Promoting Collaborative Learning Cultures: Putting the Promise into Practice

Promoting Collaborative Learning Cultures: 

Putting the Promise into Practice

Ontario Leadership Strategy Bulletin #3 updated Winter 2014-14

Below are some themes from the article with implications we could consider within CoLs.

Re-focussing on the BIG Picture: Deepening our Understanding of Collaboration

“In viewing collaborative learning cultures as a process or practice – or worse, as the latest educational “innovation” – we risk losing sight of the intended outcome: a dramatic improvement in the culture itself that builds teaching capacity and improves student achievement”.

Implication: Be mindful that collaboration is for a purspoe; to produce dramatic shifts in student outcomes. If collaboration itself becomes the goal, then a social outcome of working together might be achieved, but the purpose of a dramatic shift in student outcomes may be lost, and therefore adapations that could lead to that improvement may never be made.

The complexity of Culture Change

“technical problems may be very complex and critically important, but they have known solutions that can be implemented through current knowledge. They can be resolved through the application of authoritative expertise and through the organization’s current structures and procedures.
Adaptive challenges, on the other hand, can only be addressed through changes in people’s priorities, beliefs, habits, and loyalties. Making progress requires going beyond any authoritative experience to mobilize discovery, shedding certain entrenched ways, tolerating losses, and generating new capacity to thrive”. 
 
Implication- culture change requires quite different skill sets and dispostions to be aquired by teachers and leaders who have been used to autonomy and isolation. This indicates a major departure from the staus quo and that culture development is a key area for leaders to undertake within Cols.


Resistance to Change 

In Change the Way You Lead Change, Herold and Fedor (2008) point out that it is one thing to lead change when you enjoy high-quality relationships with followers. However, it is another thing to do so when you are still in the process of establishing such relationships, and it is yet quite another to do so when the quality of such relationships is damaged.
In their words:
“People do not naturally resist change; they resist change they do not understand, the value of which they do not see, or the demands of which they cannot meet. It is a change leader’s job to motivate others to follow and to make it possible for them to do so. Change leaders are not born. They come in all shapes and sizes but they work with what they have and can achieve success using many approaches, as long as what they do fits with the situation in which they find themselves. People are not unfortunate obstacles to change plans; they are the key elements in these plans. Cultivating people’s commitment to the organization and to the leader may be the most important change tool leaders have.” 

The role of leaders:

“Leadership has been delightfully defined as ‘the ability to foster consequential relationships’. Easier said than done. To promote collegial relationships in the school, someone has to make relationships among adults a ‘discussable’. Someone must serve as a minesweeper, disarming those landmines.
I can think of no more crucial role for any school leader.”

– Barth, 2006

Implication:

People and the relationships between people remain fundamental as a changing system begins to demand new skills and capabilies from teachers and leaders. The ability to navigate these challenges and build the capacity to collaborate in order to achieve greater outcomes for students is going to be demanding task for CoL leaders and they will require high levels of support.