Beyond individualism and isolation in schools: What types of teacher teams are there in schools? Or can we merely speak about groups?

Abstract

In this article we summarise research that discusses „teacher teams‟. The central questions guiding this study are „How is the term „teacher team‟ used and defined in previous research?‟ and „What types of teacher teams has previous research identified or explored?‟. We attempted to answer these questions by searching literature on teacher teams and comparing what these articles present as being teacher teams. We attempted to further grasp the concept of teacher teams by creating a typology for defining different types of teacher teams. Overall, the literature pertaining to teacher teams appeared to be characterised by a considerable amount of haziness and teacher „teams‟ mostly do not seem to be proper „teams‟ when keeping the criteria of a team as defined by Cohen and Bailey (1997) in mind. The proposed typology, characterising the groups of teachers by their task, whether they are organised disciplinary or interdisciplinary, whether they are situated within or cross grades, their temporal duration and degree of team entitativity or „teamness‟, appears to be a useful framework to further clarify different sorts of teacher „teams‟.