Performance character

Building students’ comfort with collaboration starts with creating an inclusive, welcoming classroom setting that respects and draws out the voices and perspectives of all students. Approaches such as project-based learning and group activities provide opportunities to teach collaboration skills in a structured and deliberate way. Giving students a role in classroom decision-making — and responsibility for carrying out those decisions — builds students’ sense of agency and their capacity for collaboration. Learning experiences like these help students learn that getting things done when working with others involves a give-and-take process of dialogue, perspective taking — and, in some cases, compromise — in order to solve problems and move forward. Incorporating time for reflection about the collaborative process can help students identify and work through the challenges that can occur in these settings. And teachers can model collaboration as they work with other educators, both in the sharing of instruction and in the interactions teaching teams display to their students. Indeed, taking on larger issues that arise also requires collaboration, and teachers are more likely to be successful if they have already built collaborative relationships with each other through regular practice.

To build innovative organizations, systems leaders can put in place structures and processes that encourage and support collaboration and should start by modeling collaborative behavior from the top. This requires intellectual humility — a recognition that everyone in the organization or community has important ideas and perspectives to contribute, and it is the leader’s job to provide the right circumstances to allow the collective potential of the community to be realized. Building on a clear sense of purpose and shared goals, diverse leadership teams can open up channels for the system’s constituents to participate and have their voices heard. Organizations can demonstrate that they value collaboration by creating well-structured, intentionally inclusive, and psychologically safe participatory processes that engage parents, teachers, and students in providing input on systems decisions. By sharing responsibility for both decision-making and carrying out those decisions, and by communicating with transparency and consistency throughout the process, organizations can leverage the inherent benefits of collaboration and communicate to their diverse constituencies that they are valued members of the community.