ADOBE EDUCATION EXCHANGE

Collegiality and collaboration in education are vital to teacher success and wider school improvement: they’re big factors in professional growth, job satisfaction and job success. But … that’s not always possible in teaching. There are a number of factors that get in the way of collegiality and collaboration – working with a bunch of jerks is one of them, but it’s not the only one. School structures, schedules and culture can foster or suffocate collegiality, and there are factors even further out of your control like having to teach in a small school or in a niche subject area.

Personally, I fell into the latter category – I was usually one of two or three educators teaching Media across the entire school. It’s not like there was nothing I could learn from my colleagues (I did learn a heap), but, when it came to anything in my subject, I was on my own. I made and used my own resources, and, unless I watered them right down, they were only useful inside my subject area. As requested, I uploaded my resources to the school’s learning-resources-management system (only to subsequently email them to my students, because at least then I could guarantee they’d get them). And I could attend professional learning programs run by the VCAA or ATOM (if I could get approval), but that was about it.

It was just as problematic for teachers in classic subjects (just differently so). In those more mainstream subject areas, you had a range of teachers making or finding all sorts of different resources to share with their classes – but, maybe, not so much sharing with their colleagues. There was plenty of professional learning on offer, but a school is never going to send a whole learning area along; they’ll just send a