From “My Teaching” to “Our School”

Every child has abilities and potential that have yet to emerge. Schools have a responsibility to recognise that potential and create the conditions for it to develop. This makes school improvement an ongoing obligation: schools need to keep asking whom their current practices serve, what potential they are overlooking, and what needs to change so that every child can learn and grow.

School improvement is therefore a sustained, systematic process of change. Its priorities will depend on each school’s circumstances. Some challenges, however, reach across individual schools. One is the excessive individualism within Austrian schools: the assumption that teaching and educational decisions are primarily the responsibility of each teacher, and that collective agreements should go only as far as they leave individual practice untouched.

There is certainly collaboration. In TALIS 2024, around 70 per cent of lower secondary teachers surveyed in Austria reported exchanging teaching materials at least monthly, and 61 per cent reported teaching together in the same classroom. Yet only six per cent participated in collaborative professional learning at their school at least once a month.¹ Sharing materials can fit comfortably within an individualistic approach: teachers help one another, then continue to make their own decisions about what happens in their classrooms. Shared responsibility asks more of them. It requires a willingness to work towards agreed goals, even when that means setting aside personal preferences.

The shift from “my teaching” to “our school” is therefore central to this kind of school improvement. Teachers plan lessons together, examine their pupils’ learning and question their assumptions about teaching. The whole staff benefits from its members’ different experiences, and individual teachers no longer have to solve the same problems independently. A US study involving more than 9,000 teachers across 336 schools found that higher-quality collaboration on teaching was associated with greater pupil progress in mathematics and reading. Teachers also became more effective at a faster rate in schools where collaboration was stronger.²

Even when staff share this ambition, putting it into practice is demanding. Consider the move to joint lesson planning. Teachers who previously prepared lessons alone—often at home, at times of their choosing and following familiar routines—are now expected to spend more time together at school, discuss materials and agree on approaches. Decisions that once took a moment now require a conversation. Sometimes a teacher has to support an approach they would not have chosen themselves. The first planning sessions may take longer without producing noticeably better lessons.

The objection that working alone is quicker may, at first, be right. The old way is familiar; the new one has to be learned. Teachers who abandon it after the first difficult attempts may never discover what it could offer. Equally, asking staff to keep putting in more effort without giving them the time and conditions they need will exhaust their willingness to collaborate.

What sustains that effort is a shared sense of what it could make possible: lessons that draw on different strengths; several teachers working together to understand a child’s difficulties; a staff in which no one has to find every answer alone. That vision, together with confidence in the team’s ability to learn, can carry people through a difficult beginning. It means giving agreed approaches a fair chance before their benefits become apparent. It also means reviewing what happens and being willing to change course.

This establishes one of the foundations of a school as a learning organisation: the capacity to improve its practice together. What one teacher tries and discovers becomes available to others. Shared insights lead to agreements that are put into practice and reviewed in turn. Over time, the school develops a capacity to respond to challenges that extends beyond the abilities of any individual member of staff.

The Gemeinschaftsschule Harksheide in Norderstedt, Germany, offers a concrete example. When it became a comprehensive school in 2009, its teachers had to cater for a wider range of learners. The school reorganised its work around teams that developed teaching units, materials and assessments together. According to a 2023 report by Deutsches Schulportal, based on a visit to the school, establishing these structures took about five years. The early stages were demanding; roughly a third of the teachers left because they felt the approach restricted their professional autonomy. The arrangements also changed: an initial four days with scheduled meeting time were reduced to two fixed afternoons. Dedicated workstations and meeting rooms made the approach practical. Eventually, the jointly developed materials were available to everyone digitally and reviewed each year. The headteacher and lower-school coordinator reported that the approach was now easing teachers’ workloads.³ The example shows how much change lies behind the seemingly simple call for more collaboration: a willingness to honour shared decisions, working conditions that make those decisions workable, and enough sustained effort to discover what a different way of working can achieve.