The teacher or the team? Towards an inclusive understanding of individual and collaborative work

In order to cope with the challenges and demands of today’s educational landscape, teachers will (increasingly) (have to) collaborate. While the evolution towards a team-based organisation has long been commonplace in other types of organisations, in the traditionally individualised context of teachers the push towards collaborative work has resulted in challenges and tensions. This project aims to disentangle these challenges, investigating the relationship between the teacher as an individual and as a team member.

The first challenge relates to the diversity in teacher collaboration, ranging from loosely coupled individuals and superficial collaboration to real teams and deep-level collaborative work. We aimed to gain understanding of how teacher collaboration is conceptualised and takes shape in practice. This objective is addressed in two studies. Study 1 (systematic literature review) explores the concept of teacher collaboration and integrates existing research. A clarified terminological framework is proposed. Moreover benefits and possible negative consequences, facilitating and hindering factors, and criteria for successful collaboration are listed. Study 2 maps different shapes of teacher collaboration and the underlying collaborative continuum by introducing team entitativity (conceptually and empirically by validating a questionnaire). The latter refers to the degree to which a collection of individuals is a real team, characterised by shared goals and cohesion and task and outcome interdependence. This bridges the conceptual gap between real teams and other types of collaboration that are not strictly teams (e.g., teacher teams), crossing the boundaries between team research and research on teacher collaboration.

The second challenge focuses on the paradoxical relationship between teacher autonomy and collaboration. The traditional understanding of autonomy as independence resulting from a long history of predominantly individualised work challenges its combination with collaboration. Disentangling the relationship between (different understandings of) autonomy and collaboration is the core objective in Studies 3 and 4. In Study 3, we distinguished two autonomy attitudes: A reactive attitude equates autonomy to independence and resistance to external influence while a reflective attitude starts from professional agency and freedom to act in a self-directed manner, which does not exclude connectedness. A new measure consisting of three subscales was developed: (1) didactical pedagogical autonomy, (2) curricular autonomy, and (3) collaborative attitude (indicating a reactive or reflective attitude). This framework is the starting point for a mixed method study (Study 4). Based on correlations and the identification of different autonomy profiles of teachers and how they relate to reported collaboration we found that teachers scoring high on both autonomy and collaborative attitude reported to collaborate most. Qualitative interview analyses indicated that didactical-pedagogical autonomy can be split up into content-related and classroom related aspects and that openness towards deep-level collaboration may not be a unified attitude but differs depending on the domain of autonomy (teaching styles and methods being the most sensitive topics for collaboration).

The third and final challenge relates to teachers’ wellbeing in a collaborative context. Collaboration was argued to foster wellbeing and the evolution towards increased collaborative work demonstrates that – besides needing engaged teachers who are willing to go the extra mile – it is essential to create supportive engaged (and engaging) collaborative contexts. In the fifth study of this project, we assessed how the aforementioned dynamics of individual and collaborative work relate to teachers’ wellbeing using a longitudinal design (latent growth curve analyses). Based on teachers’ perceived degree of team entitativity, we distinguished a high and lower scoring group and assessed the effects of autonomy and collaboration on individual and team engagement in both groups. Results indicate that teachers feeling more engaged, also experience their team as more engaged and vice versa. Furthermore, high levels of entitativity are beneficial for team and individual engagement and both autonomy and collaboration predict individual and team engagement. The compatibility of the individual and the collective tends to be reinforced in highly entitative teams.