Teacher Teamwork That Gets Results

            In this article in The Learning Professional, retired superintendent/author Diane Zimmerman and James Roussin (Generative Learning) say that all too often, teacher teams have difficulty focusing on student work, learning from each other, and taking collective responsibility for student learning. Zimmerman and Roussin’s research indicates that three key elements in PLCs successfully boost student learning: psychological safety, constructive conflict, and actionable learning. 

• Psychological safety – Team members feel that they can take risks, make mistakes, and ask for help. This operates at four levels: 
• Trust in self – I feel safe speaking my personal truths. 
• Trust in relationships – I feel listened to and respected by my teammates. 
• Trust in process – There are norms for taking turns, listening to all voices, and more. 
• Trust in collective learning – Cycles of inquiry explore student successes and challenges and identify the most effective classroom practices. 

“When any of these dimensions breaks down, teams tend to bog down,” say Zimmerman and Roussin. “When teams regularly monitor the four dimensions of trust, they increase their psychological safety, capacity to self-monitor, and self-regulate (and co-regulate) to maintain and repair trust.” 

            One way to establish team norms up front is to ask team members what they don’t like about meetings and flip those into agreements on what collaboration will look like. Going forward, the norms should always be there, and any team member can speak up when there are problems – for example, “Time out. We need to balance voices in the room” or “We seem bogged down. Can someone give a summary of the key points on the floor?” 

• Constructive conflict – Avoiding conflict and always striving for harmony can lead to groupthink, say Zimmerman and Roussin, which won’t improve teaching and learning. There’s going to be conflict; the trick “is staying open, neutral, curious, and interested… seeing disagreements as opportunities to learn.” 
• Key skills include: - Summarizing a disagreement so it can be discussed with less passion;
• Getting more comfortable hearing other perspectives and points of view; 
• Intentionally drawing out differences in how colleagues think and perceive. 

Teammates need to learn to be aware of personal triggers that derail productive discourse. reframing those emotions into a neutral or positive approach to the problem. “I’m feeling anxious,” one person might say, then listen to how others react, and work together to resolve the issue. 

• Actionable learning – To get better results with students, teams need to dive into kids’ learning difficulties, identify skill and knowledge gaps, and collectively identify new teaching strategies that produce better results. Key skills:
• Regularly assessing what’s working and not working with students; 
• Challenging the status quo (for example, a mandated commercial program) and examining assumptions about current practices; 
• The team organizing around more-effective practices. 

Team members need to ask probing questions: What do we know and what don’t we know? Why is this important? What might we do next? If a teacher has learned a successful classroom technique, it needs to be shared – perhaps in a workshop, perhaps by colleagues observing that classroom. 

 “Teacher Teams That Lead to Student Learning” by Diane Zimmerman and James Roussin in The Learning Professional, December 2023 (Vol. 44, #6, pp. 66-70); the authors can be reached at dpzimmer@gmail.com and jim.roussin@gmail.com.

Please Note: This summary is reprinted with permission from issue #1018 of The Marshall Memo, an excellent resource for educators.