Stressful times may physically and mentally affect teachers. I understand working with incredibly challenging students or balancing work and home life may cause stress, so that other teachers can be a crucial source of support. When teachers rely on one another for assistance, they develop relationships based on empathy and trust. In order to establish long-lasting professional and mentoring ties, regular encounters are essential. Teachers are better equipped to encourage their kids when they feel supported. With the help of Google Docs, Trello, and other online collaboration tools, we can now communicate digitally. Online communication between teachers is simple and includes email exchanges, sharing papers, helping with worksheet editing, and even sharing entertaining videos. This is a great way to stay in touch and develop personal connections with other teachers within and outside the classroom.
After analyzing the collaboration between teachers, it can be concluded that when they work together, each teacher’s interests, experiences, and skills may contribute to a project. Teachers who collaborate in teams might divide tasks according to each team member’s personality and skill level. Teachers can feel comfortable contributing their most innovative skills to the development of their schools thanks to this type of collaboration, which promotes a greater sense of trust and responsibility. When you pursue an online master’s degree in education, you may learn about the benefits of teacher collaboration. When educators work together, they forge essential personal and professional connections. Teachers frequently assist one another and may give tasks that make everyone feel useful. Collaboration between educators improves schools and fosters student success.
Teachers who expressed higher levels of professionalism since they were more likely to take their work seriously, show a high level of commitment, and go above and beyond the call of duty to meet the needs of students. Teachers in these schools were more involved in the teaching process, collaborated, and were enthusiastic about their work (Hargreaves, 2019). They also respected their colleagues’ knowledge and skills, which I found to be working for me. Teachers must actively participate in collaboration and other components of the school community rather than letting administrators dominate every area of the professional learning communities (Hargreaves, 2019). Teachers should be strong leaders in curriculum, instruction, program planning, and professional growth.
A shared leadership model where administrators and teachers work together to solve challenges, share values, and clearly emphasize student success is associated with higher levels of professionalism. School leaders would avoid adopting a bureaucratic mindset with its inherent bias toward compliance and efficiency if we want our schools to operate as professional learning communities, even though these methods might appear more effective in the near term.
However, what did not work for me is that it may have a substantial psychological impact on teachers if they do not feel that they are treated like experts and do not have the required level of autonomy in the classroom. It is challenging for teachers to discover meaning and purpose in their profession when they seem to implement other people’s ideas rather than their own (Hargreaves, 2019). This is especially true when instructors feel excluded from policy choices that directly impact their daily work. It is crucial to avoid falling back into the command-and-control paradigm that predominated the 20th century and is still prevalent today as the teaching profession changes and focuses more on students fulfilling standards and holding practitioners accountable for that outcome. In their classrooms, teachers must have some degree of autonomy and authority.
The way schools are run has been affected by several cultural and educational developments, including autonomy, teacher professionalism, the development of community-focused school cultures, collaborations, and the idea of the school as an organic, linked whole. All school learners have changed connections and interaction patterns due to these new surroundings. Each trend may be seen as having collaboration as a core component (Hargreaves, 2019). The resurgence of classroom management has emerged as a central subject for educational reform. The fundamental concept of the reform of teacher professionalism is the conviction that it will be up to the teachers to bear the bulk of the burden for enhancing practice. The definition of teacher professionalism varies depending on the school reform literature (Hargreaves, 2019). For instance, one definition of teacher professionalism has modified decision-making such that teachers now have more basic choices about their practices and are more involved in administrative decisions.
Developing alliances between educational institutions, local communities, and other groups is another trend in today’s society. Therefore, no organization can address the needs of the growing population of kids with educational, social, and medical issues who are in danger of failing in school and society. Teachers must find and foster relationships with parents, employees of nonprofit organizations, local government officials, company owners, and university faculty to collaborate without conventional “turf disputes.” (Hargreaves, 2019). Additionally, by doing this, new teams and collaborations that have the adaptability, independence, and authority to operate together will be able to serve the educational requirements of kids. As a result, as boundaries blur, schoolwork not only becomes more apparent but also more intricately entwined and related to family and community. As a result, partnerships that exhibit the fundamental qualities of collaboration, such as interdependence, fairness, and common purpose, have evolved from being just social to collaborative interactions.
Collaboration has demonstrated its capacity to change people and schools in the participants in this study’s vivid accounts of their own lived experiences with it. The teamwork that supports school development necessitates moving beyond the surface structural changes of reform attempts, as data from this study reveals (Hargreaves, 2019). People who collaborate have rich, meaningful connections built on trust and respect. More individuals are given a chance to take on leadership roles, which increases capacity and support toward change.
Reference
Hargreaves, A. (2019). Teacher collaboration: 30 years of research on its nature, forms, limitations and effects. Teachers and Teaching, 25(5), 603-621.