In most workplaces I have known, you can watch your colleagues work. In local government I sat in an open-plan office; at a law firm, junior lawyers learn by sitting in on negotiations. Teaching is different. Once the classroom door closes, you are alone with thirty teenagers, and nobody outside really knows what happens next. It is one of the strangest features of the profession: a job that is collaborative on paper and solitary in practice.
This isolation is not an accident or a personality defect. Judith Warren Little, in research stretching back decades, described the "norms of privacy" that govern teachers' professional relations — a deep, often unspoken agreement that what happens in my classroom is my business, and that offering unsolicited comment on a colleague's practice borders on rudeness. Her 1990 essay on the "persistence of privacy" showed how durable this culture is: even in schools that pride themselves on collegiality, teachers cooperate readily on logistics — timetables, trips, cover — while keeping their actual teaching politely out of view. Each class is different, each teacher's style is different, and the classroom door does the rest.
The obvious remedy is mandated teamwork, and this is where schools often make things worse. Andy Hargreaves gave us the indispensable term "contrived collegiality": collaboration that is imposed from above, timetabled by administrators, with outcomes fixed in advance. It produces meetings, minutes and laminated posters about "working together", while quietly increasing managerial control and annoying everyone in the room. Teachers comply, attend, and return to their classrooms unchanged. If you have ever sat through a "collaborative planning session" that could have been an email, you know the feeling.
And yet the evidence that genuine collaboration matters is strong. Vescio, Ross and Adams reviewed the professional learning community literature in 2008 and found that well-functioning communities were consistently associated with improved teaching practice and better student outcomes. So the research gives us an apparent paradox: isolation is the default, forced collaboration fails, but real collaboration works. How do we square it?
Align on outcomes, not on methods
My answer, worked out the hard way in department meetings, is to stop trying to align methods and start aligning standards. The mistake in most teacher teamwork is that we argue about how to teach — whose worksheets, whose starter activities, whose classroom routines. These arguments are unwinnable, because methods are entangled with personality, and nobody likes being told their style is wrong. Little's research suggests this is precisely the territory where the norms of privacy bite hardest.
What we genuinely share is something narrower and more defensible: the rubrics and the standards we are teaching towards. A shared rubric for an essay is an objective artefact. Either a student's thesis statement meets criterion B or it does not. Two teachers can disagree about every lesson technique under the sun and still mark to the same standard — and if they do, their students receive a coherent education regardless of which classroom they landed in.
Alignment on outcomes then permits honesty about performance. If we have agreed the objective, we can measure against it in a standardised, fair way, compare notes without defensiveness, and cascade what we learn. Dashboards help here for formative assessment: a simple shared view of quiz scores or rubric progress across parallel classes tells a department where students are struggling without requiring anyone to observe anyone else's lesson. Exam results do the same job summatively at the end of the year. This is Hargreaves' collaborative culture in a workable form — sustained by the teachers because it is visibly useful, built around tasks they actually own, and free of the theatre of contrived collegiality.
The key insight is that this model respects the privacy norm rather than fighting it. I do not need to watch you teach, and you do not need to watch me. We need to agree what good looks like, measure it honestly, and talk about the gap. Some teachers will hit the standard with discussion-heavy lessons; others with direct instruction and drilling. Both are fine. Enforced uniformity of method would achieve alignment by destroying the variation that makes different teachers effective with different students — a bad trade.
Teamwork is hard for teachers because the job privatises its most important moments. But privacy in method is compatible with solidarity on standards. Keep the doors closed if you must. Just make sure everyone is teaching towards the same target, and that the numbers on the dashboard are allowed to tell the truth.