| As teacher collaboration becomes an increasingly common goal in school organization, teachers' experiences and perspectives in a Structured Collaboration Environment remain under-examined. This qualitative case study explored how teachers participated in collaborative work, the outcomes of collaboration, and supports and obstacles to productive collaboration in an elementary school that maintains an ideological and structural commitment to collaboration, where teachers collaborated through interdisciplinary teams towards the goal of producing a shared, integrated curriculum. Through in-depth interviews and analysis of produced curriculum materials, the researcher sought to understand how teachers mutually engaged in collaboration, how they learned within the context of a professional community, and aimed to answer three research questions: 1) What kinds of formal and informal collaborations do elementary teachers find to be the most productive in a Structured Collaboration Environment? 2) What are the key similarities and differences in teachers' work in informal and formal contexts in a Structured Collaboration Environment? 3) What are the supports and obstacles to achieving the goals of collaboration in a Structured Collaboration Environment? The data was coded inductively around the research questions and data analysis was organized by way of analytic categories based upon the study's conceptual framework: Situated Learning within Communities of Practice. The study found that collaboration was constant amongst elementary teachers and lines between formal and informal collaboration were blurred. Further, collaborative exchanges were not sporadic and disconnected; rather, teachers engaged in networks of interactions that were formal and informal, authentic and contrived, and productive and unproductive to varying degrees. Some implications are that schools can develop flexible collaboration programs that recognize teachers' expertise and agency. Policies can mandate collaboration, but it is equally important to attend to normative, socio-cultural factors, and to coerce collaboration through teacher socialization and community building mechanisms. Further, research can work towards a more nuanced, ecologically valid definition of teacher collaboration that is not bound by the dichotomies of formal/informal, authentic/contrived, voluntary/involuntary, and acknowledges the socio-cultural complexities of elementary teachers' work lives and situates teachers as active constructors of professional knowledge. |
