PLCS Insights: Teacher Collaboration: Essential for the Success of Students & Teachers Alike

Adam Weinstock, Assistant Director, PLCS

Relationships were always core to my interest in working in schools, including recognizing a need for the support of colleagues. So, when looking for my first teaching position in New York City 20 years ago, I prioritized finding a school that was intentional about relationships and professional collaboration. I knew I needed collegial connections to sustain me early in my career and sought to avoid the isolation that the classroom can present for teachers. Although I mainly applied to high school positions, I opted for a middle school job - per the school's commitment to community and collaboration - and have spent much of my career working in and with middle schools since. 

The most successful teacher collaboration I've engaged in was with a Bronx middle school where I coached teachers. There, grade-level teams met twice weekly, once for a Culture Meeting to work together to address school climate and social-emotional matters and the second time for a Literacy Inquiry Team meeting. Teachers would use assessment data to identify a group of students to support with a common literacy skill across classes. Each week, they would develop common strategies for skill-building for their focus students (and any others who could benefit) and assess growth over the course of the year. Teachers' common, consistent attention to being responsive to targeted students translated into an expanding toolkit for meeting a range of student needs. Notably, meetings started with check-ins to ensure colleagues connected with each other before jumping into their inquiry tasks, reflective of how relationships are an essential foundation for sustaining collaboration.

Here at the Center for Professional Learning and Curriculum Support, I'm excited that my first school-based work in my role here is focused on facilitating teams of teachers to engage in data inquiry, using the Datawise process to determine where students need support, planning, and implementing strategies to meet identified needs, reflecting on the impact of these efforts, and repeating the cycle. This work was affirmed when I tuned into a recent Harvard EdCast episode, "What It Takes to Change a School," in which Justin Cohen, author of Change Agents: Transforming Schools from the Ground Up, shares how teams of teachers collaborating to be responsive to their students - and not top-down directives - have the most significant impact on school improvement and student outcomes. I shared the episode with the teams I'm working with, as I want them to understand the essential role of their Collaboration in serving their students.

I was further reminded of the centrality of teachers growing their practice together when I attended the fall convening of the New York State Staff/Curriculum Development Network (SCDN), where Bill Daggett presented "The Future of Education and Artificial Intelligence." Daggett, who leads the Successful Practices Network, spoke of the need to use 21st-century technology not to do 20th-century teaching better but to implement the more profound teaching and learning shifts demanded by 21st-century conditions. He also noted that policy trails the rate of change we need and urged school leaders to focus on spreading the examples of instructional innovation and excellence that exist in pockets at all schools. Again, fostering teacher collaboration, in this case to share and uplift teachers' effective efforts, is critical to widening the reach of powerful practices. 

Scheduling time for teachers to work together intentionally can be a challenge, but sustaining teachers in the profession and having a sustained impact on students' success demands it. Being part of a supportive team of colleagues was critical to my development and mindset as a classroom teacher. Now, I value helping other educators to grow systems and structures for effective teacher collaboration to further student success.