Creating partnerships for promoting in-school collaboration

Md Shajedur Rahman, Open University, UK; Mohammad Abu Bakar Siddik, National Academy for Primary Education - NAPE, Bangladesh

Teachers’ collaboration is a form of partnership that is often undervalued in the discourse of educational partnership. Yet, such micro-level partnerships have been identified as one of the influential and cost-effective ways for teachers’ professional development, changing teaching-learning practices and improving educational experiences for teachers and learners. Hence it is an important aspect of the teacher development area in Low and Middle-income counties.

However, the existing literature in this area, predominantly produced in the western context, narrowly focuses on the interactions in formal spaces such as meetings, coaching etc. My ethnographic study in a rural primary school in Bangladesh evidenced that teachers understood collaboration as a matter of their day-to-day activities, which are not restricted to formal professional interactions but also include a range of informal, professional, social and emotional activities. Teachers were involved in planned and unplanned collaborations with the majority of them being unplanned social conversations. According to the participants, collaboration lies in their social relationship which is underpinned by the closely knitted social structure. While this context offers potential for rich and spontaneous partnership, in most cases, these collaborative activities are not harnessed professional learning.

Based on the findings, we proposed a Framework for Professional Collaboration (F4PC), involving four stages- Sharing, Critical-building, Evaluation and Recording to promote focused professional collaboration which enables them to use their sociocultural spaces for collaboration without limiting their autonomy. The framework was recently / subsequently validated through three face to face workshops with 45 primary teachers from 3 geographic divisions in Bangladesh.

We have now established a partnership among researchers and government agencies to promote this framework as existing literature shows that administrative support is crucial for establishing and continuing collaborative practice in schools. Our current presentation reports on the partnership to promote professional teachers’ partnership in Bangladeshi primary schools.