Most schools encourage their staff to work in a collegial manner and this is actually a policy requirement in many parts of the world. Year level clusters of teaching staff are exhorted to work as a team, and there is often the belief, based on teachers legally being in loco parentis, that the school is like an extension of family within its local community.
Personal experience and observation have revealed that there is a ‘many shades of grey’ overlaying blanket of idealism that dampens the true expression of these terms as they are currently deployed systemically in schools. Accepting politically correct or ‘grey’ definitions of these terms can ostracise us from what we know deeply within to be true collegiality, teamwork and family. Unmasking the ‘grey’ offers the potential for a true way for all of us in education to work together.
Taking collegiality as a case in point: what is the systemically peddled picture of how this should look in school and what is the actual potential for this concept?
Webs of Collegiality
The current standard of collegiality in education is founded exclusively on the functionality of all participants, without regard for what each teacher or staff member uniquely brings to the table. In line with this emphasis, working cooperatively is reduced merely to the task in hand and is perhaps more aptly referred to as working compliantly within the confines of strictly role based arrangements. Whatever title each person carries – be it principal, teacher, aide, student, area director – the stringent expectations of the title carry a limited range of parameters from which each person can express and engage with colleagues. Everyone is like a cubist portrait of themselves – no aspect feels or looks natural and confining lines compress each person’s look and expression.
When there is unquestioning or rigid compliance, being ‘on the same page’ all too often indicates simply that no-one is rocking the boat and that each ‘cubist painting’ is conforming to their pre-assigned role and meeting the group’s functional expectations. The result is an entire mural of cubism, where these expectations are actually compressing every participant bar none. The cubist look is intensified by the way in which each person is wearing the equivalent of a distressingly restrictive, invisible corset, unable to breathe their own breath.
What if there is a grander interdependence, a harmony, to align to that goes beyond the scripted norms we all semiconsciously obey in deference to the multiple systemic demands?
In exactly the same way that some religions have a bureaucratic hierarchy, a scale of importance from entry level priest, through to the pomp of an archbishop and ultimately to the dizzying heights of a cardinal or even a pope, these graded hierarchies of scale do not allow for the true expression of any who serve them, but merely allow arrangements of comfort whose sole intent is to perpetuate and sustain the bureaucracy itself. Each role is no more than the feathering of each one’s singular nest, generating a systematised acceptance of roles that separate us into higher and lower, important to insignificant.
Referred to by some as reciprocal altruism – the notion that if you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours - this type of group work completely ostracises all of us from each other and from true connection, intimacy and expression, as we unwittingly replay scripts that are aeons old, differing only in the descriptive labels and titles attached to them.
Because such hierarchies are graded, there are the unceasingly disturbing movements of multiple, deadly undercurrents: workplace politics characterised by competitiveness, inequitable resource allocation and hierarchical subservience. These dynamics play out the constant drama of who is in and who is out; who is top dog; who is in the aspiration and ascendancy of the top dog position; who are the enablers, the victims, the bullies, the supporting bureaucrats, the token rebels; who is the ruling hand behind the public face of the throne.
There are occasions when these dynamics operate through a single person; in many cases, it is clearly a group force that is propelling and sustaining the momentum. All of us contribute to the overall dysfunctional dynamic any time we are not expressing from the simplicity of who we are.
Academia itself fully acknowledges the complex conundrums that arise from this way of structuring human interactions within hierarchical, role-based systems, with an entire branch of Psychology being dedicated to this. Industrial and Organisational Psychology is a multi-billion-dollar industry.
Clearly our collective dysfunctionality in the workplace can be put to profitable use by someone somewhere.
Standing on Common Ground
How did our ‘earning our daily bread’ ever come to take on these tangled webs of complication (?) when a natural connection with both our innermost and our physical body always confer an ease in communicating and collaborating with others. Our common ground is that we all have an innermost essence and a physical body and hence we all respond instantly to what is common within us all. Collegiality based on this foundation would surely be a completely different experience both in education and all other workplaces.
Do it for the Team?
In the last two decades there has also emerged an emphasis on teams and teamwork as an integral part of teacher professionalism. Prior to this, we teachers were largely silo-ed in our respective classrooms and left alone to a very large degree, collaborating mainly on term-by-term planning and during weekly staff meetings.
The movement to corporatise education in the age of technology brought the demand for more complex, school-based data, alongside identical, but wider, demands for regional, state-wide, national and international data. What was once an exclusively local and highly personal assessment of children’s academic achievement, now belonged to huge trends, based on worldwide data analysis. Any singular child’s grades came to form part of a global picture of how children were performing against children in other countries.
This whirlwind emphasis on data drive pedagogy inevitably meant that teachers had to work in teams to ensure the temporal precision and accuracy of their school’s data. The teacher role became more complex with the wholesale movement to regular moderation of student work in order to standardise grades. Expectations of increased teacher accountability for student performance emerged. This was accompanied by further professional expectations for teacher performance to cut the mustard in ‘stretching the bell curve’ of student grades. An emphasis on achievement based data walls, data talk and comparative data all now replaced the earlier teacher conversations of how children were developing socially and emotionally within their local community, as well as academically.
Generating grist to the inexorable global data mill took precedence over the potential for genuine intimacy and care within one’s school community.
The definitions of team and teamwork were framed within this social context. Those of us who had naively subscribed to rose tinted ideals and beliefs about what working in teams could be like were swiftly disavowed of such non-functional notions. The ultimate corporate expectation was, and remains, for teacher efficiency in meeting pre-set targets in their students’ achievement grades.
A further multi-billion dollar industry emerged around this, with the correlation co efficiency scores of various teaching strategies scored, analysed, promulgated and then sold to educators worldwide as the effective pedagogy they need to maximise student academic outcomes. In other words, the teaching strategies that teachers had used for decades, were packaged up and sold back to them as this is what you need to be doing. Selling ice to eskimos comes to mind.
The overall outcome has been teachers spending more of their professional time looking at data laden screens, with commensurately less time spent looking at their students, or even at each other.
As a package, this is the ultimate maximisation of the factory / corporate model of education, whose foundation was the demand for a literate and numerate workforce to fuel the industrial machine of the Industrial Revolution.
However, this is not the only model of education. There are so many more colours than just grey in the palette with which we can collectively paint our lives.
Meet Your Family
As these movements of corporatisation and data driven pedagogy were occurring globally, there arose in some local areas a trend of referring to one’s school as being like an extended family, where the school community is claimed to be your bigger family. This was based in part on the way schools support both staff and children’s families in times of crisis or emergency. This is definitely fabulous support at such times; however, this movement is usually relatively short lived and only encompasses the time of the incident or crisis. It is followed by a return to telling children that the school is their larger family as they learn that acceptance by this family tends to centre on compliance and obedience to a fixed set of ideals, beliefs and norms. These norms and ideals, which are school specific, are invariably seen as ‘good’. They are socially acceptable and completely impeccable, ticking all the boxes of good behaviour. Another movement akin to cubism and its compressing portraits…
These norms and rules are externally derived and loosely based on the catch-all concept of tradition and habit. They are then imposed upon the students and community as a whole. It’s rather like expecting the centuries old tradition of good manners to act as the foundation for profoundly ethical, virtuous and socially responsive behaviour when in fact many, many well-mannered people act like rogues and scoundrels. Neither manners nor socially prescribed definitions of ‘good’ maketh the man.
The real tragedy of this scenario is that it disbars the entire school community from the actual connection and intimacy on which true family is based. Instead, we circulate compliance to external values with little to nothing of us in them. In the absence of us, these values have no heart. When we defer exclusively to systems, we withhold our own rhythmic heartbeat and it is this that pulses the warm flow of love into our schools and communities.
It is this type of expression from within that founds the deepest standards of care and regard for all. An environment that truly fosters deeper levels of care and nurturing for the whole being is the genuine way to claim to be acting as a true family, where each person is truly known and valued for who and what they are.
None of us can flourish on functionality alone and a group defined by functionality only exponentially compounds the distress that then blankets the entire group. The drudgery of the dispossessed abounds.
Islands of Intimacy
A wise man once taught that we must render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s. However, what do we do when ‘Caesar’ (the systemised demands) has become inordinately greedy and wayward in his insatiable appetite for dehumanising all who work or study in education in this way?
Could it be as simple as restoring the heart - offering true connection and intimacy to one colleague, one student at a time day by day by day?
We have all experienced moments when there is a glimmer of something much more profound than the daily grind. It can be a look in the eyes of another; or catching a movement, a gesture and being touched by its grace. It can be a confirming smile, a vitalising conversation or a sense of space. These are the islands of intimacy that can abound in our day to day. They are the foundations of connection with ourselves and our community from which we begin to express truly from our open heartedness. Building genuine care and transparency into our daily engage brings a lightness to our work and a harmony among us.
What if this lightness offers the way to another model where true collegiality, teamwork and family can flourish harmoniously?
Such a model is built on valuing deeply who each person is and what they bring to each interaction, to work and to the students in their care. Within this model is the awareness that none of us need be reduced to a static definition of a role, but that we each carry endless depths of potential within us. These potentials are drawn out from within us as we respond in service to others, breathing warmth and life into our work.
In this model we are the many colours in each other’s palette and with these we paint the masterpiece of our collective life.