INTRODUCTION

Collaborative teacher development (CTD) is an increasingly common kind of teacher development found in a wide range of language teaching contexts. In the past, teaching has traditionally been an occupation pursued largely in isolation from one’s colleagues – Donald Freeman (1998) famously described it as an “egg-box profession” in which each of us is carefully kept separate from our fellow teachers. A crucial component of teacher development had been to overcome this isolation with collaborative endeavors both within and beyond the classroom.

The practical effects of such work have been impressive. Yet, the most important thing about CTD lies deeper, in the values that underlie collaboration as a wellspring of teacher professional development. First, CTD arises from, and reinforces, a view of teacher learning as a fundamentally social process – in other words, that teachers can only learn professionally in sustained and meaningful ways when they are able to do so together. As Edge (1992) puts it, “[s]elf-development needs other people … By cooperating with others, we can come to understand better our own experiences and opinions” (pp. 3–4). Second, CTD supports a view of teachers both individually and as a community as producers, not just consumers, of knowledge and understanding about teaching (Freeman and Johnson 1998; Johnston 2003: 123–126).

Third, CTD arises from a belief that teaching can and should be a fundamentally collegial profession. Sockett (1993) argues that “[c]ollaboration and an implicit move toward a common professional community is justified morally because of its power in strengthening professional development and increasing professional dignity” (p. 25). Hargreaves (1992), in turn, calls for a “culture of collaboration,” citing research on such cultures in which “routine help, support, trust and openness … operated almost imperceptibly on a moment-by-moment, day-by-day basis” (p. 226). Thus, overcoming professional isolation is of benefit not just to the individual teachers concerned, but to the entire context in which they teach – in other words, students and schools also stand to gain from teachers engaging in CTD.

In this chapter I begin by offering a loose definition of collaborative teacher development, and I suggest a range of possible answers to the important question of who collaborates with whom in CTD.