Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
New teams are emerging in classrooms: remedial teachers are now called
support teachers, and they now work alongside classteachers; parents are
working in classrooms; welfare assistants are helping children with special
educational needs in class. It has been assumed that these teams must be for
the good, but this book, the product of a decade of research, shows that this
attitude is at best simplistic, and at worst damaging to effective classroom
practice. When extra adults move into the private domain of the classteacher,
all kinds of stresses and tensions emergeindividuals have different ideas of
what they should be doing, and of what education is about. Ambiguity and
ambivalence can destroy working relationships, and instead of helping, these
supporting adults may be hindering effective teaching and learning.
Gary Thomas looks in detail at these new teams and offers advice on how
they may be helped to work more effectively. He draws on lessons learned
from teamwork in other situations, such as industry, and from his own
experiences as a support teacher. He also reports on interviews with team
participants in which they talk candidly about their difficulties. Picking out
key areas for concern, including inadequate role definition, poor
communication and status barriers, he outlines strategies for dealing with these
stresses and tensions in teamwork. The book will be of interest to all who
work in classroom teams, all who are involved in classroom support, and
those who are interested in the dynamics of groups and management in
education.
Gary Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at Oxford Polytechnic and has taught in
primary and secondary schools. He has worked as an educational psychologist
in Manchester, and, from University College London, as a staff tutor to two
psychological services. He has jointly edited two other books, Planning for
Special Needs and Tackling Learning Difficulties.
EFFECTIVE
CLASSROOM
TEAMWORK
Support or Intrusion?
Gary Thomas
CONTENTS
List of figures
List of tables
Preface
Acknowledgements
1 THE NEW CLASSROOM TEAMS
2 THE DYNAMICS OF TEAMS
3 CLASSROOM TEAMS: TEACHERS WORKING TOGETHER
1
8
26
40
53
61
74
89
113
10
153
11
TEAM PERSONALITIES
168
12
176
13
186
14
196
206
228
230
237
240
FIGURES
viii
11
11
54
57
58
65
73
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
114
117
118
137
139
141
143
145
146
148
150
171
192
TABLES
7.1
7.2
7.3
7.4
7.5
7.6
7.7
7.8
13.1
13.2
13.3
ix
81
81
82
82
83
84
85
86
191
191
192
PREFACE
xii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to thank Sarah Tann and Stephen Fearnley for looking through
drafts of this work and for their many invaluable comments and ideas and for
their encouragement.
Thanks are due to the large numbers of teachers and headteachers who
gave their time to assist the research, in particular those anonymous individuals
who partook in interviews and suffered my presence in their classes.
I am indebted to the editor of Educational Research for permission to reprint
parts of chapters 7, 8 and 13, which first appeared in that journal.
I would also like to thank Helen Fairlie and her colleagues at Routledge
for all their support and encouragement.
xiii
1
THE NEW CLASSROOM TEAMS
The very diversity and instability of these classroom teams make them and
their members especially vulnerable to the tensions and stresses which threaten
the effectiveness of groups elsewhere.
The people comprising these new groups probably fail to recognise
themselves as teams. Their reasons for existing have nothing to do with the
benefits which are brought by working as a team. They are none the less
teams, and as such they are characterised by the same stresses that mark
teamwork in any other kind of setting.
The fact that the teamness of these new teams is unrecognisedor at
least unremarked uponmeans that they stand even less chance of surviving
than did the team teaching teams of the 1960s and the 1970s. The latter at
least had the dynamics of the team as a central question to be addressed. It
would be a pity if the new teams atrophied in the way that team teaching
atrophied due to inadequate attention to the working of the team. If that
happened, it would mean that the ideals behind the new developments
parental participation and the integration of children with special needs
would be rejected, and worse, rejected for the wrong reasons. Teams can be
made to work, but team members need first, to recognise that they are part
of a team, and second, to employ strategies which will maximise their chances
of success.
In order to devise those strategies, it is necessary to examine the dynamics
which so often seem to be responsible for the attrition of teamwork.
This book will argue the case that the new collections of people in
classrooms are, in every sense, teams. It will provide documentary evidence
for the existence of the new teams. It will examine the dynamics of teams
generally. It will provide case study data about the kinds of tensions which
exist in the new teams. It will provide a model for analysing team
personalities, and it will provide guidelines for the effective working of
classroom teams.
CHANGES IN THINKING WHICH GIVE RISE TO
THE NEW TEAMS
Over the decade 198090, many adults moved into the classroom to work
alongside the classteacher. The new teams have emerged by stealth, almost
unnoticed. There was no fanfare, no top-down initiative which inspired the
creation of these new teams, as there had been for team teaching.
Rather, there were a number of discrete and separate changes in educational
thinking which gave rise to the new teams. Two have been of overriding
importance:
1
the idea that children with special needs should be integrated into
mainstream schools; and
2
the idea that parents have a central place in their childrens education
including full involvement in their childrens schools.
Both of these trends have, as I shall show, brought extra adults into classrooms.
The picture of classrooms containing two, three or even more adults working
together, represents a major departure from the stereotype of the classroom
(one adult to one class) which the public probably holds.
The effects of these trends are exaggerated by other wider social
developments to result in an unprecedented influx of additional people to
many classrooms. However, the ways in which this influx alters the working
environment of the classroom have remained unexamined. As I indicate in
the remainder of this chapter, there is widespread recognition among
researchers, observers and commentators that analysis of this alteration is
necessary.
EXTRA PEOPLE DUE TO INTEGRATION
Fundamental changes have taken place in schools due to the move to
integration over the last ten years or so. Calls for the integration of disabled
people into society generally have been responded to in education and have
been legitimised in this country by the report of the Warnock Committee
(Department of Education and Science 1978) and by the 1981 Education Act.
While integration has not occurred to the extent that some would have wished,
calls for integration have given rise to a number of changes in the way in
which services for those children who are experiencing difficulty are organised.
There are a number of trends within the integration movement, all of which
result in the movement of additional adults into the classroom:
1
The move to integrate children with special needs from special to ordinary
schools means, therefore, that many of the staff who had been working with
children in special schools, special units or other special settings within the
ordinary school may now be deployed to work in the mainstream class
alongside the classteacher. Many of those practices, which lay at the backbone
of special needs provision in ordinary schools (e.g. withdrawal for remedial
work) and which were also segregating in their effects, are being replaced by
practices which involve specialist staff going into the mainstream classroom
to work alongside the classteacher.
Despite the general accord with which this move has been received, there
have been suggestions that without proper organisation integration may not
result in the benefits which were envisaged (e.g. Hodgson, Clunies-Ross and
Hegarty 1984 in research conducted by the NFER; Strain and Kerr 1981 in a
large-scale American review of the effects of integration). The success of
integration hinges on the effective assimilation into mainstream education of
special sector personnel and resources: in some cases it may be possible to
meet special needs through the provision of equipment or through adaptation
of the physical environment. By contrast, the assimilation of human resources
from special settings is infinitely more complex and more problematic.
EXTRA PEOPLE DUE TO PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT
Running parallel with moves due to integration is another major trend which
results in additional people moving into the classroom to work alongside the
4
have profound effects, the effect of introducing another adult participant is, of
itself, worthy of study.
However, little attention has been paid in this country to the means by
which additional people in the classroom may work together to the best possible
effect. By contrast, in the USA, where the enactment of Public Law 94142
(the Education for all Handicapped Children Act) pre-dated the 1981 Education
Act by some six years, studies noting the effects of moves to integration in
terms of the transfer of personnel from specialised settings to mainstream
settings have been commissioned. DeVault, Harnischfeger and Wiley (1977),
for instance, looked into the effects of personnel allocations to the various
Project Follow-Through curricula. They make the observation that little if any
attention has been paid to the question of how best to deploy additional
personnel. They state:
It is high time to investigate this question. If we staff typical-sized
classrooms with up to four full time instructional adults then we [had]
better find out how to use them most effectively, as the educational costs
are surely high.
(DeVault, Harnischfeger and Wiley 1977:47)
Despite such clearly articulated recognition of the need for analysis in this
area, little systematic investigation has been undertaken. Neither has there
been any examination of the extent of the trends as a whole or the issues
which arise from their introduction, despite the manifest coherence of a set of
problems which appear to exist irrespective of the nature of professional
groupings of the individuals concerned.
One of the assumptions of this book is that the influx of very varied groups
of people is accompanied by problems which are general to the teams thus
constituted, irrespective of the nature of the participants. The uncertainties
engendered by these moves carry with them a host of questions which none
of those groups has had the chance to formulate coherently, let alone address
or resolve. An assumption throughout will be that despite the diversity of the
groups of people moving into classrooms, they are homogeneous at least to
the extent that such questions exist for them.
Although these questions have not been addressed in education, substantial
amounts of work have been done in other areas, notably in industry, on the
working of task-oriented groups. While much of this work is relevant here,
classroomsin contrast to factoriespresent an environment populated with
diverse inhabitants and governed by loosely formulated rules. These make
the setting and the interpersonal connections more complex than those found
in industry. In terms of the definition of the task to be done in the classroom,
and of the nature of the rules in the environment, markedly different
expectations exist between schools and the environments in which most work
2
THE DYNAMICS OF TEAMS
In this chapter I shall look at teamwork research which has its origins in
all kinds of different environmentsthe factory shop-floor, the hospital,
the management group. In delving through this research, I shall be
seeking insights into the working of classroom teams. What are the stresses
which characteristically afflict teams? How do these teams overcome these
stresses and manage to work more effectively? And how relevant for the
classroom team are the findings made in these other kinds of team
environment?
Teamwork research identifies a number of factors which determine the
success or failure of teamwork: quality of leadership; role definition and role
ambiguity; the nature of the task to be undertaken; the mix of team members;
the ease with which team members can communicate.
But the problems of teams seem to be centrally located in not knowing
(or agreeing about) what you are supposed to be doing, or having
conflicting demands on your effort, time or loyalty. Individuals
uncertainties about their roles in teams have formed a central position
in small group and organisational research. With this in mind, classroom
teams are off to a bad start: they arefor the best of reasonsloosely
formulated with tacitly held pedagogic or humanistic aims rather than
tightly formulated goals. The culture of schools, and particularly primary
schools, does not lend itself to clear role definition, seemingly so
important for good teamwork.
I shall look at some of the explanations that have been proposed for the
success or failure of teamwork in different kinds of settings, having in
mind all the time the relevance of these explanations for the classroom
setting. I intend to look at the dynamics of teams and especially at the
notion of role, which forms a central place in teamwork research. Various
models for making groups more effectivesuch as quality circles and semiautonomous work groupswill also be examined for their relevance to the
classroom.
8
11