For my inquiry I did my research on:
How can we overcome barriers to collaborative practice in a special school setting to help improve learner outcomes.
I began doing research on collaboration in a special school setting.
I couldn’t find any New Zealand research on collaboration in special schools.
All the research I found was done overseas and was centred around Mainstream and Special needs teachers working together.
I am going to share some stats to explain how complex our set up is at Sommerville.
We support students with their learning between the ages of 5 and 21.
We have a staff of around 250
Our base school in Panmure is our ‘Mothership’.
At our Bhengazi and Tripoli road sites, we have over twenty classes.
We have around 18 satellite classes in local primary, intermediate and secondary schools from Glendowie through to Owairoa in Howick.
Sommerville has a specialist service comprising of Physiotherapists, Occupational Therapists, Speech and Language Therapist, Behaviour Specialists, Vision and hearing advisors and a personal development councillor.
We also have an amazing team of outreach teachers who support around 45 students in 28 different schools in the Eastern suburb of Auckland.
At the beginning of the year, I collected data from staff around their collaboration when planning, teaching, working with other teachers, specialists and their support staff.
Staff had a fairly good understanding of what collaboration is and was in agreement that it is beneficial.
At Sommerville, we work across many different sites, so collaboration across sites and in pathways can look different.
One thing we were able to gauge from the feedback is that most staff are keen on collaborating and willing to work as a team.
Many welcomed the opportunity to learn from others.
We were fortunate to have Chris Bradbeer from Stonefields share some insight into collaboration, here are some take-home points
Teachers often think they are collaborating, when they are not.
Collaboration is a more intense and sophisticated approach than what we can achieve by ourselves.
If we want to achieve effective team teaching, we need to be using the same language.
We need to pre-empt what the little stresses will be and make arrangements and allowances.
It's beneficial to learn from colleagues and recognise their strengths and skills.
There is no point trying to collaborate if people aren't interested in developing these skills.
Data Collection
While Covid restrictions hindered the work I planned on doing around improving teacher collaboration, I did manage to visit a few classes, set up jam board, arrange google meets during the lockdown and I was also able to send out surveys. As much as I would have liked to collect qualitative data that didn’t happen as planned.
I did collect some quantitative data around the barriers that staff face.
I summed this up as :
Time
Travel
Transport
Traffic
Timetable
Trust
Collaborating with other special schools.
I work very closely with a range of teachers from all the other special schools in Auckland. I was able to organise a few online meetings with staff and send out surveys to them as well.
It was very interesting to see that they faced the exact same barriers that we did.
Rogers 4 Stages of diffusion of innovation theory says that in every society like every school, there are those that are willing to try new things. Early adopters are quick to try something new before anyone else while laggards are the last to try something and may not try it at all.
When it comes to collaboration, think about where you fit on this chart?
Are you an Early adopter where you want to work with others and learn
Or are you a laggard and will continue doing things the way you always did and not want to extend your knowledge?
