As collaboratives get started, the early conversations must focus on the critical but mundane issues of fiscal agency, budgets, roles, and governance structure. Each of these issues are important in their own right. However, they are even more significant when understood as early attempts to articulate a structure of public cooperation. Effective inter-institutional collaboration requires that the partners become sensitive to one another' organizational cultures, the sets of values, practices, assumptions, and rules that provide the context for how people think and act in their organizational roles. This permits them to become more knowledgeable about and sensitive to the constraints that each works under, and helps knit together the connections among individuals and organizational units that are vital for real collaboration to take place.
Vision is Important.
The next stage of collaborative work calls for partners to move beyond the narrow bureaucratic perspectives of their individual organizations. This requires the development of a vision of the collective effort and the potential role of the various partners as they scale up their activities. To embark on the hard work of educational reform, the partners must be able to envision a future that is more than simply the current educational system functioning slightly better. Instead, they need a compelling vision of what could be if the partner institutions identified the major barriers to student achievement and collaboratively worked to overcome them. The vision of the new system may come from a variety of sources.