How Collaborative Professionalism Varies by Culture and Design

• In Event: 66.024 - From Professional Collaboration to Collaborative Professionalism

Abstract

Findings from educational research have revealed how professional collaboration is connected to student achievement increases (Schleifer, Rinehart & Yanisch, 2017; Talbert & McLaughlin, 1994), teacher effectiveness (Day et al., 2007; Leana, 2011), and teacher motivation and retention (OECD, 2014; Papay & Kraft, 2017). But collaborative practice varies and not all of it is effective (Little, 1990). Collaborative professionalism (CP) distinguishes itself from professional collaboration by articulating an impactful way of collaborating founded on global case studies of distinctive collaborative designs (Hargreaves & O’Connor, 2018).
This presentation will:
• Distinguish collaborative professionalism from professional collaboration, based on five international case studies of collaborative practices that demonstrate deep and effective collaboration.
• Provide theoretical framing through which other collaborative designs and their implementation can be analyzed.
This study is guided by conceptual framing on collaborative professionalism, as articulated by Hargreaves and O’Connor (2017; 2018). Drawing from their work, professional collaboration refers to how people collaborate within a profession. That collaboration may be strong or weak, effective or ineffective, and emerging or mature. Collaborative professionalism is about how people collaborate in an increasingly professional and purposeful way. Professional collaboration is descriptive – it delineates how people work together in a profession. Collaborative professionalism is normative – it is about creating stronger and better professional practice together.
Purposive and snowball sampling were used to identify five sites (and school and educator participants), guided by their geographic and cultural variation and representation of different collaborative designs, such as PLCs, lesson study, and rural school networks. To build each case, we collected multiple forms of data including observations of collaborative activities, classroom observations, interviews, focus groups, and artifact reviews, including documents, media, and website information in the public domain. Data were analyzed through multiple rounds of coding using constant comparative analysis and a process of ongoing analytic memo-writing (Charmaz, 2014). Pattern and axial coding were utilized to move from individual codes to themes (Saldaña, 2016). The case studies were written based on the emerging categories that applied to all cases and the intrinsic narrative that was inherent to each particular case. Upon completion of the cases, we conducted member checks, sending quotes and initial case write-ups to participants for confirmation, correction and feedback.
Findings from the study point to key transitionary paths from professional collaboration to collaborative professionalism that involve moving from talk or action to talk and action combined; from collaboration focusing on narrow achievement goals to deeper learning with meaning and purpose, from episodic to embedded collaboration, from becoming teacher-led rather than administrator-driven; from less to more challenging conversations and forms of feedback; and from collaborating for students to also collaborating with them.
At a time when some in educational research have questioned the value of collaboration (e.g., Croft, 2016; Hanushek & Rivkin, 2012; Jacob & McGovern, 2015), this research on collaborative professionalism illustrates how global examples – reflecting the theme of this annual meeting by seeking out diverse voices – can provide crucial perspectives to inform the discourse on collaboration for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners.

Authors

• Andy Hargreaves, University of Ottawa

• Michael T. O'Connor, Providence College