Collaboration and Progressive School Reform

Abstract

For many educational scholars collaboration holds the key to school reform. This seeming agreement about the benefits of collaboration, however, obscures some significant differences about the meaning, form, and purpose of this process. This uncertainty about collaboration suggests the need to look carefully at the relation between specific forms of collaboration and the articulated purposes for this reform process. By looking at collaboration in this way, the author found that "robust "forms of collaboration can achieve broadly defined progressive ends when the effects of collaboration on the intensification of teachers' work are limited, when teachers play a significant role in setting the agenda for the collaborative process, and when the issues raised as part of the collaborative process emerge from the contextual realities of a particular school. The key to progressive reform, in this regard, is developing forms of teacher collaboration that reflect progressive values and purposes thereby setting the stage for some teachers to develop similar relationships with students.