Collaborative Professionalism: When Teaching Together Means Learning for All

Ensure Conversations About Collaboration Get Results.   

Ask any educational professional about collaboration and chances are they’ll tell you it’s one of their core values. But this familiar sentiment doesn’t always translate into meaningful professional experiences that help educators or their students grow. 

Addressing this critical gap head-on, this book lays out the theory and practice of Collaborative Professionalism. Through five international case studies, the authors distinguish Collaborative Professionalism from professional collaboration by highlighting intentional collaborative designs and providing concrete examples for how to be more purposeful with collaboration.  

Additionally, the book makes Collaborative Professionalism accessible to all educators through clear take-aways including:

• Ten core tenets, including Collective Efficacy, Collaborative Inquiry, and Collaborating With Students.
• Graphics indicating how educators can move from mere professional collaboration to the deep and transformative work of Collaborative Professionalism.
• Analysis of which collaborative practices educators should start doing, keep doing, and stop doing 

Collaboration can be one of your most powerful educational tools when used correctly, and turned into action. This book shows you how.

Andy Hargreaves is the Brennan Chair in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He is President of the International Congress of School Effectiveness and Improvement, Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Professional Capital and Community, and Adviser in Education to the Premier of Ontario and the First Minister of Scotland.

Andy has consulted with the OECD, the World Bank, governments, universities and teacher unions worldwide. Andy’s more than 30 books have attracted multiple Outstanding Writing Awards – including the prestigious 2015 Grawemeyer Award in Education for Professional Capital (with Michael Fullan).

He has been honored with the 2016 Horace Mann Award in the US and the Robert Owen Award in Scotland for services to public education. Andy has been ranked by Education Week in the top 10 scholars with most influence on US education policy debate. In 2015, Boston College gave him its Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Michael T. O’Connor is the assistant director of the Providence Alliance for Catholic Teachers (PACT) program at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. In this role, Michael teaches Master’s level courses, provides supervision and instructional coaching to the program’s teachers, and offers support to the program’s partner Catholic schools in the New England region. A former middle school English Language Arts (ELA) teacher and instructional coach, Michael received his Ph.D. in Curriculum and Instruction with a focus in literacy from the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. While working on his doctorate, he worked with Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley on the Northwest Rural Innovation and Student Engagement (NW RISE) network project, which included supporting the work of the ELA group. His dissertation explored secondary students’ language choices in authentic, community-based writing activities and the ways in which teachers collaborated to support student writing across rural contexts.