School of Education and Human Development. Conventional stereotypes, which convey the image of professors conducting research in the isolation of a laboratory or teaching alone in front of a room of passive students, overlook important aspects of modern academic life. Faculty collaboration occurs in a variety of settings and takes different forms, depending on the nature of the collaborative team and the goals of its members. Essentially, faculty collaboration is a cooperative endeavor that involves common goals, coordinated effort, and outcomes or products for which the collaborators share responsibility and credit. This definition is broad and flexible, because faculty collaboration varies in numerous ways contingent upon whether the partnership is for teaching or research as well as on the participants' fields of specialization, institutions of employment, career stages, and a host of other factors.
Professors choose to work in concert with colleagues for numerous reasons.
Many believe collaboration increases productivity, maintains motivation, and stimulates creativity and risk taking. It can maximize the use of limited resources and could enhance the quality of teaching and research. Sometimes complex problems accompany faculty collaboration, however, such as difficulty concerning evaluation and assigning credit for work produced in collaboration. Because of the increasing popularity of faculty collaboration and the complex questions it poses to higher education, the time is right for a comprehensive examination of this important topic. The growth of collaboration is not limited to the academic sector.