Although the concept itself is not new, the suggestion that collaboration should become the norm for all schools is new. As the many examples in these pages make clear, there is no one model of the collaborative school. Collaboration describes a range of practices that can involve a handful of teachers or an entire faculty. Teachers engage in frequent, continuous, and increasingly concrete and precise talk about teaching practice. Teachers plan, design, research, evaluate, and prepare teaching materials together.
Teachers teach each other the practices of teaching.
Collaboration, then, is intended to facilitate instructional effectiveness. Toward this end, the collaborative relationships have both vertical and horizontal dimensions. That is, administrators cooperate with teachers and teachers cooperate with one another. The collaborative school provides a climate and structure that encourage teachers as professionals to work together and with the principal and other administrators toward school improvement and professional growth. The focus of this Bulletin, then, is on collaboration as a strategy to improve the instructional effectiveness of a school's faculty.