Fostering teacher community development: A review of design principles and a case study of an innovative interdisciplinary team

Abstract

To deal with recent reforms and the accompanying complexity of work in secondary education, ongoing collaboration between teachers has become more important. A community is seen as a promising learning environment to support and embed collaboration into the culture of the school. However, community theory for the design of teacher communities seems underdeveloped. Therefore, this study aims to formulate a set of design principles to foster the development of teacher communities in secondary education. The set of design principles is based on a review of literature, as well as on a best-practice case. The case study was used to validate design principles from the literature in the target context. The resulting design principles were based on context-intervention-mechanismoutcome logic that takes into account the context-dependency of interventions as well as the mechanisms that help with understanding of how interventions produce certain outcomes. Implications for practice relate to ownership and co-design of the arrangement. The set of design principles provides a practical basis for teachers and administrators aiming to facilitate community building in their school. Future research is recommended on testing the effectiveness of the arrangement in the target context by means of a multiple case study.

Leadership for team learning: the case of university teacher teams

“…Cox (2004) observed that university teacher's work tradition is largely solitary, with high levels of individual autonomy. This work tradition also exists in secondary education, with Brouwer et al (2012) finding that when teachers collaborate, their interdependency is seldom task-related, leading to a low shared outcome responsibility and accountability. Yet, research outside the educational domain also provides ample evidence that teams of professionals that are interdependent and share responsibility can be very successful in tackling innovative tasks (e.g., Lee et al 2010;Zaccaro et al 2008).…”

“…Therefore, this study builds on studies performed in organizational and educational contexts (e.g., Crow and Pounder 2000). When describing the context, higher education literature takes precedence, although studies conducted in secondary education were also used where the former was lacking, since the setting has similar features (e.g., Kezar 2014), such as the tradition of professionals working solitarily and autonomously (Brouwer et al 2012;Cox 2004;Van Waes et al 2015) and the tendency of teachers to avoid change (Furco and Moely 2012;Van Eekelen et al 2006).…”

“…Such research also predominately focuses on team performance as an outcome and not on team learning (Burke et al 2006;Nicolaides et al 2014). Moreover, research on the influence of team leadership on teacher team learning is lacking, because empirical studies on stimulating collaborative teacher learning are limited (Little 2006;Vescio et al 2008) and mostly do not concern teams but collaboration forms with lower levels of task interdependence and shared responsibility (Brouwer et al 2012;Vangrieken et al 2015). In addition, these studies have mainly been conducted in primary and secondary education, and rarely in higher education (Kezar 2011;Vangrieken et al 2015).…”

Effects of Business Model Development Projects on Organizational Culture: A Multiple Case Study of SMEs

“…Finally, we used CIMO logic (context, intervention, mechanism, outcome) (Denyer et al, 2008) to explore intervention effects and synthesize information from the practical project work. CIMO logic has been used in other studies to draw causal relationships between an intervention and the outcome within a particular context (Bougharas et al, 2010;Brouwer et al, 2012;Rajwani et al, 2015;Pries-Heje & Baskerville, 2010).…”

The teacher as linchpin

“…Within these teams, it was difficult to address a teacher who was not acting as agreed upon. Brouwer, Brekelmans, Nieuwenhuis and Simons (2012) propose 31 design principles to facilitate community-building in schools. Three of these principles could be very helpful for these teams for developing an atmosphere in which they can discuss it with one another if things do not happen as proposed: (1) develop trust, (2) enable a positive climate, and (3) develop ownership.…”