Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT
This article reviews the benefits of a collaborative school culture, including reduced teacher isolation, social and emotional support, opportunities for professional development and learning, and closer ties with significant stakeholders, such as families and community organizations. While collaborative cultures may be powerful, they also may be either misguided or superficial. Further, cultural change is difficult and norms such as teacher isolation and autonomy are well entrenched.
These concerns point to the need for a change process that has a positive focus, is essentially self-organizing, encourages deep reflection, and avoids the pitfalls of manipulation by school administrators. This analysis points to consideration of appreciative inquiry, a strengths-based process that builds on 'the best of what is' in an organization. The second portion of the article reports on the impact that an appreciative inquiry process had on building a collaborative culture in 22 schools located in British Columbia, Canada and reflects on its strengths and limitations.
Keywords: appreciative inquiry, collaboration, school culture, school change
INTRODUCTION:
One of the strands of educational reform movements in the last two decades has been the call for greater collaborative efforts, both among educators as well as with parents, students and the surrounding community (Hargreaves, 1994; James, Dunning, Connolly, & Elliott, 2007; Rosenholtz, 1989). Educational researcher Hargreaves (1994) referred to collaboration as an 'articulating and integrating principle' (p. 245) for school improvement, providing a way for teachers to learn from each other, gain moral support, coordinate action, and reflect on their classroom practices, their values, and the meaning of their work. Hargreaves argued that in some contexts 'collaboration replaces false scientific certainties or debilitating occupational uncertainties with the situated certainties of collected professional wisdom among particular communities of teachers' (p. 246).
PERCEIVED BENEFITS OF COLLABORATION AMONG EDUCATORS:
One of the reasons that researchers such as Hargreaves promote collaborative efforts among teachers is to reduce levels of teacher isolation so that teachers can share professional practices and have occasion to observe each other in the classroom or discuss their work (Lortie, 1975). In the ordinary course, a typical school structure provides little in the way of teacher interaction except for time spent in administrative committees or brief interchanges in a teachers' lounge (Rosenholtz, 1989; Lortie, 1975; Little, 1990a). Darling-Hammond (1990)...