Teachers Notebook

This week as part of the reading for my NPQTLD I came across an interesting study – The Myth of the Performance Plateau (Papay and Kraft, 2016) which suggests that 35% of a teacher’s career improvement happens after year 10. This got me thinking, what keeps teachers in the mindset that every teacher needs to improve not because they are not good enough, but because they can be even better (Dylan William) after 10 years in the classroom?

The research then got me thinking: ‘How do you keep the motivation high for the more experienced teacher?’ The study explores the environment surrounding ‘veteran’ teachers and what pushes them to continue to improve. Whilst not discovering the magic formula the study does discover that the working environment does have an impact. The point that jumps out to me as needing more thought and consideration is that ‘veteran teachers become better teachers if they work in schools with effective systems of peer collaboration’. Teaching is actually a lonely job, yes we are surrounded by people all day and have many social interactions too, however how many purposeful conversations do you have each day? How many times do you get to mull over an idea with another professional? That’s why to keep motivation high in experienced staff, time and space is needed for teachers to come together and have professional conversations about what is actually happening in the right here, right now of our classrooms.

I have found that collaborations between teachers from different subject areas more beneficial than within my own department. When we discuss pedagogical approaches in our department grouping, we often revert to subject specific techniques that come from the top down, from the more experienced to the novice teachers. However, when I have got together with teachers across a variety of subjects our conversations soon get down to the granular aspects of our teaching practice. We are able to offer advice from a non-biased view and also able to probe with professional curiosity. But it doesn’t all come easily. We have dedicated time within our CPD to meet as a coaching group, and as the coach lead for that group I begin the conversations with a clear teaching strategy to discuss. We occasionally share educational studies surrounding that strategy often before we meet and I have found this helps to kick start the conversations. There is a high level of trust within our group, I feel that each teacher has stepped out of their comfort zone and been vulnerable, admitting to us when things haven’t gone well. Together we have then begun to pick apart why it wasn’t successful and suggest what changes could be made.

A study by Jackson & Bruegmann, 2009, found that teachers who work with more effective colleagues improve more. Whilst this can be interpretated as we should pair our most effective teachers with those who are deemed less effective, to me this would be counterproductive. It would lead teachers feeling that these collaborations take on a mentor and mentee format. Any teacher at any stage of their career should be surrounded and supported by others within school no matter their performance. Our most effective teachers still need to feel that support and have opportunities for effective collaboration. I feel that school’s need to ensure that collaboration forms to base layer of any CPD offered, start off small building a climate where all viewpoints are considered no matter the teachers experience. Give structured time for collaboration to happen, the school day can just run away from you and having a set time where you are accountable to meet with others is vital. So, to answer my question ‘how do you keep the motivation high’ for the more experienced teacher?’ We need to keep collaboration at the heart of everything we do in teacher development.

Please share with me how you have seen effective collaboration in your own schools? Collaboration can also happen beyond our own school walls.