Wow! eBook
Moving from Teacher Isolation to Collaboration: Enhancing Professionalism and School Quality
Author(s): Sharon Conley (Author), Bruce S. Cooper (Author)
- Publisher: R&L Education (UK)
- Publication Date: 28 Aug. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 194 pages
- ISBN-10: 1475802692
- ISBN-13: 9781475802696
Book Description
Teaching embodies many roles — in the classroom through teacher-student interactions, and beyond the classroom through teacher-adult interactions. This book explains and demonstrates how collaboration and teamwork can help enhance professionalism and school quality by overcoming teachers’ isolation in the classroom, in the school, and in their work. The contributing authors address: historic patterns of isolation; why collaboration is crucial for vibrant and sustained professionalism; principles of successful team collaboration in schools and other sectors; school districts’ structure and support for collaborative teams; forces that motivate or restrain teachers’ ability to collaborate; how teachers in grade-level teams perceive the quality of their training and support; team members’ perceptions of their work in departments; teachers’ use of evidence of student learning to improve teacher and organizational learning; and teacher-principal collaboration from the perspectives of exemplary teachers. These chapters provide insight into the complexity of teachers’ roles, and indicate the necessity to build collaboration within the school and beyond.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Any doubt that educators are looking to collaborate with others throughout the school environment? For teachers are expected to use a variety of relevant data to inform instruction and provide timely feedback, while creating environments where students have a voice in their own learning. This book targets and responds to the critical issues of teacher isolation and collaboration, at a time when strategic engagement is often required of all teachers. This book is a must read for anyone seeking to alter the mindsets that limit how and why time and professional interactions in schools are currently constructed.
In the face of unrelenting and often irrational challenges to public education, the teaching profession risks becoming less and less desirable to many. Conley and Cooper offer ways to strengthen both the professionalism and desirability of teaching. Their emphasis on collaboration and professionalism promises to enrich teachers’ work and to strengthen schools as well.
About the Author
Bruce S. Cooper, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus, Education Administration and Public Policy, Graduate School of Education, Fordham University; having taught at University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College, after receiving his doctorate at the University of Chicago with Donald A. Erickson, as his mentor. Cooper has written 35 books on education politics and policy, including The Handbook of Education Politics and Policy, in two editions with Lance D. Fusarelli and James Cibulka; served as President of the Politics of Education Association and a founding member of Private School Research Association; and received the Jay D. Scribner Award for Mentoring and the UCEA.
