Research for Teachers

There was a period earlier in my leadership journey when I experienced conflict within a collaborative teaching team that genuinely surprised me.

The conflict itself was not explosive or dramatic. It emerged gradually through tension in meetings, frustration during planning conversations, and increasing defensiveness between team members. At first, everyone involved tried to frame the issue professionally. People spoke about respect, professionalism, collegiality, and appropriate behavior.

What struck me afterward, however, was that nobody had ever explicitly defined what any of those words actually meant within the team.

Everyone assumed professionalism was self-evident.
Everyone assumed respectful collaboration looked the same to everyone else.
Everyone assumed the expectations were understood.

They were not.

That experience fundamentally changed the way I think about collaborative norms in schools.

At the time, I viewed team norms as somewhat unnecessary. If teachers were experienced professionals, I assumed they should naturally know how to collaborate effectively together. Norm-setting activities sometimes felt performative to me — something schools did at the beginning of meetings because they were supposed to, not because they genuinely mattered.

Now I think very differently.

I have come to realize that group norms only work when they are visible, shared, and revisited collectively over time.

Without explicit norms, teams often operate through invisible assumptions. Individuals carry different expectations about communication, disagreement, participation, feedback, initiative, workload, and decision-making, yet those assumptions frequently remain unspoken until conflict emerges.

And by then, tensions are much harder to untangle.

Looking back, I now understand that much of the conflict on that team was not rooted in bad intentions. It emerged because people were interpreting behavior through entirely different internal standards.

One person viewed direct disagreement as honest and productive.
Another interpreted it as disrespectful.

One person believed professionalism meant efficiency and blunt clarity.
Another believed professionalism required softer communication and greater relational sensitivity.

One person expected everyone to contribute immediately during discussions.
Another needed more time to process before speaking.

None of these expectations had ever been discussed openly.

The longer I work in schools, the more I realize that teams rarely discover the importance of norms during calm moments. They discover their norms during tension.

That is when the invisible suddenly becomes visible.

Research by Amy Edmondson (1999) highlights the importance of psychological safety within teams. Psychological safety is not simply about people being kind to one another. It is about creating environments where individuals feel safe enough to contribute ideas, ask questions, disagree respectfully, and engage in intellectual risk-taking without fear of humiliation or interpersonal punishment.

Clear norms play a significant role in creating those conditions.

When expectations remain vague, people often become hesitant about participation because they are uncertain about how disagreement, critique, or vulnerability will be interpreted. Ambiguity can quietly erode trust within collaborative spaces.

I also began understanding norms differently through the work of Bruce Tuckman (1965) on group development. Tuckman’s stages — forming, storming, norming, and performing — helped me recognize that conflict within teams is not necessarily evidence of dysfunction. In many cases, conflict is part of the developmental process itself. But teams move through conflict more productively when shared expectations have been established clearly.

Norms help groups navigate the “storming” phase without interpreting all disagreement as relational breakdown.

The work of Robert Garmston and Bruce Wellman also deeply influenced my thinking about collaboration. Their work on norms of collaboration emphasizes that effective teams intentionally cultivate behaviors that support inquiry, listening, pausing, paraphrasing, and productive dialogue rather than assuming these practices emerge automatically (Garmston & Wellman, 1999).

This was an important shift for me professionally.

I stopped seeing norms as decorative statements posted at the beginning of meetings. I began seeing them as operational agreements that shape how collaboration actually functions under pressure.

And importantly, norms create accountability.

Not punitive accountability, but collective accountability.

When teams have explicitly agreed upon expectations, it becomes much easier to return to them during moments of tension:

• Are we critiquing ideas rather than individuals?
• Are all voices contributing?
• Are we clarifying before reacting?
• Are we assuming positive intent?
• Are we making space for disagreement productively?

Without shared norms, these conversations often become personal very quickly.

I have also learned that norms are not static documents created once and forgotten. Teams evolve. Membership changes. Trust fluctuates. Workloads intensify. New tensions emerge. Effective collaborative teams revisit norms regularly because collaboration itself is dynamic.

What I once underestimated was how much emotional safety depends on clarity.

Professionalism becomes much easier to uphold when teams have actually defined together what professionalism looks like in practice.

And perhaps that has been one of the most important leadership lessons for me: healthy collaboration is not sustained by assumptions. It is sustained by intentional agreements that become strong enough to hold teams together when collaboration becomes difficult.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Garmston, R. J., & Wellman, B. M. (1999). The adaptive school: A sourcebook for developing collaborative groups. Christopher-Gordon Publishers.

Tuckman, B. W. (1965). Developmental sequence in small groups. Psychological Bulletin, 63(6), 384–399. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022100