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Leadership for inclusion: what can you do?
Leadership for inclusion: what can you do?

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2.2 What is the cost?

In addition to the constraints of traditional roles and attitude, another barrier to an increase in co-teaching is cost. Generally, people are the greatest cost within the education system. If you double up the number of paid adults within the class or provide them with planning time you invariably increase the cost. However, there are administrations using contracts to define collaborative roles and to require some collaborative working.

Activity 5: There are others doing it too

Timing: 30 minutes

There are also models of practice undertaken around the globe which encourage collaboration and involve relatively simple reorganisation of staff and teaching groupings, without great cost increases. For example, the author of this course has seen examples of:

  • three or four teachers to two classes
  • interconnected classrooms so staff and students can move between them
  • a support teacher linked to a subject teacher
  • support teachers allocated to a class regardless of identified support needs
  • a flexible mix of teaching, support staff and students working across several classes depending upon curriculum and learning needs.

Collaborative practice can also take place beyond the classroom, for example through shared lesson planning which builds upon teachers personal, professional and practical resources. It is also possible to engage in these processes in informal ways, which is probably something that teachers have been doing down the ages.

Watch these two videos and as you do so consider the table which lays out challenges and strategies identified in a study of teacher collaboration in joint lesson planning (Yuan & Zhang, 2016).

Download this video clip.Video player: Video 5: Teacher Collaboration- Spreading Best Practices School-Wide
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Video 5: Teacher Collaboration- Spreading Best Practices School-Wide
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Video 6: Collaborative working - Kingussie High School & Aviemore Community Sport Hub (The Open University is not responsible for external content.)
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Table 2: Challenges and strategies for teacher collaboration in joint lesson planning (based on Yuan & Zhang, 2016).
Challenges Coping strategies
  • Busy work schedule.
  • Too many ‘assignments’ from the district office.
  • A lack of collaborative awareness.
  • A lack of in-depth discussion.
  • Reluctance to critique others.
  • Teacher conformity in terms of thinking modes and teaching approaches.
  • Rearranging teaching schedule to provide common meeting time.
  • Reducing and integrating ‘assignments’.
  • The reform of teacher appraisal system to focus on group performance.
  • Guidance from a think tank.
  • Transforming teachers’ attitude towards giving comments from passiveness to positivity.
  • Inviting a teaching-research officer to provide guidance.

Now consider these two questions:

  • To what degree do you feel there is a need to have a commitment from school leaders to provide support to enable and motivate collaboration?
  • What opportunities can you see within these two videos which can be led in a bottom-up way?

Comment

These videos recalled the personal nature of working with others. You might have thought about how frustrating it can feel when someone seems to be focused on something else or seems to be missing the point. You might have recognised the importance of understanding other people’s priorities and how anyone can easily be preoccupied. The need to understand each other seems so obvious but it is not always clear when or if people are misunderstanding each other, and it is easy to just let such misunderstandings pass by unchallenged. The comment in the table about conformity of thinking was particularly interesting, given the earlier suggestion about the need to share values. Go back to the Yuan and Zhang paper and read this quote from a teacher:

We have been working together for so long. I think the high level of interdependence among us became an impediment to our collaborative learning because our ways of thinking and teaching were quite alike.

This made a great deal of sense. Collaboration is not of itself a panacea if it just means replicating old exclusionary ways. Part of leading is challenging ourselves. This was clearly what had happened in the class in the video.

Mel Ainscow (2016), an academic who has spent many years advocating and supporting collaborative practice to enhance school effectiveness and inclusion, talks about it being relatively easy to maintain cooperation until those moments when hard decisions must be made. The challenges people face emerge within their teaching and leadership practices alongside their relationships with the broad range of external and internal partners with whom they work (other schools, parents, support staff, teachers, community groups, universities, employers and public services). Ainscow notes that the most likely point of breakdown regards the setting of priorities and the allocation of resources. These moments can of course arise at all levels of the system and in relation to all the partners involved in the potential collaboration. It was clear in the videos that the participants needed to feel they had available workload and not too much to do. This seemed to be a systemic issue. The points in the table about a shift to a collective appraisal system was also systemic.

It was clear that practitioners are supported to work together if the leadership of the organisation recognise this as a priority. However, if we recognise leadership as a moment of agency within a particular context, then collaboration seems likely to present more opportunities for such moments to emerge. For example, the engagement with the wider community both in the strategies and the community sport hub opened up many interesting ideas and possibilities for leading new practices and relationships within and beyond the school setting. These could be supported by top-down management processes too but could build upon personal interests and understandings. Part of this process seemed a willingness to take a risk. This issue of risk taking seemed fundamental to the collaboration on view. This encourages thinking about the notion of risk that is central to participatory practices, where developing new ways of working not only involves taking risks in relation to the nature and quality of what you are producing but also in terms of the relationships between participants (Rix, 2020).