When it comes to the current challenges facing education—tight budgets, uncertain funding streams, student disengagement, mental health concerns, chronic absenteeism, teacher turnover, and more—it is increasingly difficult for schools and districts to implement and sustain essential initiatives in pursuit of improved student outcomes.
However, one outlier—teacher collaboration—can have an immense impact on academic achievement, staff and student culture, and teacher professional development, almost regardless of budgets, staff, and student body. When educators move away from the notion of “meeting for the sake of meeting” and instead meet with the goal of increasing student proficiency, the results are visible and measurable. This happens when a leader or leadership team prioritizes collaboration. If leaders provide the time and space, as well as the professional learning tools to make teacher collaboration productive and satisfying, then schools can see real change.
The Evolution of Teacher Collaboration
Without diving into a lengthy history lesson, it’s helpful to understand the origins of current education collaborative models. In the early stages of teacher collaboration in the ‘80s and ‘90s, professional learning communities (PLCs) were initially seen as supplementary to traditional teaching roles and responsibilities. In other words, they were a “nice-to-have,” not a “must-have.” Since then, collaboration has shifted from isolated, sporadic, and disconnected meetings toward consistent, data-driven approaches that home in on timely and specific student needs (Archer, 2012).
Of course, these are general trends. If you were to take a day to attend team meetings in different schools (or even different teams within the same school), you would likely observe a range of collaborative models with varying levels of effectiveness from one meeting to another. For a school to successfully transition from sporadic touchpoints to consistent, high-impact collaboration, strong leadership is essential.
Outside of extenuating circumstances, like being severely understaffed, it is a leader’s level of effectiveness that determines a teacher team’s level of effectiveness. When collaboration “goes right” in education—as it does in a number of the schools and districts I have had the privilege of working with—it is because building and district leaders have taken the reins. It is not enough to simply provide teams with dedicated time and then send them off to the races. The good news is that, with the right mindsets, structures, and leadership moves, high-quality teacher collaboration is within reach for any leader.
Honing High-Quality Collaboration
Skillful team collaboration yields a vast array of valuable benefits. Most educators are likely familiar with John Hattie’s (2023) extensive and ongoing research into the most impactful influences on student achievement. Topping this list of over 320 factors, each with a meta-study used to determine its effect size on student learning, is the most influential factor on student achievement—collective teacher efficacy. Collective teacher efficacy is the shared belief by a group of teachers that they have the skills to positively impact student outcomes. When fully realized, collective teacher efficacy can accelerate students’ learning by two or more years of academic growth within one calendar school year.
Research repeatedly shows that there is a strong connection between good collaboration and teacher retention. In 2006, RAND researcher Cassandra Guarino and associates analyzed federal Schools and Staffing Surveys. The study uncovered lower turnover rates among teachers who met regularly to share, refine, and assess the effects of lessons and strategies that focused on increasing the number of students learning at higher levels (Guarino, Santibanez, & Daley, 2006). Further, after surveying 2,000 current and former teachers in California, researcher Ken Futernick (2007) concluded that when teachers believed in their efficacy, were involved in decision making, and established strong collegial relationships, they felt greater personal satisfaction.
High-quality teacher collaboration is good for students, educators, and school staff.
Ultimately, high-quality teacher collaboration is good for students, educators, and school staff. As research continues to reinforce the innumerable benefits of effective teacher collaboration, more schools and districts are taking note and doubling down on their investment in this practice.
Five Ways Leaders Shape Collaboration
Over the years, I have studied and written extensively about structured collaborative protocols that promote improvements in instruction and student achievement. More recently, while continuing to support teacher teams, I have narrowed my focus to leaders. It cannot be understated how influential a leader is on the quality of teacher collaboration in a building. Through my work, I’ve identified five leadership components that significantly influence effective collaboration. Within each, there are replicable moves leaders can make to enhance teacher collaboration.
1. Facilitate a Well-Defined Structure for Collaboration
Successful teacher collaboration thrives on a clear and well-organized process. When educators work together effectively, they can refine their skills while addressing both the strengths and areas for growth in student learning. I often describe PLCs as “learning labs” where teams can experiment, learn, and grow. One approach I have refined is the Achievement Teams Protocol (Ventura & Ventura, 2022), a four-step structured framework for collaborative meetings that allows educators to eliminate uncertainty in their discussions. Our protocol has shown remarkable success across hundreds of schools, not only improving student outcomes but also fostering a mindset where educators take ownership of student data.
What is the leader’s role here? It is the leader’s responsibility to adequately train teachers on the protocol, to attend and actively support PLC meetings, to monitor teams’ commitments coming out of those meetings, and to celebrate every success, big and small.
2. Understand That Assessment Results Reflect Instructional Effort
A good instructional leader understands that assessment results must be interpreted as feedback on instructional practices, not as a measure of student effort. In their book 10 Mindframes for Visible Learning: Teaching for Success, John Hattie and Klaus Zierer (2018) identify this mindframe—that formative assessment results reflect the teacher’s instructional effort more than the students’ effort—as a critical factor influencing student achievement. When teachers begin to ascribe data to innate student ability or curricular details, this is a leader’s sign to jump in with empathy and reshape this mindframe.
Leaders can ensure teachers have a shared understanding of the purpose of formative assessment. Help teachers view these data points as opportunities to refine instructional practices, ensure educational equity for all learners, strengthen the team as a collective, and encourage students to take greater ownership of their learning progress (Ventura & Ventura, 2022). By viewing assessment results as a reflection of instructional effort, teachers are empowered to make meaningful changes. When approached with these purposes in mind, assessments become a catalyst for both teaching and learning.
3. Use Data to Make Informed Decisions
Effective leaders also help teachers understand how to better use student assessment data to inform collaborative conversations around instructional practices. Using assessment results effectively begins with an objective analysis of the data. In the Achievement Teams Protocol, I offer reflective questions teachers can discuss in their team or PLC when they get their first look at an assessment data set:
- Which items had the highest correct responses?
- Were there questions commonly skipped?
- Are there patterns or anomalies in the data?
- Which items had the most incorrect responses?
- Do the results show significant changes over time?
During this discussion time, team members try to make sense of what the student assessment data says and why. After making objective observations about the data, teams move to interpretation of the data. Having identified trends, leaders can then prompt teacher teams to consider the following:
- What criteria can help prioritize next steps?
- What potential reasons might explain the results?
- How do these findings compare to previous assessments?
Finally, with observations and interpretations in mind, leaders can help educators connect data insights to classroom practices by posing questions like:
- What are the next instructional steps?
- Which teaching strategies would address these results?
- What additional assessments could provide clarity?
Collaborative discussions around these questions elevate individual and team instructional effectiveness. It is the leader’s responsibility to actively listen to PLC conversations and humbly jump in when discussions turn toward individual student ability levels or curricular complaints. Certainly, every educator and leader understands that extenuating circumstances arise, specific student challenges are real (such as chronic absenteeism or severe student learning or emotional differences), and no curriculum is perfect. However, leaders must continue to bring back data conversations to what is within an educator’s ultimate control—their instructional decisions and practices. As teams become more familiar with this process, highly effective leaders identify and coach teacher leaders to skillfully facilitate PLC discussions with the same eye on teacher locus of control.
4. Create Relational Trust
Relational trust serves as the foundation for any high-performing team. Researchers Barbara Schneider and Anthony Bryk (2002) developed criteria that can help school leaders measure the level of trust among colleagues and identify opportunities to cultivate trust in their buildings. These five elements are crucial for creating a collaborative environment where team members feel supported and empowered to contribute their best effort:
- Teachers at this school trust one another.
- Teachers at this school feel comfortable discussing feelings, worries, and frustrations with other teachers.
- Teachers at this school respect other teachers who take the lead in improvement efforts.
- Teachers at this school respect other teachers who are experts at their craft.
- I feel respected by other teachers at this school. (p. 157)
When teachers start seeing leaders take action to change the climate, trust will begin to improve, laying the groundwork for effective collaboration.
Leaders are at the helm of the ship when it comes to cultivating a trust environment. Survey your teachers on how these five criteria apply to your school. You can administer this survey at the beginning, middle, and end of the school year. Then analyze the data and be transparent with teachers about the trends you see. Based on these results, what are the implications for leading effective teams at your school? How might you take the results and find ways to improve relational trust? For example, can you ask individual teachers for specific feedback on what would help improve trust among teams and implement these practices? Or can you identify if additional professional learning is needed to begin the effort toward building trust among staff members? When trust is low or absent, effective collaboration is impossible. When, however, teachers start seeing leaders take action to change the climate, trust will begin to improve, laying the groundwork for effective collaboration.
5. Lead the Change in PLCs
Finally, an effective leader can ensure that the right questions are being asked in professional learning communities. A PLC is different from a regular team or teacher working committee. It’s likely that leaders have led or attended these committees or teams under the guise of PLCs, which looked something like this: Teachers meet, interactions are collegial and supportive, and participants are focused and busy at whatever shared work is in front of them. Instead, education consultant Steve Barkley (2024) asserts that the number one question teachers should be asking themselves during PLCs is, “What do my students need me to learn?” In the spirit of developing efficacious teachers who build the self-reflective habit of continuously coming back to this question, leaders should encourage teachers to remain focused and steadfast on addressing this question every time they meet. When leaders continuously bring teachers back to this essential question, “What do my students need me to learn?”, the emphasis shifts to teacher practice and growth (Barkley, 2024).
Whether it’s the Achievement Teams Protocol or a different process, if teachers come back to this question and the process focuses on teachers’ reflection and evidence-based adjustment to their practice, change will happen through PLCs. Leaders can model this behavior and continue to support teacher teams while they work toward effective collaboration.
Creating Conditions for Collaboration
Before jumping into any initiative, effective leaders create the right conditions for goals to take root. When aiming to enhance collaboration, it is not enough to simply provide teams with a structured protocol and an assigned time to meet. Culture shapes the effectiveness of any initiative in education, including collaboration. The conditions needed to impact change include: an action plan, collective efficacy, goals, formative evaluation, and instructional leadership. If any of these five components is missing, you will likely experience a false start, fragmented beliefs, reduced motivation, a lack of evidence, or confusion (see fig. 1).
For leaders pursuing top-quality collaboration, the first step is creating a targeted action plan. An effective action plan for promoting collaboration should include professional development for PLC facilitators and instructional leaders, implementing a structure for teacher observation and feedback, and mapping out professional learning around structured protocols, studying standards, and unpacking assessment rigor. With no action plan in place, leaders often get a false start on an initiative, leaving teams to quickly lose steam or abandon the initiative entirely.
Effective action plans include thoughtful goal setting. I encourage leaders and teams to set their sights on incremental goals over shorter periods of time. When attainable goals are within reach, teams demonstrate greater levels of focus and motivation, leading to higher levels of collaboration. When goals are too distant, too vague, or absent, there is no way of knowing what’s working and what’s not, leaving teams to spin their wheels and lose motivation.
To measure progress toward goals, leaders need to implement systems for regular formative evaluation. With formative assessment, teachers have checkpoints to determine the effectiveness of their instructional practice. These checkpoints serve as opportunities for teacher teams to dig into student data, problem solve, share best practices, and tweak instructional plans. With these pause points in place, teams have built-in opportunities for reflection and sharing their collective intelligence. When formative assessment is absent, there is no evidence to support instructional decision-making (Hattie, 2009).
Continuously bring teachers back to this essential question, 'What do my students need me to learn?'
The final two conditions allowing collaboration to thrive are collective teacher efficacy and instructional leadership. What can leaders do to enhance collective teacher efficacy and instructional leadership? In short, all the above. By focusing on and taking ownership of the five leadership components of effective collaboration, while simultaneously equipping themselves with a clear action plan, goals, and formative assessment systems, leaders are poised to accelerate student and teacher learning through high-impact teacher collaboration.
Practice, Patience, and Persistence
The way leaders choose to spend an average day says a lot about what really matters to them. When leaders engage with every team, monitor team commitments, and are diligent in celebrating teams’ successes, they demonstrate their full investment in honing teacher collaboration. Further, consistency is key in achieving sustained change. When working with teams, I’ve often seen initiatives abandoned after just one school year.
It is my strong recommendation that leadership teams devote at least three years of unyielding focus on enhancing teacher collaboration to experience optimal results:
- Year One—Introduce and practice short-cycle assessment rounds coupled with data analysis protocols at least three or four times in a school year, focusing on one or two standards per cycle.
- Year Two—Shift team focus toward addressing the first year’s areas of challenge and further leverage strengths.
- Year Three—With deep collaboration ingrained in team culture, implement more frequent short-cycle assessments (closer to six or more), leading to greater levels of student growth.
As schools commit to deep and consistent implementation of high-impact collaboration, they will reap sustained improvement in student outcomes, increased levels of collective efficacy, and a laser-like focus on instructional practices that truly make a difference.
Transforming Schools, One Meeting at a Time
Effective teacher collaboration today goes beyond discussions about students; it focuses on data-driven instruction, collective efficacy, and integrating the right instructional strategies to enhance learning. These models have reshaped how educators assess their teaching and implement change in the classroom. However, teachers still need resources to collaborate effectively and work as part of cohesive, successful teams. It is the leader’s responsibility to create these conditions and implement effective structures to allow collective teacher efficacy to flourish.
In an education system that is strained for funds and facing record high levels of teacher turnover, impactful teacher collaboration is a low-cost strategy that is proven to accelerate student learning, improve schoolwide instructional prowess, and retain educational talent for years to come. Invest in it deeply, give it time, and you will see results.
