Toolbox 5 Teamwork for transformative learning.

At the moment as a beginner teacher, I can only come up with three ideas on ways I could engage in teamwork for transformative learning. First, I could join a school that already has collective teacher efficacy, which means that I could learn from teachers in a school that fundamentally believes learning transforms lives. Secondly, I could intentionally seek out and participate in a global online learning community who are learning from best practices around the world to help people become lifelong learners in their area of interest. The third way is to become part of a faith-based school who prayerfully turns to God to ask that their work is transformative through the work of the Holy Spirit.

The first is the idea of collective teacher efficacy which leads to transformative learning because teachers believe that students can and will improve. The Education Hub website connects the group positivity of teachers to the impetus for growth and learning in students, in this way, 

“Education professionals who have strong self-efficacy believe in their own ability to create change and are confident of their teaching abilities. Education professionals with a high sense of efficacy about their teaching capabilities may find it easier to connect with students, influence students’ beliefs about their abilities and influence student achievement.” 

I think of this as the Pygmalion effect, writ large. Goddard, Hoy, and Hoy (2000) explores the transformative power of collective teacher efficacy on the learning environment as a whole. Teachers working together, exemplified in the Stonefields School video, and that believing “the efforts of the faculty as a whole will have a positive effect on students,” stem from “the faculty in general agreeing that teachers in this school can get through to the most difficult students.” This research shows that, “teachers’ shared beliefs shape the normative environment of schools … [and] are an important aspect of the culture of the school.”  Being part of a school environment like this would make it easy for me to engage in teamwork for transformative learning as a new teacher and it would be easy for me to maintain self-efficacy. 

Secondly, there exists an online community of learners who may not necessarily be teachers but who are engaged in active learning about the global challenges facing a Volite, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world in areas of interests that I am teaching. First, what and where is teacher engagement on digital platforms? Teachers who go online and are part of a professional learning community who blog, have Youtube channels and engage through comments. Through social media platforms there are interest specific online reading and discussion groups run through educational institutions, including action research undertaken by teachers for specific practical purposes. Teachers who are part of such shared information spaces take part in quality conversations that include what they have tried in classes and suggestions on refining strategies in different classrooms for different cultural contexts and where to find ready produced material free online. For example, at the moment I am on PInterest as a English second language teacher. For every informative poster I pin, the platform suggests multiple versions of the same information designed and crafted in different ways by other people. My students can access my Pinterest account and can then select from this variety of presentations and learn (and pin) the same information designed in a format they like best. This variety of options to aid their learning would not be possible without this team of  “digital content creators”. Beyond the teaching profession there are interest groups in subject areas that I teach. For the past few years, I have followed some writing blogs on Tumblr and written some stories on Wattpad. Over time I would like to explore how these online spaces could transform my students’ ability to write stories for a real global online audience. In a way this is “teamwork” in a loose sense of the word because each participant takes responsibility for their own growth and increases their knowledge of their own learning online drawing from the collective experiences shared by others. By engaging in this process, I hope I am able to come alongside students in the future to collaboratively learn and add to the pool of learning collated online in order to produce transformative results offline and concrete ways. This motivation to leave a meaningful digital footprint increases my level of teacher efficacy.

Finally, joining a faith-based educational institution who prays for students, staff and school needs, like the Catholic school I am in now, allows me to be part of a community created to part of the transformative work God is already doing in the lives of the students. This has been called the “Catholic school advantage”  by Coleman in 1988 which refers to the transformative effect of Catholic schools on a pupil’s learning. Coleman observes that there is a “shared trustworthiness among members” of Catholic schools. “This reciprocal trust facilitates the exchange of useful information, but also a variety of other resources essential to a healthy community”. “Within these networks there exists what Coleman calls a “density of outstanding obligations”, meaning that available resources within a particular structure can be augmented by the fact that others within the community can be called upon to contribute to achieving the goals shared by all.”(Agirdag, 2019) In short, these schools offer prayers to a loving and just God and intercede on behalf of the young men in our care so belonging to such a transformative team of teachers, increases my self-efficacy and transforms us all into His likeness.

References

Agirdag, Orhan. (2019). The Catholic school advantage and common school effect examined:

a comparison between Muslim immigrant and native pupils in Flanders. Taylor and Francis online.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09243453.2016.1251469

Donohoo, Jenni., Hattie, John. & Eells, Rachel. (2018). The Power of Collective Efficacy.

Educational Leadership. 

http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar18/vol75/num06/

The-Power-of-Collective-Efficacy.aspx

The Education Hub.

https://theeducationhub.org.nz/strategies-for-developing-and-maintaining-self-efficacy-in-teachers/

Visible Learning. (2018). Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE) according to John Hattie.

https://visible-learning.org/2018/03/collective-teacher-efficacy-hattie/