WK9: Managing a team of teachers, personal experience

A Unique Team of Teachers

http://institutopiaget.edu.mx/

While in Mexico I served as a director of the English department at a prestigious bilingual school, Instituto Piaget. Half of a student’s day was taught in English and the other half of their day was taught in Spanish. The school was small with approximately 180 students and because of our intimate environment the teachers and I were able to work closely together to develop a strong and successful team.

Determining the overall coordination of a team is critical (Hill, 1995). Using Drucker’s analogy of work team and business team coordination, it appears our team functioned like tennis-doubles. In the school setting, the team structures typically function like a football team – each teacher has her class to worry about, is accountable exclusively for her role, and works in parallel with other teachers. At Instituto Piaget we adopted a structure more similar to a tennis-doubles team. Although they each had their fixed titles (e.g. 1^st grade English teacher), they often were in communication about changing roles (e.g. taking over 2^nd grade for half a day) and covering for one another to meet the needs of special day activities, parent meetings, or absents due to illness. This flexibility may be due to the high functionality of the transactive memory systems theory mentioned by Majchrzak, Jarvenpaa, & Hollingshead (2007). Several of the teachers had been working at the school for 15+ years and they had a keen knowledge of who knows what, determining who is capable of what at a given time, and self-organizing to make sure performance was maximized. The teachers worked together to delegate responsibilities based on who was most capable and they coordinated with me appropriately. Before I even arrived to manage them, they had a functional system of their own that sufficiently allowed them to accommodate the ultimate goal of giving students the best education they can give on a daily basis.

With this system in place, when the time came to hire new teachers to join the team, I look for candidates that would compliment our current team’s functionality; as emphasized by Hill (1995) I sought out teachers that were individually experienced, but more importantly in line with our school mission and values. We followed an internationally focused curriculum intended to develop student into curious, caring, and understanding individuals. Given that there is a lot of personality involved with teaching, it was important to select teachers that identified with the mission and values. Teachers who articulated a proactive awareness of global perspective and compassion were more likely to get a second interview than candidates that simply found the mission interesting. 

Fortunately, the work of the teachers was fairly visible and a problem such as the Nut Island Effect mentioned in Levy (2001) was never for my team. However, we had what I would refer to as the Peanut Island Effect. This would be defined as a small, but not quiet as disastrous incident similar to the case on Nut Island. At our school we started students as young as two years old studying English. Parents often had the expectation that their student would be fluent in English by the age of five or six. Although fluency could never be promised, the director often emphasized the high proficiency of the student body. Proficiency was defined by ability to spontaneous speak in English. The director of the school was not typically on the campus. She knew that they had effective teams of teachers with dedicated directors; with that, she confidently left us alone through our day-to-day work. Sometimes she would come visit and tell us changes, and we would implement only those that they felt truly necessary – but things continued to run smoothly and curriculum objectives were being met. Surely enough, when a couple parents started to complain about the level of their student’s English, suggesting that their student could “speak” English the team of teachers and myself had disagreements with the school director about how to define early age proficiency.  Since we work with the students everyday, we knew that they did not all comfortably produce English language, but we defined early age proficiency through their excellence receptive skills (listening, following instructions, understanding readings, etc). This led to a minor misfortune that resulted in the school director and myself calling a school-wide parent meeting to clarify expectations and current abilities of the student body. Although it was not nearly as detrimental as the Nut Island incident, we did discover that there was a miscommunication that required a change in information processing.

This team was not geographically dispersed, however, Hinds & Mortensen’s (2005) finding that spontaneous communication was associated not only with stronger shared identity, more shared context, and moderated the distribution of interpersonal conflict seemed particularly important to me. This shows that spontaneous communication is inherently significant to the success of any team, since it now includes both collocated and distance team development. Individuals are more likely to understand one another and minimize conflicts because spontaneous communication gives us an idea of one another’s moods, current life situations, interests, and even work objectives. This is empirical proof to me that there is always a reason to engage in small talk among team members – we never know what we may find out to help develop an appreciation for colleagues.