Collaboration in Education: Difficulties and Benefits

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Collaboration is a skill of working together, sharing knowledge and experiences, pursuing a common goal in a group. It is said that collaboration is extremely effective and would improve the results of work – the speed and productivity of a group of collaborated workers is going to be much better than the results achieved by each worker performing alone. Collaboration has become a new aim for the school managers, an improved form of co-working that involves tighter connections between the partners and the members of the group. A skill of collaboration is what teachers are trying to explain to their students for years.

In the learning process collaboration has proved to be an essential knowledge, needed for better understanding of the inner policy and structure of the group, development of the ability to co-operate, take directions and share the general amount of work fairly and equally. Teachers know and can explain the importance of collaboration for the students very well, yet the collaboration between teachers seems to be very difficult to achieve.

The main challenges teachers have to face while trying to collaborate are connected with inter-dependence of the group members. For generations teachers have been individualists, each of them has their own style of teaching, way to organize work process, philosophy and views. This is why teachers, whose views and ideas are different, will have a hard time adjusting to each other’s schedule and style (Kaplan, par. 9). Besides, when the teaching process becomes observed, every teacher is known to feel extremely uncomfortable and self-conscious. Teachers do not like to be “exposed” like that. For the teachers collaborative work also means loss of autonomy in the process of forming the work structure and in decision-making (Bradbeer, par. 6). Moreover, co-teaching leads to working with more diverse groups of students.

This also can become a serious challenge and a cause of stress for the teacher. Another big difficulty of the collaborative work for any kind of professional, not only for a teacher, is the stage of building relationships inside of the group, assigning the roles and duties. The group has to be able to work as a whole without killing people’s initiative and personal style. Otherwise such partnership may lead to conflicts between the group members, which will bring negative results and influence productivity of the team.

Of course, some of these difficulties can be overcome by the teachers – forming better relationships with fellow teachers, sharing knowledge, asking questions, observing each other – all these things can be done once the teachers manage to defeat their insecurities and cope with what feels like “lack of privacy”. The school principals and administrations are able to bring collaboration to even higher level and provide inter-school communication (Leonard and Leonard, par. 20). Schools can participate in programs for collaboration on higher levels. However, on this level there may be a problem with organizational differences in various schools. The biggest external barriers for schools are lack of personnel or lack of resources needed for the development of better programs and putting them into action.

Collaboration on higher levels is a very complex process and it requires a lot of thinking and adjusting from all the sides. Unfortunately, finding understanding between so many people, who have been sticking to themselves and their own styles of work and organization for years, might be very complicated. This is why these days collaboration that is theoretically known as an extremely useful form of working is so hard to achieve practically.