One of the challenges that we are faced with in our schools is finding time for teachers to collaborate with one another. This goes beyond professional development days to creating time for teachers to regularly and systematically collaborate with one another.

Some schools have arrived at solutions including weekly before or after school faculty meetings using late starts or early dismissal to fit these meetings in with teacher contractual hours. Some schools do not face this challenge and are have weekly meetings after school without the need to cut instructional time. Some schools can produce a timetable with meeting times allotted in the daily schedule for teachers to collaborate on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Though, this requires creative scheduling skills.

When collaborative time is carved out, there still remains the determination of what to do with that time, as there is an endless list of things that we can work together on to improve our schools. As the saying goes, ‘a jack of all trades is a master of none.’ For collaborative to be effective, we must make sure that we allow teachers to have consistent and sustained focus on one or two things rather than be overwhelmed by a barrage of tasks where it becomes difficult to know where to start. School leaders are then responsible for ring-fencing the time needed to collaborate on these few tasks without interruption of other initiatives and, so called, urgent matters.

Additionally, when collaborative meeting time is set, clear outcomes are required that hold us all accountable for utilizing the time given. This means that guidance and support is vital for ensuring that outcomes meet expectations. Exemplars of what is expected, timelines from completion, a steering committee of leaders or assistants are all ways to support the focus of the collaborative effort.

This is the first step to developing norms with regular and systematic collaborative planning in our schools. Once we have these things in place, then we can talk about the desired behaviors that we want in our collaborative time, as most of the excuses for not collaborating are taken off the table.