma Rose of Britain (R-L) of the HowDo start-up attend a production meeting at their office at the Wostel co-working space in Berlin March 18, 2013. REUTERS/Thomas Peter.