Teamwork, an “invisible collegiality”. The cases of Colombia, Mexico and Spain

Descripción

In the context of the ISTL project, we conducted a documentary analysis using key policy documents from Colombia, Mexico and Spain to discover the meaning attributed to teamwork as a feature of teacher leadership in these countries, to identify points of divergence among the conceptualizations of this term in those three contexts, and to establish their connections with teacher leadership as theorized in distributed leadership. The documents examined in the present study do not highlight teamwork as a crucial aspect for school improvement, and teamwork does not appear as a prominent feature of teacher leadership in them, which may be explained because such concept is absent in the discourses used in the policies of the regions examined. Although the sense of community and interdependence are mentioned in the documents of the three contexts examined, they are more aspirational formulations than orientations on practices and processes that make it possible to operationalize them. For example, educational leadership in the three regions under consideration is still understood as principal-centered, with a top-to-bottom nature, such as in the case of the Colombian “Let’s All Learn Program”, the Mexican CTEs, and the school councils in Spain. In all those cases, either the principal or the school coordinators plan, arrange, and structure teamwork for teachers, or the central administration, through legislative requirements, calls upon teachers to become members of a group. These top-down practices, create a contrived collegiality that, enhances administrative power through the rigid time, space, and content structures used in the meetings. This study suggests that there is a need to analyze the contents of new proposals for legislation to determine changing perspectives of teacher leadership as a response to the complex social problems faced in the three countries, considering that all three studied educational systems operate in contexts of high social complexity marked by inequality, violence, exclusion, and high levels of migration. It also opens opportunities to examine collaborative work that takes place in the margins, called "invisible collegiality", so that it can be recognized and strengthened by public policy.

Período	20 oct. 2023
Título del evento	ICAPES 2023-10th International Conference on Applied Psychology and Educational Sciences. Alexandru Ioan Cuza, University of Iași, Rumania. : Teamwork, an “invisible collegiality”. The cases of Colombia, Mexico and Spain
Tipo de evento	Conferencia
Número de la conferencia	D4
Ubicación	Iași, RumaníaMostrar en mapa
Grado de reconocimiento	Internacional