A Year Long Study of the Formation and Development of Middle Years’ Teaching Teams

Abstract

Australian acceptance of middle schooling has been gaining momentum. The impetus behind the introduction of middle schooling in Australia has been to provide a more developmentally appropriate educational experience for Years 6-9 students (approximately ages 10-11—14-15) and a smoother transition between the traditional primary and secondary divide. An underpinning practice in the philosophy of middle schooling is small communities of teachers and students. Teachers working in a middle school environment are organised into small teaching teams that plan and teach together. Middle schooling practice, however, demands some reshaping of complex and multiple relationships among teachers. This reshaping includes collaborative planning, teaching, assessing, and reporting within teaching teams, together with closer relationships with students, administrative staff, parents, and the wider community. These collaborative tasks require teachers to negotiate a new complex web of interrelationships. Stages in group development have been explored in a variety of settings. Tuckman (1965) identified four stages in the development or “life cycle” of groups (i.e., forming, storming, norming, and performing) that have been shown to be transferable to groups across a number of disciplines. As newly formed middle school teaching teams evolve and work to complete these new collaborative tasks and negotiate these new relationships, they have been reported to progress through this same life-cycle. The way that these teams move through these progressive stages is important to the effective functioning of the team. This purpose of this study was to examine the formation, development and maintenance of four middle school teaching teams over the course of their first year as a team. This study aimed to identify factors that facilitate or hinder a positive trajectory for a team’s development and to explore the influence of a school’s culture on teaming practices. Teams involved in this study were all in government run middle schools in South East Queensland that introduced an holistic reform in the last decade. A multi-site case study approach was used. Qualitative data were gathered through semistructured individual interviews with core teaching staff in each team and through notes taken during participant observation days throughout the year. Comparisons of data within and across teams revealed six main characteristics that were found to either positively or negatively influence teaching teaming in the four teams from the three Queensland schools participating in the study. These characteristics concerned (a) training (i.e., both preservice and inservice); (b) administrative support throughout the teaming process (i.e., from formation to establishment and maintenance); (c) attitudes of team members to teaming (i.e., a willingness to participate in a team and experience and confidence in contributing to the team); (d) relationship building; (e) conflict; and (f) school culture. These results resonated with the research literature on the experiences of middle school teaming practices in the USA. A school’s culture was identified as one of the six defining characteristics of a team’s experience within the first question of the study. It was found to exert facilitating and inhibiting effects on the other 5 characteristics that were identified. Moreover, the results revealed several aspects of working in teams that teachers found challenging. A lack of specific training in teaming skills (i.e., either preservice or inservice) prevented teachers from establishing adequate team protocols (i.e., goals, rules, and roles) able to facilitate the smooth functioning of the team. Specifically, teachers generally demonstrated limited and ineffective means of dealing with conflict, which, in most instances, caused team development to stagnate or regress. Findings from this study has shown a gap between what the middle school literature has said about collaboration and teaming and how it is being implemented in these three Queensland middle schools. This study also demonstrates the urgent need for preservice and inservice training in teaming practices to occur concurrently with the introduction of a middle years’ reform in Australia. It also identifies a list of specific teaming skills that are required by teachers embarking on a teaming experience and a list of the facilitating and hindering factors to team formation and development at an individual, team, and school level.