I was at Campbell Hall on Monday for the California Association of Independent Schools Southern Regional Meeting. Rob Evans was the featured speaker and I was able to catch his talk during the second session of the day. He spent most of his time suggesting that while teachers are generally quite congenial with one another, they may struggle to be collegial. This lack of collegiality hinders learning environments and can negatively impact the growth of students, teachers, and the school itself. I will outline Evans’ take on why this is occurring and what educators can do to shake the trend.

This was a CAIS meeting, so his talk was targeted toward educators at independent schools. It is common for teachers at independent schools to make less money than those at public schools, but most independent school teachers find tremendous value in the freedom to teach what they want to teach, the way they want to teach it - as opposed to having a strictly enforced curriculum and methodology handed down to them. They like to do things their own way and don’t always share those ways with colleagues.

It would be difficult to find an educator who claims that collaboration, communication, interdisciplinary studies, conflict resolution, and constructive criticism between students and their classmates are not essential elements to building a rich learning environment and promoting growth. Yet, these educators are sometimes forgetting to practice what they preach. Their own professional relationships and workplaces are lacking the very qualities and practices that students are being taught to employ in the classroom. So either the students are learning strategies that are not applicable to individuals in the “real world,” or educators are not creating a workplace for themselves that is conducive to learning and growth. Evans suggests that the latter is the case, by comparing this to the way that colleagues interact in other types of workplaces or businesses.

Workers in the corporate world tend to develop a thick skin, or a high conflict tolerance, as they are spending time in an environment with less congeniality than say, an elementary school. Frequent feedback about how a corporate employee is doing his/her job is common, and often times that feedback can be blunt. Feelings are not always considered when a boss or colleague is telling an employee that performance hasn’t exactly been up to par. In many fields of work, it is understood that these conversations and possible criticisms between coworkers about the way they are doing their jobs is “business, not personal,” and it is in the best interest of the company for these conversations to take place.

Educators do have conversations, but more often than not the conversations revolve around curriculum or content as opposed to method. If method is not discussed, how can it be known that the school is doing what it says it’s doing? Discussions that allow educators to investigate this and settle differences that might arise are essential to growth. Teachers need to have the capacity to disagree constructively for the benefit of the school. Asking questions or providing feedback about the way a colleague teaches his/her students should be commonplace and any differences of opinion should not threaten the understanding that “I like you and we’re friendly with each other,” which may or may not be the case. Colleagues should feel comfortable generating dialogue about the way things are being done, and that dialogue should be constructive and collaborative. In a typical classroom discussion, a teacher has no problem telling a particular student “We’ve heard quite a bit from you today, now let’s hear from somebody else.” Yet, it is not uncommon for the same voices to be heard, saying the same things, at every faculty meeting. “Unanimous” agreements are sometimes reached because people just “don’t want to get into it,” yet some very necessary and valid objections to the agreement might surface in parking lot conversation.

So how can educators give each other collective permission to talk more directly? Evans suggests that teachers need to better know each other, and each others’ ways. Being friendly and saying “Hi, how was your weekend? Mine was great, thanks” is not knowing. Colleagues need to understand each other by visiting one another’s classrooms and building constructive dialogue based upon those visits and the observations within. Critical Friends Groups are being utilized in some schools as an effort to achieve this. The opportunities for visits and conversations should be scheduled during school hours, not on personal time. School-wide, there should be a clarity of all good things believed in and pursued by the institution. From the head of school on down, each individual educator at a school should understand which of those things are valued most. These values should shape the conversation about the way things are being done.