Research for Teachers

When I first began working on collaborative teaching teams, I assumed collaboration was fairly straightforward. We would meet together, discuss ideas, divide responsibilities, complete our assigned tasks, and move the unit forward. If everyone contributed something and followed through on what they had agreed to do, then collaboration was working.

At least, that was what I believed.

I remember one particular team where tensions slowly began to emerge, although at first nobody named them directly. One teacher consistently attended meetings prepared with thoughtful suggestions. They contributed ideas during discussions, volunteered opinions about assessment design, and reliably completed the tasks they had been assigned afterward. From their perspective, they were doing exactly what collaborative teamwork required.

But over time, frustration began surfacing among other members of the team. Conversations became shorter. Small comments about workload or initiative started appearing during planning meetings. Eventually, it became clear that people were operating from entirely different understandings of what collaboration actually meant.

For some team members, collaboration was not simply contributing ideas and completing assigned responsibilities. Collaboration meant actively co-constructing lessons together in real time. It meant opening documents simultaneously, building resources collectively, revising one another’s thinking, and proactively shaping instruction before tasks were formally assigned. In their minds, true collaboration required shared intellectual ownership of the work itself.

What struck me most was that nobody involved believed they were failing to collaborate.

Everyone thought they were being professional.
Everyone thought they were contributing.
Everyone thought they were meeting expectations.

The problem was not effort. The problem was definition.

That experience fundamentally changed the way I think about collaboration in schools. We often speak about collaboration as though it is universally understood, but in practice, educators frequently carry very different mental models of what collaborative work actually looks like. Teams can spend months operating under invisible assumptions without ever explicitly discussing them.

One of the most important things I have learned is that schools often use the word collaboration to describe many very different activities.

Sometimes teams are coordinating. They are organizing logistics, aligning pacing, or distributing tasks efficiently.

Sometimes teams are cooperating. Teachers support one another, share resources, and contribute independently toward common goals.

And sometimes teams are genuinely collaborating. They engage in shared inquiry, collective problem-solving, and the co-construction of professional knowledge.

Those are not identical processes, yet schools frequently collapse them into a single word.

Looking back, I realize much of the tension on that team emerged because people were evaluating one another against different collaborative standards. One teacher believed reliability and contribution demonstrated professionalism. Others interpreted initiative and co-creation as indicators of commitment to the team. Both perspectives were reasonable. Neither had been explicitly discussed.

The emotional side of collaboration became increasingly visible to me after that experience. Conversations about collaboration are rarely just about workflow. They are often deeply connected to fairness, workload, ownership, trust, and professional identity.

• Who is carrying the cognitive load of planning?
• Who is generating the ideas?
• Who is revising the assessments?
• Who is waiting to be directed?
• Who feels over-relied upon?
• Who feels micromanaged?

These tensions can become especially pronounced in schools because collaborative structures are often implemented without a shared understanding of purpose. Andy Hargreaves (1994) warned against what he described as “contrived collegiality,” where collaboration becomes administratively imposed rather than authentically developed through professional trust and shared inquiry. Simply placing teachers together in meetings does not automatically create meaningful collaboration.

In many schools, collaboration is encouraged structurally but rarely defined operationally.

Teachers are told to “collaborate,” yet teams are seldom asked:

• What does collaboration actually look like here?
• What responsibilities are shared?
• What level of initiative is expected?
• What should be co-created versus independently completed?
• How do we distribute planning equitably?
• What does productive participation look like?

Without these conversations, teams often rely on implicit assumptions shaped by prior experiences, personality, workload capacity, or departmental culture.

Research by Katelijn Vangrieken and colleagues (2015) highlights that teacher collaboration is far more complex than it is often presented in schools. While collaboration is widely associated with professional growth and improved student learning, it can also generate tension, conflict, and ambiguity when expectations remain unclear. Collaboration is not inherently positive simply because it exists. The quality and structure of collaborative interactions matter enormously.

This realization also changed the way I thought about Professional Learning Communities (PLCs). Richard DuFour (2004) emphasized that collaboration is not merely about working together politely; it is about collective inquiry focused on student learning. Effective collaboration requires clarity of purpose, shared responsibility, and ongoing reflection into practice. That level of collaboration cannot emerge if teams never establish a common understanding of what collaborative work entails.

What I now understand is that collaboration is not a neutral word. It carries assumptions about initiative, ownership, accountability, and professional responsibility. When those assumptions remain invisible, conflict becomes almost inevitable.

Ironically, many collaborative teams do not fail because people refuse to work together. They fail because individuals are collaborating toward entirely different expectations.

That distinction matters.

As a leader now, I spend far more time helping teams define collaboration explicitly. Not to create rigid compliance structures, but to surface assumptions before tensions emerge. What do we mean by co-planning? What should collaborative planning time actually involve? What responsibilities belong to individuals, and which belong to the collective? What does equitable contribution look like on this team?

These conversations can feel uncomfortable initially, but they are far less damaging than allowing silent resentment to build over time.

Collaboration works best when expectations become visible.

And perhaps that is the real lesson I learned from that team years ago: professionalism alone is not enough to sustain collaboration. Teams also need shared definitions, shared norms, and shared understanding.

References

DuFour, R. (2004). What is a “professional learning community”? Educational Leadership, 61(8), 6–11.

Hargreaves, A. (1994). Changing teachers, changing times: Teachers’ work and culture in the postmodern age. Teachers College Press.

Vangrieken, K., Dochy, F., Raes, E., & Kyndt, E. (2015). Teacher collaboration: A systematic review. Educational Research Review, 15, 17–40. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2015.04.002