Where We’ve Been

In the early years of the Barnes Initative for Collaborative Learning, the focus on educators working together on shared challenges drew the attention of many people and even made it onto the front page of our local print newspaper, the Valley News. At that time, Page Tompkins described the appeal: “This is educators coming together and understanding and solving shared challenges that they face,” he said. “It can’t be educational researchers talking to each other; it has to be practical.”

During the 2022-2023 school year, when school staffing challenges had grown exponentially in response to the pandemic, we decided that this was a practical area that we could come together and work on. The Barnes Initiative aimed to impact workforce development within the education sector by understanding the factors that contribute to attracting, supporting, and retaining educators throughout their careers in Vermont and New Hampshire. What did we learn from this? We discovered that, more than anything, educators yearned for more time for meaningful professional collaboration with their colleagues. Additionally, by helping educators assess the quality of their team meetings, small adjustments to meeting structures could be made, resulting in slight improvements in educators’ sense of job satisfaction. While there were some positive gains, we were left wanting to learn more about this topic.

Staying with this theme, the 2023-2024 school year led the Barnes Initiative to explore professional collaboration within schools across our region as a way to sustain educators. Our project, initiated by a needs assessment that gathered feedback from 91 educators in Vermont and New Hampshire, quickly identified that educators needed increased structure during collaborative time, including agendas with goals informed by teacher input and choice to prioritize needs. In response, the Barnes cohort consulted the relevant literature and created a meeting procedure and agenda template that sought educators’ input on potential agenda topics well before the meeting. These agendas were designed to connect chosen topics of discussion to commonly understood high-level beliefs (e.g., a school’s mission or vision statements, team charters, etc.) that translated into action and created a sense of overall greater efficiency.

What did we learn from our research? It turned out that even though our meeting agendas included more teacher voice and choice, we found no evidence that this helped educators feel their professional needs were recognized or prioritized. Additionally, we found no evidence that educators could see a clear connection between discussed agenda items and high-level guiding beliefs that eventually translated into action. However, we did see a modest indication that our meeting process and agenda template were viewed by educators as more efficient than previous efforts.

Where We’re Going

What does all of this mean? First, it means that we now have more questions that need answering. What is required for educators to view agenda items discussed in team meetings as being connected to commonly understood high-level beliefs that translate into action? What other adjustments can be made to team meeting structures to help participants feel their needs are recognized and prioritized? We will continue to ponder these questions and others as we work to better understand how professional collaboration can support educators in their efforts toward improved outcomes for students.

Most learning at UVEI takes place in cycles of inquiry, and the Barnes Initiative is no different. We will certainly come back to these questions about professional collaboration in the future, but now, as we look to the 2024-2025 school year, we turn our focus to a new cycle around a familiar topic: equity-centered deeper learning within schools across Vermont and New Hampshire. (You can read more about the last Barnes cycle on this topic here.) We are still recruiting participants to serve as co-researchers and site leaders, so if you are interested in either of these opportunities, you can learn more about this year’s project by clicking here or by contacting Adam Norwood, EdD, Coordinator of the Barnes Initiative for Collaborative Learning at anorwood@uvei.edu.