The scene is a tenth reunion and three college friends run into each other. They are all teachers, and soon they begin to talk shop .. Two of them are fed up. One says she is a-stickler for the rules and pushes her students as hard as she can. The other admits that she tends to be easy on her kids because "They have enough problems already." But as different as their approaches are, the two agree that most kids nowadays are hopeless; they can't or won't learn.
On the other hand, the third teacher, who teaches in a school with the same kinds of students as her friends, says that most of her kids are good workers and achievers. She is now trying some new ways of running her classes. Cooperative learning is one of them, and so far the youngsters are doing well.
How can we account for the friends' different attitudes and experiences with their similar students? It could be differences in talent or temperament, but a recent study, "Contexts That Matter for Teaching and Learning," by Milbrey McLaughlin And Joan Talbert, suggests another possibility. McLaughlin and Talbert found that the degree of collegiality in a school, and especially a department within a school, makes an enormous difference in teachers' response to their students and in students' achievement.
The survey involved nearly 900 teachers in 16 California and Michigan high schools. In noncollegial settings, where teachers seldom if ever discuss their teaching with colleagues and would be uneasy doing so-McLaughlin and Talbert found that teachers tend to stick with the methods they are used to. And they do this even if the methods do not and have never worked very well. As a result, they often get discouraged, and they often conclude that their students are not capable of learning.
But in collegial settings, teachers are accustomed to consulting colleagues and using them as resources. Not only does this provide help with immediate problems, it also leads teachers to continually look at and question their teaching practices and work to make then more effective .. McLaughlin and Talbert's data show that teachers in this kind of professional community feel more positive about their teaching and their students and that their students are substantially more successful than youngsters taught by the noncollegial teachers.
We can see the connection between collegiality and good teaching in the successful schools of some other industrial nations. As Harold Stevenson and James Stigler tell us in The Learning Gap (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), one reason Asian teachers get excellent results with their students is that teachers in a given grade work together, over time, to plan and then to revise their lessons.
Other professions also understand this connection. Lawyers routinely consult each other about their cases, and education reformer Phillip Schlechty describes how health-care providers in after teaching hospitals hold a "mortality and morbidity conference" after a patient dies. Everyone who had anything to do with the patient is involved in reconstructing the record of treatment. What was the diagnosis on admission? What treatments were ordered? What were (he results? And what might have been done differently? These conferences are not a way of assigning blame: They are an ongoing education program that helps the health professionals analyze their performance and decide how they might improve it.
McLaughlin and Talbert's findings about good teaching and collegiality have important implications for professional development and for school reform. Most districts think of professional development in terms of courses or workshops that train teachers in what is considered good teaching practice. But what kind of course or training session could possibly compare with a group of teachers acknowledging problems, sharing Ideas, trying new ways of doing things and evaluating results on an ongoing basis? And what kind of school reform instituted from the outside could possibly be successful without this kind of professional community to support It? Because the professional community the study talks about Involves teachers' working together at a school level, some people will be reminded of shared decision making, a strategy for education reform that has lately swept the schools. The two are not inconsistent with one another, but shared decision making is usually a question of school governance and administration how will the bell schedule be set up or where will the computers be relocated? In contrast, collegiality has a powerful effect on the quality of teaching in other words, on the basic mission of the school. If McLaughlin and Talbert are right, the best investment the national or state or local governments could make in education would be to start helping to build this ongoing process in all our schools.