Based upon the readings:
Question 1 - How are characteristics of effective teams described?
The people problem (Harvey Robins and Michael Finley)
- The perfect team versus “Real teams--your teams are made up of living, breathing and imperfect people”
- Identify your communication style / adapt your style depending on whoever you are communicating with - to change your style completely is difficult! - It is possible to “soften the extremeness of your style, and learn how to communicate with people in other styles” - don’t be a chameleon - much rather “try to see things through their eyes, and understand their needs and preferences”
- ‘The will to team’ - “Learning about one another and by caring” - you may not like one another, “but you do have to get to know one another, and to value one another’s abilities and individuality” - It is when we “meet team mates halfway” and work together, that objectives can be met.
Competitive Hazards (Harvey Robins and Michael Finley)
- ‘Transcompetition’ = “grafting of fruit from the two trees of competition and collaboration” - taking both the good and bad - combine the best of both areas!
Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse (Roland S. Barth)
- Congenial relationships - Relationships that are interactive and positive = personal and friendly
- Talking about practice - Creating an atmosphere where teachers talk about their work = student evaluation, parent involvement, curriculum development and team teaching
- Sharing Craft knowledge - Staff meetings - Having the opportunity to share “a front-burner issue about which they have learned something important or useful” - this works against the challenge of “withholding”
- Observing one another - Holding a staff meeting in the classroom of a different teacher - the host is then responsible for ‘show and tell’ - this allows for follow up discussions - this reduces any anxiety a teacher may have about being observed.
- Rooting for one another - Offering to help!
Question 2 - What are challenges when collaborating with others?
The people problem (Harvey Robins and Michael Finley)
- When we form a team “nearly all team members are taken aback by the personalities of the other team members” - this is a big challenge and one “major reason teams fail”
- Misunderstandings are created because we are all different - these need to be overcome - “but they require self-knowledge, generous attention to the person who’s bugging us, and the will to keep working together, and not give up on one another” - or… we give up on one another
- Diversity = “different minds, different slants, different hot buttons… different cultures… different histories… different brains” - this can lead to “the message transmitted is not the message received” - How we communicate with others is “influenced… by what kind of person you are - - by your behavioural style”
- Home plates - Right to left = assertiveness - from passive (asking) to activity (telling), Top to bottom = Responsiveness - controlled reaction (top) to emotional reaction (bottom) - Analyticals (perfectionists, critical, stuffy…) Amiables (people people, dependent, awkward...) Drivers (Let-me-do-it people, tough, harsh…) Expressives (Big-picture people, excitable, friendly…) - On a team you might find all of these!
Competitive Hazards (Harvey Robins and Michael Finley)
- Unabated competition = treachery, deceit and corruption
- Unabated collaboration = nemesis of individuality, progress, diversity and change
- Sameness = lack creative deviation from what they already do
- Groupthink = doesn’t account for the viewpoints of outsiders
- Blurriness = Too much input = lack of focus
- Slowness = Teams lose momentum
- Leaderlessness = “When everyone is encouraged to lead, the end result is that no one does”
- Defenselessness = Everything is available to everyone = no confidentiality, no firewalls
- Interiority = Working alongside each other too long / becoming cross-eyed
- Mercilessness = “The many are stronger than the one”
- Finding the balance = greatness versus the will to commonality, focus versus empathy, persistence versus insistence, process versus results, play versus work, loose versus tight (structures)
Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse (Roland S. Barth)
- Parallel play - Working “in close proximity for a long period of time, each is so self-absorbed, so totally engrossed in what he or she is doing, that the two of them will go on for hours working in isolation” - “Here, we all live in our separate caves” - the consequence of this being that you will find “the self-contained classroom, with the door shut and a piece of artwork covering that little pane of glass” - the significance of this is that by shutting ourselves away we end up working in “isolation from colleagues who might cause us to examine and improve our practices”
- Adversarial relationships - as with parallel play many teachers find themselves “barricaded behind their classroom doors” - I was interested in the concept of ‘withholding’ - As educators we all have insights into practice and a vast amount of knowledge, referred to here as “craft knowledge” - the benefits here being that “if one day we educators could only disclose our rich craft knowledge to one another, we could transform our schools overnight”. Teachers who consider the “craft knowledge” they have is important and are willing to share it with others are often met with criticism. Competition = for resources and recognition = “the better you look, the worse I look”
- Developing Collegial Relationships - “Getting good players is easy, getting em’ to play together is the hard part” - The consequence here is how do you get ‘good teachers’ to work together in a professional learning community.
- Definition of effective collaboration
- Characteristics of effective teams
- Sameness = lack creative deviation from what they already do
- Groupthink = doesn’t account for the viewpoints of outsiders
- Blurriness = Too much input = lack of focus
- Slowness = Teams lose momentum
- Leaderlessness = “When everyone is encouraged to lead, the end result is that no one does”
- Defenselessness = Everything is available to everyone = no confidentiality, no firewalls
- Interiority = Working alongside each other too long / becoming cross-eyed
- Mercilessness = “The many are stronger than the one”
- Finding the balance = greatness versus the will to commonality, focus versus empathy, persistence versus insistence, process versus results, play versus work, loose versus tight (structures)
Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse (Roland S. Barth)
- Parallel play - Working “in close proximity for a long period of time, each is so self-absorbed, so totally engrossed in what he or she is doing, that the two of them will go on for hours working in isolation” - “Here, we all live in our separate caves” - the consequence of this being that you will find “the self-contained classroom, with the door shut and a piece of artwork covering that little pane of glass” - the significance of this is that by shutting ourselves away we end up working in “isolation from colleagues who might cause us to examine and improve our practices”
- Adversarial relationships - as with parallel play many teachers find themselves “barricaded behind their classroom doors” - I was interested in the concept of ‘withholding’ - As educators we all have insights into practice and a vast amount of knowledge, referred to here as “craft knowledge” - the benefits here being that “if one day we educators could only disclose our rich craft knowledge to one another, we could transform our schools overnight”. Teachers who consider the “craft knowledge” they have is important and are willing to share it with others are often met with criticism. Competition = for resources and recognition = “the better you look, the worse I look”
- Developing Collegial Relationships - “Getting good players is easy, getting em’ to play together is the hard part” - The consequence here is how do you get ‘good teachers’ to work together in a professional learning community.
Our collaborative design of these wiki pages:
- Definition of effective collaboration
- Characteristics of effective teams
