Teacher Collaboration and Perceptions of School Effectiveness and of the Difficulty of Teachers’ Work

Abstract

Teacher collaboration is regarded by many authors as a powerful factor that promotes professional learning and school effectiveness. This paper seeks to determine whether the most intense levels of professional interaction in teaching are associated with higher perceptions of school effectiveness and lower feelings of difficulty at work. The empirical study was conducted in three elementary schools. Data were collected by means of a questionnaire and analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics and social network analysis.
The results show that it is possible to draw different conclusions on the matter, depending on whether the analysis takes the school or the teacher as the unit of observation. The results at the individual level show that the collaborative involvement of teachers is not significantly associated with their perceptions of their school’s effectiveness, but that collaboration is clearly and negatively associated with teachers’ perceptions of the difficulty of their work.