Calling for higher collective responsibility among teachers

I have been doing quite a bit of reading on school climate measures and papers that study the correlation between school climate and student achievement lately. One of the more interesting and widely cited pieces is a 1996 paper in the American Journal of Education by Valerie E. Lee and Julia Smith “Collective Responsibility for Learning and Its Effects on Gains in Achievement for Early Secondary School Students.” You can access the paper here: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1085702?origin=JSTOR-pdf.

The authors focus on three constructs measuring the organization of teachers’ work: collective responsibility for student learning, staff cooperation, and teachers’ control over classrooms and school working conditions. Data for the study came from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS: 88,) which contains a nationally representative sample of middle-high school students. What the authors find is that achievement gains are significantly higher in schools where teachers take collective responsibility for students’ academic success or failure rather than blaming students for their own failure. Achievement gains were also higher in school with more cooperation among staff. A lot of interesting theorizing and statistical analysis takes place in the paper to make it convincing. But I am really more interested in placing the results in the context of the real world (using good basic research to improve school practices, what a concept!).

I don’t think it would take a lot to convince district officials and principals that teachers who take responsibilities for their students’ success and cooperate more amongst themselves are going to be happier teachers (and are more likely to be able to educate students better.) Assuming that we can all agree with Lee and Smith’s findings, wouldn’t it be good if we can somehow encourage more cooperation among teachers in Baltimore’s public schools and really encourage teachers to take more responsibility for their students’ outcomes? The idea may seem straightforward, but I understand that many obstacles stand in the way preventing these changes from happening. My question for the teachers here is: have you/your principals created opportunities to encourage higher collective responsibility and cooperation amongst the teaching staff? Have these efforts been successful? Why or why not? Why might it be such a challenge to care in Charm City?