The Persistence of Privacy: Autonomy and Initiative in Teachers' Professional Relations

Abstract

The present enthusiasm for teacher collaboration has spawned a wide array of practical experiments. These range from various forms of coaching and consultation to shared decision making, interdisciplinary teams, subject discipline “collaboratives,” and more. It is precisely this plethora of specially designed arrangements-the fact that they are so designated-that compels attention. How central or peripheral are teachers’ relations with colleagues to their success and satisfaction with students, their engagement in their present work, and their commitment to a career in teaching? What is the contribution that teachers’ collegial involvement makes to the quality of the work force and the productivity of schools? The term collegiality has remained conceptually amorphous and ideologically sanguine. Advocates have imbued it with a sense of virtue-the expectation that any interaction that breaks the isolation of teachers will contribute in some fashion to the knowledge, skill, judgment, or commitment that individuals bring to their work, and will enhance the collective capacity of groups or institutions. Researchers have ascribed various benefits to teacher collaboration, among them student achievement in inner-city schools, teacher morale in times of stress, support for innovation, and an easing of the “reality shock” visited on beginning teachers.’ When I attend closely to the accounts of teachers’ professional relationships that have accumulated over the past decade, however, I am confronted by certain inescapable conclusions. A few schools stand out for the achievements wrought collectively by their faculties but much “that passes for collegiality does not add up to much.“’ Teachers’ collaborations sometimes serve the purposes of well-conceived change, but the assumed link between increased collegial contact and improvement-oriented change does not seem to be warranted: Closely bound groups are instruments both for promoting change and for conserving the present. Changes, indeed, may prove sub-