Research for Teachers

When I first became a Head of Department, I felt incredibly fortunate.

I was already friends with many of my colleagues. We socialized, laughed together, and genuinely liked one another. I assumed those relationships would make collaboration relatively easy.

And, in many ways, they did. Meetings were comfortable. People shared resources. Decisions rarely involved much conflict.

But I began to notice something.

We could spend an entire collaborative planning meeting discussing where we were in a unit, who would create a resource, or when an assessment needed to happen. We would leave organized and feeling as though we had collaborated successfully.

What we didn’t necessarily discuss was whether what we were doing was working.

Were students learning what we intended? Were common difficulties emerging across classes? Had someone tried something particularly effective? Did the evidence suggest we needed to change our approach?

Over time, I realized that getting along with your colleagues and believing in your collective capacity to improve student learning are not the same thing.

That distinction brought me to collective teacher efficacy.

From “Can I?” to “Can We?”

Teacher self-efficacy concerns a teacher’s belief in their own capacity to influence student learning. Collective teacher efficacy shifts that belief to the group.

Bandura (1993) captures the distinction simply: “I know I can do this, but can we?”

Collective teacher efficacy is a group’s shared belief that, through their combined actions, they can positively influence student learning. It isn’t simply having a department of capable teachers—or one where people like and respect each other.

The belief is in the collective.

Can we identify why students are struggling? Can we develop and implement a better approach? And when something doesn’t work, can we learn from it and try again?

This matters because collective efficacy influences both the goals groups pursue and their persistence when difficulties arise (Bandura, 2002). Goddard et al. (2015) also found a positive relationship between collective teacher efficacy and student achievement.

But that raises a more interesting question:

How do we actually build it?

Efficacy Needs Evidence

I don’t think we build collective efficacy by telling teachers they are a strong team. Nor does simply providing more collaborative planning time create it.

Efficacy needs evidence.

One of the strongest sources of efficacy is mastery experience: experiencing success at something challenging (Bandura, 1993).

Imagine several teachers notice that students are struggling to integrate evidence into analytical writing.

They examine student work together, identify a common problem and agree on an instructional response. Everyone tries it. Then they return with student work and ask:

Did it help?

Perhaps it did. Perhaps it worked for some students but not others. Perhaps one teacher adapted the approach and achieved better results.

Now the team has something meaningful to investigate.

And if students improve, teachers have experienced something important together:

We identified a problem.

We did something about it.

Students improved.

We can do this.

That is very different from simply exchanging resources.

Coordination Is Not Collaboration

Looking back, I don’t think there was anything wrong with those early meetings. Teaching teams need to discuss pacing, resources, assessments and deadlines.

The problem comes when we mistake coordination for collaboration.

This distinction eventually became important in my own research. Collaborative planning can easily become dominated by logistical work rather than sustained inquiry into evidence of student learning.

I used to ask: Are teachers meeting? Are they sharing resources? Are decisions being made?

Now I am more interested in:

What are teachers accomplishing together that would have been more difficult to accomplish individually?

That might mean replacing Where are you in the unit? with What are you noticing students struggling with?

Or following What should we try? with the much more important question a few weeks later:

We tried it. What happened?

Collective efficacy also requires accountability. If we agree to implement something and return with evidence, my colleagues need to trust that I will do my part. Collective responsibility works because individuals contribute their expertise and effort toward a shared goal.

Collegiality Still Matters

None of this means relationships are unimportant.

Warmth and trust can make it safer to admit that something didn’t work, ask for help, challenge an established practice, or disagree with someone we respect.

I still value the friendships and laughter that characterized those early years of my leadership.

I just no longer mistake them for collective efficacy.

A team can enjoy being together without necessarily learning together. A meeting can be harmonious without changing anyone’s practice.

So I am less interested now in whether a collaborative meeting felt successful and more interested in what happened because we met.

Did we understand our students better?

Did we change something?

Did we follow through?

Did we return to the evidence to see whether it worked?

Because ultimately, the question isn’t simply whether we enjoy working together.

It is whether working together makes us more capable of improving learning than we would be working alone.

Am I measuring how well we get along—or whether we genuinely believe our collective actions can improve student learning?

References

Bandura, A. (1993). Perceived self-efficacy in cognitive development and functioning. Educational Psychologist, 28(2), 117–148.

Bandura, A. (2002). Social cognitive theory in cultural context. Applied Psychology, 51(2), 269–290.

Goddard, R., Goddard, Y., Sook Kim, E., & Miller, R. (2015). A theoretical and empirical analysis of the roles of instructional leadership, teacher collaboration, and collective efficacy beliefs in support of student learning. American Journal of Education, 121(4), 501–530.