Dive Brief:
- According to Esther Quintero, a senior fellow at the nonprofit Albert Shanker Institute, teachers collaborating and fostering a supportive professional environment is just as important for student achievement as having good individual teachers in place.
- Quintero supports this claim with research from four empirical papers that evaluate the benefits of collaborative teams.
- Instead of focusing on excellent individuals, Quintero urges schools to think about their staff as a unit and to work toward building excellent teams.
Dive Insight:
"The big message I hear is that maybe we don’t just need extraordinary individual teachers, but rather teachers of diverse abilities who work as a cohesive team," Quintero writes. Her point is especially interesting, since, as she explains, when schools focus too much on the skills of the individual teachers (teacher human capital), the potential for a strong professional team (teacher social capital) is often eroded. Teaching should not be done in a vacuum, and when praise is focused solely on individuals and their work, an opportunity is missed to build something stronger. Maybe instead of Teacher of the Year, "Grade Level Team of the Year" should be awarded. Imagine how many more students could be affected.
