Teacher Collaboration and the Learning Network

I’ve been reading John Hattie’s book: ‘Visible Learning: The Sequel - A Synthesis of over 2100 Meta-analyses Relating to Achievement’.

It’s not a very catchy title; I can’t see him making a fortune from the film rights. But it’s a brilliant book and it deserves to have the same impact as ‘Visible Learning’ had in 2008.

Although many of his ideas have shifted slightly over time, there are a number of consistent threads and, in particular, the significance of what he calls ‘collective teacher efficacy’ (CTE) has remained constant. He gives it an effect size of around 1.57, placing it at the top of his ‘league table’ of educational influences. For context, anything above 0.4 is a significant benefit and probably worth trying to implement..

Put simply, CTE is the shared belief among teachers in a school or department that they can positively impact student learning. It’s not about individual teachers believing in themselves or even about a group of teachers in the same school or department all believing in themselves. Rather, it’s about a collective belief in their combined ability. 

It chimes with a number of interesting ideas about learning networks - but more about that in a future blog.

The problem is that collective teacher efficacy is rather an abstract idea and, as such, it’s hard to disagree with. Few people would claim that working in a vacuum is a good thing and most teachers, if asked, would probably say they work pretty well in their departmental team. Some would even be right. But, in truth, most of us wildly inflate our true level of collective teacher efficacy. Just as most husbands inflate the amount of housework they do.

The trick, always, with an abstract idea is to find a simple way of giving it a practical expression. That way, there’s a chance it might stick and become part of the culture.

My favourite example of this is from the All Blacks rugby team when they made a conscious effort to change their culture in response to a series of world cup disappointments. A central part of the identity they wanted to develop was the idea of self-reliance. An abstract concept.

The practical expression was called ‘sweeping the sheds’. In rugby parlance, the sheds are the changing rooms. You can imagine that after an international rugby match, there’s quite a lot of ‘debris’ lying around. Sweeping the sheds involved the players, often but not always led by the most experienced players, picking up brooms and clearing up. There was no big fuss made. No verbal signal. It just happened and they all joined in until the room was tidy. 

A very simple gesture but, in a context where all other teams would walk out to the bar, leaving the clear-up for the cleaning staff, it said, ‘We clear up our own mess’. 

So, what’s the equivalent for teaching? How can teachers practically express the abstract desire to combine their abilities and to work collectively?

For generations, teachers have been used to working in ‘silos’; many have actively enjoyed the fact that their classroom is their fiefdom. This mindset makes practical collaboration difficult and  even when a department does create shared materials, it’s very easy to drift back into splendid isolation where everyone uses the material differently and there is little sense of shared identity or language.

In my experience, shifting to a blended learning model is a very practical way of ensuring that teachers collaborate meaningfully. It challenges you to change your thinking and the process of re-designing a course to work in a blended way forces you to work together as you create exciting new material. 

A few years ago, the English Department at the school where I worked was struggling with the poetry component of the GCSE Literature course. Some of the teachers were more comfortable with it than others and the students’ experience was very uneven. Most people viewed it as ‘stuff we’ve just got to get through for the exam’. It was always the weakest section in the final exams. 

We decided to take a blended approach, using the flipped classroom model. A couple of teachers started creating the video material while others worked on finding imaginative new ways to assess the students’ knowledge. Others planned livestream events and other ways of bringing students from the whole year group together. 

The process was great fun and hugely energising. Instead of arguing about who was going to moderate the Year 9 exams, we had some great rows about Shelley’s use of poetic metre. We were focusing on the subject, the very thing we had all enjoyed at school instead of all the dull organisational stuff. Importantly, that rubbed off on the students; many of them started to enjoy the poetry work rather than merely tolerating it. 

That year, it was, by some way, the strongest section in the final exams. 

Was that because the students enjoyed the blended approach or was it the teachers’ newfound energy and positivity for that part of the course - the CTE? That’s hard to say for sure - but the effect was clear and evident.

And it started to spread, first to other parts of the English course and then, rapidly, to other departments. 

Now imagine if you were able to pool resources and create a learning network to have that effect in more than one school or even across a whole MAT. Think how many children would benefit from that real ‘collective teacher efficacy’. It’s an innovation waiting to happen.