One Classroom at a Time? Teacher Isolation and Community Viewed Through the Prism of the Particular
by Alex D.M. Pomson — 2005
In recent years a research literature has developed which increasingly problematizes the project to construct professional community in schools. This case-based literature explores the messy complexities of teacher cooperation and collaboration. It points to the human, cultural, and political dimensions in schools that prevent changes in the organizational conditions of teachers' work from achieving their anticipated outcomes. This article deepens this vein of research by examining the experiences of those who work in a school system where, because of its governance and curriculum organization, teachers must work in a professional environment which provides few opportunities for isolation or privacy. Drawing on a series of narrative inquiries into the work and lives of Jewish day school teachers, the article helps clarify different impulses behind the search for teacher community: those that derive from professional concerns, such as the goal to improve student achievement, and those that derive from personal concerns, such as the desire to belong or to experience fellowship in the workplace. In its final section, the article brings into view sources of teachers' ambivalence about collaboration often overlooked in the school reform literature.
In recent years a research literature has developed which increasingly problematizes the project to construct professional community in schools. This case-based literature explores the messy complexities of teacher cooperation and collaboration. It points to the human, cultural, and political dimensions in schools that prevent changes in the organizational conditions of teachers’ work from achieving their anticipated outcomes. This article deepens this vein of research by examining the experiences of those who work in a school system where, because of its governance and curriculum organization, teachers must work in a professional environment, which provides few opportunities for isolation or privacy. Drawing on a series of narrative inquiries into the work and lives of Jewish day school teachers, the article helps clarify different impulses behind the search for teacher community: those that derive from professional concerns, such as the goal to improve student achievement, and those that derive from personal concerns, such as the desire to belong or to experience fellowship in the workplace. In its final section, the article brings into view sources of teachers’ ambivalence about collaboration often overlooked in the school reform literature.
CONTEXT
For much of the last century it was a commonplace of research into the professional lives of teachers that they invariably worked in isolation, behind closed doors, in the insulated environment of their own classrooms (Little, 1990; Lortie, 1975; Waller, 1961). This sociological circumstance became a central target for reformers who argued that if teachers’ work was deprivatized, or if, in Sergiovanni’s oft-quoted charge, schools were viewed as communities rather than as organizations, a variety of benefits would follow (Sergiovanni, 1994). These benefits, it was claimed, brought about through the creation of smaller schools, magnet programs, site-based management and teacher collaboration, would transform not only teaching and learning, but school systems as a whole (Goodlad, 1990; Meier, 1995; Shulman, 1989; Sizer, 1984). As Achinstein (2002) explains, it was anticipated that at the individual level, the cultivation of professional community would ease the isolation and uncertainty inherent in the teaching profession (Johnson, 1990); at the classroom level, it would support teacher innovation and risk (Rosenholtz, 1989); and at the school level, it would result in organizational coordination, teacher empowerment, and the achievement of reform goals (Barth, 1990).
The benefits promised by school reformers have emerged only haphazardly and hesitantly. As a consequence, in recent years a research literature has developed which increasingly problematizes the project to construct professional community in schools. This literature questions what Westheimer (1998, p. 21) identifies as two problematic but central assumptions of school-based organizational reform: (a) that teachers and administrators know how to turn organizational potential into truly communal relationships and (b) that teachers seek such communities. This case-based literature explores the messy complexities of community and collaboration. It points to the human, cultural, and political dimensions in schools that prevent changes in the organizational conditions of teachers’ work from achieving their anticipated outcomes. To cite some examples: This research has made visible the multiple reference groups within which teachers navigate institutional life (Little & McLaughlin, 1993); the obstructions to school change created by teacher cliques (Hargreaves, 1994); the manifold human elements that subvert the evolution of school community (Louis & Kruse, 1995); and numerous other cultural, ideological, and psychological factors that complicate the cultivation of community in schools (Merz & Furman, 1997; Westheimer, 1998). In short, this burgeoning literature has provided a powerful sense not only of the fragility of community (Calderwood, 2000), but also of the complex micropolitics that can make a difference between ‘‘mature, developing, fragmented and static’’ school communities (Louis & Kruse, 1995).
This article seeks to contribute to our growing appreciation of the human and cultural complexities involved in nurturing collaborative school communities by examining the experiences of those who work in a school system where, it seems, teachers must, of necessity, cooperate with peers and parents. This private, denominational and (largely) faith-based setting allows teachers little professional or physical autonomy and is unlikely to suggest organizational recipes for public elementary schools as a whole. Yet to adapt an argument of Eisner’s (1998), this special system in which almost a quarter of a million North American children are educated might help others better appreciate the shared complexities involved in cultivating professional community (cited by Westheimer, 1998). Moreover, the reflections of teachers thrown together at all levels of this system will help thicken understanding of the problems and possibilities when teachers in other systems find themselves (forcibly) teamed with colleagues for particular curriculum purposes.
The governance and curricular organization of Jewish elementary schools requires teachers to work in a professional environment, which provides few opportunities for solitude or privacy. Generally, Jewish day schools are privately funded institutions governed by parental groups involved intensively in day-to-day operations. All schools deliver a dual curriculum of Judaic and general studies. Each half of the curriculum is usually delivered by a different teacher. This means that other than in rare instances, teachers throughout the elementary grades must share their students with at least one colleague (chosen for them in an arranged match) with whom they must negotiate the many dimensions of the classroom environment. In many ways, this is an extreme form of a situation familiar to all classroom teachers who are required to coordinate their work with music and art specialists or with second-language instructors. In these terms, the day school also looks much like the work environment for health care and human service providers, who increasingly are required to conduct their work within specially formed interdisciplinary teams (Garner, 1998).
In this setting, where there are few opportunities for privacy or autonomy, it is possible to investigate the extent to which teachers seek out isolated professional space or instead embrace opportunities for collaboration and collegiality. If teachers do seek community in this context, we can explore whether it is because they are concerned to improve student achievement and/or whether they seek other desired personal outcomes. This special setting provides, then, a context in which to interrogate many of the psychological and structural categories used to explain teachers’ resistance to aspects of school reform.
METHODOLOGIES
The data at the heart of this inquiry are drawn from three research projects conducted over a 4-year period. These projects have asked Canadian Jewish elementary school teachers from 16 schools of great ideological diversity to engage in systematic or sustained reflection on their professional lives. In the first project, 9 Jewish studies teachers from 6 different schools kept reflective diaries over the course of a school year. Participants were asked to write at least once every 2 weeks about any aspect of their lives and work, which they regarded as having been important for their teaching. Individual participants then met with a member of the research team1 approximately once every 6 weeks in order to elaborate on what participants regarded as gaps in their accounts or to revise whatever they might have recorded. In a follow-up yearlong study, four pairs of Jewish and general studies partners engaged in a similarly structured process of journal writing and conversation as they reflected on their professional lives and on their relationships with cross-curriculum partners. In a third study, 18 graduates from a university-based Jewish teacher education program were interviewed about their teaching careers. In this instance, the research participants had completed a Jewish studies specialization in a publicly certified preservice program and came to day schools after gaining some experience in public schools. The research team developed a semi structured interview script to encourage participants to narrate their career stories without being restricted to a linear or chronological orientation.
In all three instances, these research projects were grounded in a view of teaching as work that involves (in often exceptional ways) the teacher as a person (Hamachek, 1999). From this perspective, it was assumed that not only is the teacher’s work an important element in the definition of self, as is the case for most workers in Western culture (Hughes, 1958), but also, as Nias (1989) puts it, that the ‘‘the self is a crucial element in the ways teachers construe the nature of their work’’ (p. 13). All three studies sought, therefore, to explore the points at which personal and professional identity overlap in teachers’ work.
Narrative provided both the substance and method for all three inquiries. The first two journal-based studies, by inviting teachers to narrate the details in their lives, ‘‘called’’ participants to capture/compose the stories they live (Coles, 1989). The third study attended to what Kelchtermans (1993) calls ‘‘teachers’ career stories,’’ the career accounts teachers compose from the facts of their lives. It was conceived as a study of teachers’ careers in which career was regarded as a subjective construct which gives shape to individual employment histories (Bicklen, 1986). All three projects utilized narrative forms, which conveyed the essences of teachers’ practices, pursuing ‘‘the secret of teaching . . . in the local detail and the everyday life of teachers’’ (Ayers and Schubert, 1992, p. v). The data they generated possess many of the qualities of narrative inquiry: They are personal, evocative, and fraught with moral tension.
FRAMING THE FINDINGS
The original scope of these three studies was open-ended. The first two sought to turn to teachers ‘‘to generate accounts which might serve as significant sources of insight into Jewish education’’ (Pomson, 2002, p. 26). The third was interested in exploring what Jewish schoolteachers identify as central sources of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in their work (Pomson, 2004). While the core concerns of these inquiries focused on particular issues within the world of Jewish day schools, the rich data they generated make it possible to examine questions of more general application beyond their immediate faith-based contexts. In this instance, they provide an opportunity to explore how teachers construct their space in relation to both colleagues and parents and to investigate the kinds of concerns that influence their search for autonomy or community in environments that press on them to participate in collective activity.
As suggested above, a thread running through much of the school reform literature is a view of teacher isolationism as either (a) an adaptive strategy in environments where the resources required to meet instructional demands are in short supply or (b) an ecological condition, encouraged by workplace settings where physical isolation is pervasive (Flinders, 1988; Johnson, 1990; Lieberman, 1988). From these perspectives, teacher isolation is a legitimate, or at least a predictable, response to circumstances where, normally, teachers are the only professionals in the room and are left to figure out how to move a group of 30 students through the required curriculum (Labaree, 2000).
More recent research has adopted a less deterministic view of the relation between organizational conditions and teachers’ tendencies toward professional community or isolation. Schools are rarely uniform cultures or ‘‘total institutions’’ where teachers respond in similar fashion to common workplace conditions. As recent studies have shown, teachers are as likely to see aspects of school reform, such as scheduling changes and site-based-management initiatives, as opportunities or irritations (Hargreaves, 1994; Merz & Furman, 1997). They might regard team teaching, for example, as an opportunity for collegial support or as a threat to professional autonomy (Guiton, Oakes, Quartz, Lipton, & Balisok, 1995).
The findings reported here shed further light on the sources of these ambivalent responses to community-building structures and processes in schools. They indicate that when teachers commit to professional community, they often have different ends in mind. The following data show in evocative fashion how (and why) teachers’ investment in community can fluctuate among cooperation, collegiality, and collaboration, that is, among different expressions of professional interaction which Kruse, Louis and Bryk (1995) identify as corresponding to ever closer degrees of co-commitment. In the view of Kruse et al. (1995), these different modes of interaction derive from different approaches to the advance of student interests: cooperation ‘‘represents a very basic level of social interaction among teachers . . . It entails mutual aid in order to get work done more efficiently’’ (pp. 32–33). Collegiality, in contrast, is ‘‘characterized by mutual learning and discussion of classroom practice and student performance’’ (p. 33). Collaboration is ‘‘an expression of collegiality at its most advanced.’’ It is not contingent on tangible products but ‘‘entails a shared value base about teaching practice, students, and learning’’ (pp. 33–34).
These different co-commitments share a common concern with the betterment of student achievement. The work of Sergiovanni (1994) indicates, however, that teacher community can also be motivated by more immediately personal concerns without direct consequence for the quality of student learning. Indeed, in their more recent research, Bryk and Schneider (2002) show that a commitment to cultivating teacher-teacher relationships can be driven by at least three impulses, only some of which are centered on students’ needs: an ‘‘instrumental’’ impulse in which teachers seek one another’s help to carry out the day-to-day routines of schooling; a ‘‘moral’’ or normative one, which seeks to advance the best interests of children; and a ‘‘hedonic’’ or personal impulse derived from an interest in maximizing the teacher’s own self-worth and status (pp. 21, 30).