Understanding teachers’ mental models of collaboration to enhance the learning community

This is a self-archived version of an original article. This version may differ from the original in pagination and typographic details. Author(s): Title: Year: Version: Copyright: Rights: Rights url: Please cite the original version: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Understanding teachers’ mental models of collaboration to enhance the learning community © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Published version Toikka, Teppo; Tarnanen, Mirja Toikka, T., & Tarnanen, M. (2022). Understanding teachers’ mental models of collaboration to enhance the learning community. Educational Studies, Early online. https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2022.2052809 2022 Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ceds20 Educational Studies ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceds20 Understanding teachers’ mental models of collaboration to enhance the learning community Teppo Toikka & Mirja Tarnanen To cite this article: Teppo Toikka & Mirja Tarnanen (2022): Understanding teachers’ mental models of collaboration to enhance the learning community, Educational Studies, DOI: 10.1080/03055698.2022.2052809 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2022.2052809 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Published online: 21 Mar 2022. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Understanding teachers’ mental models of collaboration to enhance the learning community Teppo Toikka and Mirja Tarnanen Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland ABSTRACT This study examined representations of Finnish basic education teachers’ mental models of collaboration to reveal the background features that enable or hinder changes in a school community and teacher collaboration. In this case study, we explored 41 teachers’ mental models of collaboration in a one-school community to identify and understand the features that enhance or challenge collaboration. The findings raise the question of how collaboration can support a school’s transition to a unified comprehensive school, when teachers are accustomed to working alone with a strong sense of autonomy and diverse mental models of collaboration. The findings revealed that collaboration is mainly limited to planning and sharing ideas and that teachers’ involvement in administrative work limits pedagogical discussions between teachers. Our findings suggest that the mental models examined may play a crucial role in building a school’s collaborative culture, promoting curriculum principles and developing a learning community. ARTICLE HISTORY Received 4 June 2021 Accepted 8 March 2022 KEYWORDS Mental models; collaboration; learning community; school development Introduction Strengthening teacher collaboration is an area that has gained interest among educators through the promotion of learning communities. According to Senge et al. (2012), teachers should have opportunities to develop professionally and develop their schools through collaboration with other teachers, school staff and students. Also, teacher collaboration is an important part of teachers’ work-life and continuous learning (de Jong, Meirink, and Admiraal 2019). Yet, research has increasingly shown that strengthening teachers’ collaboration at the school level is a key method to increase the effectiveness of education, promote school development and enhance teachers’ job satisfaction and self-efficacy (see, e.g. Forte and Flores 2014; Hargreaves and O’Connor 2017; Vescio, Ross, and Adams 2008). In a sense, this underlines the understanding that collaboration should not be understood as an end in itself; instead, it must be linked to a school’s development goals, of which students’ learning is central (Fullan and Hargreaves 2016). CONTACT Teppo Toikka [email protected] Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, PO. BOX 35, Fin-40014, Finland EDUCATIONAL STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/03055698.2022.2052809 © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. Although collaboration has become a common way of tackling increasingly complex issues (e.g. teachers’ professional development, improvements in teaching and students’learning) (Hauge and Wan 2019), a collaboration that enables interdependence between teachers (e.g. observing, providing feedback, collaborative professional learning and team teaching) is less common than collaborative work, such as discussing the learning of specific students or exchanging teaching materials (OECD 2020). Exploring different forms of collaboration alone does not provide answers to how teachers perceive collaboration, as teacher collaboration concerns a school’s social dimension (de Jong, Meirink, and Admiraal 2019). Thus, this study captures teacher collaboration from a less examined perspective related to school development and themes of change in the school context. This study approached Finnish basic education teachers’ representations of mental models of teacher collaboration in a school community to identify and understand the essential features that enhance and challenge teacher collaboration in current and future school communities. This study was part of a larger project called “Creative Expertise – Bridging Pre-service and In-service Teacher Education”, funded by the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture (2017–2021). This project was part of the national Finnish Teacher Education Forum, which prepared the “Development Programme for Teachers’ Pre- and In-service Education”. In this case study, teachers’ collaboration was examined by interviewing teachers working in the same school community. This study describes the initial state of one school that was in a state of transition to a new building and school community – more precisely, towards a unified comprehensive school. This is a significant shift in Finland as more schools are being unified (Lahtero and Risku 2012). Although the number of unified comprehensive schools has increased by 10% over the last 10 years and 20% of the comprehensive schools are now unified (SVT (Suomen virallinen tilasto) 2019), there is scant research on the unification process and operability of unified schools. Focusing on teachers’ ways of thinking might reveal the possible background features that enable or hinder changes in a school community and teacher collaboration. This study sought to answer the following research questions: (1) What forms of collaboration do teachers attach to their work? (2) What do teachers think about different forms of collaboration, and what types of collaborative work do they consider relevant during a period of change? Mental models as representations of teachers’ collaboration in a learning community’s framework Unravelling teachers’ mental models is not only a way to explain teachers’ assumptions or thinking; it is also strongly linked to the effort to understand how teachers collaborate and what forms of collaboration and types of collaborative work they consider relevant during a school’s process of change. To explore this, a study was conducted within the framework of (Senge’s (1990), 2006, Senge et al. (2012)) work on learning organisations, famously described in his book Senge (1990). Senge’s idea of a learning organisation refers to five disciplines (e.g. mental models, personal mastery, shared vision, team learning and systems thinking), which are intertwined (Senge 1990). Alongside Senge’s 2T. TOIKKA AND M. TARNANEN work on learning organisations, this study’s framework stems from Finland’s national core curriculum for basic education (FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2014), whereby a learning community is at the core of a school’s culture. This is the first time that Finland’s national curriculum for basic education has empathetically considered the importance of a learning community as part of a curriculum (FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2014). In this section, we briefly review the definitions of mental models, teacher collaboration and a learning community and bridge them by considering previous research. In terms of school development, the role of mental models is relevant Interviewing the teachers at the beginning of the school’s development project and working with their mental models helped us understand the nature of the persistent but commonly hidden challenges in a school community. This idea is based on the fact that the systems educators strive to improve and develop are often based on attitudes and values, and mental models, “our theories of how the world works”, guide the actions of individuals and systems (Senge et al. 2012, 131). Mental models work as mechanisms to generate descriptions, explanations and predictions of social-system states (Johnson-Laird 1983; Rouse and Morris 1986). According to Senge (2006), mental models are “deeply ingrained assumptions, generalisations or even pictures of images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action, and mental models are ‘intricately intertwined’ with the discipline of systems thinking” (Senge et al. 2012, 127). Thus, mental models alone do not reveal an entire picture of a school community; for example, in addition to teachers’ personal mastery, they help to outline development initiatives and generate opportunities to build a shared vision, collaboration and teamwork between teachers. Exploring mental models helps teachers make sense of their surroundings and act appropriately in different situations (Rouse and Morris 1986; Mathieu et al. 2000). In one of the earliest studies on mental models, Rouse and Morris (1986) expressed that mental models allow people to describe a system’s purpose and form, explain a system’s functioning and observed system states and predict future system states. However, due to the nature of mental models, they generally remain unexamined and tacit (Mevorach and Strauss 2012; Senge 2006). By nature, mental models function selectively, for example, by leaving out data; therefore, “they are incomplete, sometimes distorted, narrow or single-framed” models derived and constructed from real-world experience (Werhane 2008, 464). The study of teachers’ mental models was particularly valuable at the beginning of the development project, as mental models often remain unexamined, which may undermine the success of change initiatives (Senge et al. 2012; Tarnanen et al. 2021). Research on mental models has been conducted in a variety of contexts in the field of teacher education and learning. Mental models of teacher students have been studied broadly in relation to the development of scientific thinking and concepts (Dinçer and Örzan 2021; Kiray 2016), environment (Moseley, Desjean-Perrotta, and Utley 2010) and learning approaches (Helen, Murray-Harvey, and Lawson 2007). Also, studies on preservice teachers’ mental models suggest that a mental model develops from general to discipline-specific practice (Wilke and Carol Losh 2012), and teacher students’ mental models can be built heavily on their own school-time experiences (Helen, Murray-Harvey, and Lawson 2007). EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 3 Widmann and Mulder (2020) studied in-service vocational teachers’ team learning behaviours to understand team learning and team mental models. Mental models have also been studied in relation to lifelong learning (Philip, van Schaik, and Hudson 1998), shared mental model development in school leadership teams (Chrispeels et al. 2008), school management teams (Chen-Levi, Schechter, and Buskila 2020) and elementary school principals’ mental models related to instructional leadership (Ruff and Shoho 2005). However, in-service teachers’ mental models related to teacher collaboration or school-community development have been scarcely explored. The term “teacher collaboration” has become popular amid an ongoing change in education. This current study was driven by the need to understand teacher collaboration more broadly – in other words, the multiple aspects of collaboration, as different forms of collaboration require a different depth of collaboration. According to a review, the definition of teacher collaboration is broad, and it is challenging to form a clear, coherent picture (Vangrieken et al. 2015). When studying teacher collaboration, it is necessary to determine whether a collaboration is being explored to, for example, promote practical issues or to develop teaching or teamwork (Vangrieken et al. 2015). Hargreaves and O’Connor (2017) suggested that teacher collaboration should concentrate on teachers’ joint work and improve their teaching practices. Furthermore, collaboration is considered a crucial resource for breaking the culture of individualism in teaching, which prevents the development of new teaching practices (Hargreaves 2019). That said, the picture of collaboration’s effectiveness is slightly unclear, and uncertainty still exists about the relationship between collaboration and teachers’ development and learning (Forte and Flores 2014; Opfer and Pedder 2011). Not all forms of collaboration positively affect teachers; collaborative professionalism can create anxiety in some teachers due to the nature of a school community (Fullan and Hargreaves 2016). Similarly, regardless of the possible positive impact on school communities, it is difficult to sustain and implement the enthusiasm initially generated by the idea of learning because emotions and power relations can restrict learning (Forte and Flores 2014; Vince 2001) and professional disagreement and mutual critique (Lockton and Fargason 2019). The culture of teachers working alone in classrooms (Vescio, Ross, and Adams 2008) or in silos of different subjects, grade levels or teacher groups (i.e. primary school and subject teachers) are recognised in the educational research literature (Hargreaves 2019). Although collaboration is an essential part of learning in a school, there is a lack of structures and conditions (e.g. space and time, supportive working conditions, and practices) that support knowledge and skill-sharing between teachers (Opfer and Pedder 2011). If collaboration is not an integral part of teachers’ daily work, educators will likely work in isolation (Richard et al. 2016). Kelchtermans (2006) noted that exploring collaboration in an organisational context is effective method for understanding this phenomenon. Throughout this article, “teacher collaboration” will refer to the interactions between teachers to share knowledge, perform a shared task related to teaching and school development or reveal about their teaching and learning. In this study, when the teachers talked about their collaboration, they voiced their mental models, making it possible to examine them (see, e.g. Mevorach and Strauss 2012; Senge 2006). A broad definition of teacher collaboration is based on the idea that teachers’ professional learning and development, professional growth and well-being and their ability to learn, collaborate 4T. TOIKKA AND M. TARNANEN and create a responsive, professional community should be seen as inseparable from their students’ achievements and treated as an essential part of a developing school community (see, e.g. Fullan and Hargreaves 2016; Senge et al. 2012). Because teachers have their own mental models and beliefs regarding schooling and learning, for them to learn together, they must be comfortable challenging their and others’ beliefs and assumptions within a learning community. A teacher’s job consists of participating in administrative and pedagogical decision-making processes, adapting to new regulations, pedagogical approaches and learning environments and adjusting to continuous learning demands (Paronen and Lappi 2018). Thus, this study combines several perspectives from the learning community literature (e.g. Senge 1990; Senge et al. 2012; Richard et al. 2016; FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2014). The key for a school is to link the activities to the goals of a national core curriculum to enhance community members’ learning, development and growth (Mitchell and Sackney 2011). A curriculum sets goals, as mentioned above, but also leaves room for interpretation regarding how a learning community should be developed in practice. Learning communities can be understood as a school’s collaborative culture, characterised by shared values, visions and learning orientations (Vangrieken 2018). For example, research on professional development has suggested that organisations should expand opportunities for continual learning and foster collaborative work cultures (Day 1999; Fullan 1995; Fullan and Hargreaves 2016; Senge 1990). The key is to understand how to increase individuals’ learning capacity because “organisations learn only through individuals who learn” (Senge 1990, 139). Furthermore, learning is no longer just a matter for individuals; increasingly, it is a concern for all school organisations and communities (Senge et al. 2012). According to Finland’s national core curriculum, “the school operates as a learning community and encourages all of its members to learn”, and “a learning community creates preconditions for learning together and learning from each other” (FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2014, 28). At the heart of the core curriculum’s learning community model is that a learning community touches on both children and adults (i.e. teachers, staff members and parents) and their learning (FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2016), not only professionals such as teachers. The curriculum specifies the common principles on which the advancement and operation of a school are based. Thus, the core curriculum defines that a learning community “takes care of the safety and well-being of each member of the community”, “systematically promotes versatile working approaches”, “is aware of different languages and sees culture as a richness”, “promotes participation and democracy”, “promotes equity and equality” and “takes responsibility for the environment and focuses on a sustainable future” (FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2016, 2). Also, the collaboration and interactions of the adults of a school and its surrounding society are emphasised (FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2016). In our view, this may especially consider teachers who and schools that are amid various overlapping changes. For this reason, this study brings together teachers’ mental models of collaboration and learning-community development to understand and develop a school community. EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 5 Data and methods Research context and participants In this case study, 41 primary and lower-secondary school teachers of a one-school community were interviewed to explore their mental models of teacher collaboration and professional learning and to deepen their understanding of their school’s situation and aspirations for the future. The school was being turned into a unified comprehensive school, meaning that students from grades 1–9 (ages 7–16) will, as a one-school community, be studying in the same building as a single-track school. The collaborative development project lasted for two years (2018–2019), during which there was close collaboration between the teachereducators and the entire school community – from students and teachers to principals. The teachers and principals voluntarily participated in this research project and signed consent forms before the interviews. All the teachers were informed of the aims of this study. The themes of the semi-structured interviews were (1) professional development and learning, (2) collaboration, (3) school as a work community and (4) classroom-related work. We chose a semi-structured approach because interviewing teachers would enable us to obtain data based on their work-community experiences (Anne and Cross 2013) and uncover possible tacit and hidden knowledge. The semi-structured approach allowed the teachers to share their experiences without predetermining what kinds of collaborations we wanted them to report. The open-ended questions helped the teachers freely share their experiences (Anne and Cross 2013). The average interview time was 45 minutes. All interviews were conducted by teacher-educators and recorded and transcribed verbatim for analysis. The purpose of the individual interviews was to collect additional information about the initial state of the one-school community. More specifically, the teachers participating in this study were members of the future single-school community, thus representing diversity in the mental models of the one-school community. Of the 41 teachers interviewed, 21 worked as primary school teachers (grades 1–6) and 20 worked as subject teachers (mainly grades 7–9), and their amount of teaching experience varied from one year to 34 years. This massive variability in teachers’ experiences is explained by the nature of community based research and the school community. Regarding the diversity of experience and profession (i.e. primary school and subject teachers), from the perspective of comparing schools, all Finnish primary schools follow Finland’s national core curriculum and that all teachers hold a master’s degree. Finnish teacher education is a research-based academic education that focuses on combining the practices of teaching and research. Understanding the teachers’ representations and the aspects that may contribute to their mental models of teacher collaboration was identified through qualitative, data-driven but theory-informed content analysis (see Table 1) (Bernard and Gery 2009; DeCuir-Gunby et al. 2011). The analysis process was conducted in three phases. First, the coding relied on the three-part description of mental models by Rouse and Morris (1986), which led to an examination of three levels in the teachers’ responses: how teachers (1) describe the school community’s purpose and form, (2) explain the community’s operation and system states and (3) predict the school’s future system states. The first two of these levels concerned the current state of the school and were parallel, while the third concerned its future. Second, the qualitative data analysis started with an in-depth reading of the transcribed interviews 6T. TOIKKA AND M. TARNANEN and preliminary coding (Phase 2). Third, the quotations coded on matter-related representations of the teachers’ mental models were the teachers’ mental models were reviewed and subcategorised. They were then further categorised into three themes (Phase 3). During this phase, the subcategories were created, divided or combined. Finally, the analysed data were re-examined to identify patterns and determine research-question responses. The coding (see Table 2) was conducted with Atlas.ti Cloud, a qualitative analysis programme that allows multiple users to work simultaneously and in real-time. In the analysis, we identified several levels in the teachers’ interviews regarding the description, explanations and predictions of the future school community (Rouse and Morris 1986). The content analysis of this study involved dividing the transcribed interviews into subcategories and themes (Erlingsson and Brysiewicz 2017). The analysis was conducted via collaborative discussions, which allowed us to obtain an in-depth understanding of the data. Alongside the analysis process, the coding was crosschecked by the researchers to ensure consistency. The coding logic and discrepancies were negotiated and carefully reviewed. The resultant codes were then discussed for agreement and clarification. The participant data were anonymised without distorting scholarly meanings, and when the data were collected, the research participants received privacy notices. The research context and participants Findings Based on the mentioned analysis, three themes (see Figure 1) emerged: the nature of collaboration in the work community, teamwork and aspirations and expectations related to the shared school community Table 1. Data collection and analysis EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 7 influenced by cultural and micropolitical perspectives (Kelchtermans 2006). In this light, it is interesting to consider how the school community could benefit from observing the construction of a future school. Could it, at best, also act as a catalyst for a pedagogical debate, as a new learning environment enables various kinds of learning activities for students and asks teachers to collaborate? To conclude, this study was driven by the need to understand multiple aspects of teacher collaboration. The findings illustrate that the current schedules and structures (i.e. time and space for collaboration and pedagogical development) do not allow teachers to achieve the goals of the core curriculum. Instead of changing structures, such as schedules, to make room for curriculum goals, some goals have been discarded because they are considered excessively time consuming to achieve (e.g. multidisciplinary learning modules). Some of the teachers did not consider teacher collaboration to be important (see, e.g. Hargreaves and O’Connor 2017; Johnson 2003), even though the national core curriculum emphasises the role of a learning community and dialogue (FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2014). Although the national core curriculum emphasises that schools are developed through participation and that “all practices are geared to supporting the goals set for the educational work” (FNBE (Finnish National Board of Education) 2014, 27), the teachers called for a more clearly shared school vision and increased teacher collaboration, for example, co-teaching. These wishes also echoed the present cultural state of the school. Although we know the complex nature of mental models, this analysis provides new insights into teachers’ collaborations in a school community. The findings suggest that teachers experience diverse challenges related to implementing a collaborative culture. The critical question is how opportunities for teacher collaboration might be bolstered, thus making diverse mental models visible and negotiable (Senge 2006; Mevorach and Strauss 2012). However, according to the teachers, some forms of teamwork are more genuinely accepted as part of their work (e.g. teacher-to-teacher collaboration). In contrast, other forms (e.g. teamwork, pedagogical discussion and planning) either do not receive the same level of approval or teachers cannot see the value of collaborative work. In this case, mental models that remain hidden and silent guide a school’s activities and thus potentially prevent change (Senge et al. 2012). This study has some limitations. First, our data show the experiences of teachers from a one-school community. Second, the research data’s collection and analysis were guided by close collaboration with the school, so we also accumulated information about the school community through other means (e.g. workshops, meetings, multidisciplinary learning module), and we made a special effort to describe only the issues the teachers raised in the interviews. Third, as 41 teachers participated in this study, the results contribute to the qualitative generalisations of teachers’ representations of mental models, and not all perspectives can be brought to light in one article. Thus, we relied on analysis-based and systematic judgment to highlight individual examples. These issues were considered by exploring mental models, which, by nature, are ever-changing (Johnson-Laird 1983; Norman 1983; Werhane 2008). During the analysis, we kept in mind that the interviewees may have had various and diverse collaboration experiences. Consequently, we had to consider how teachers’ mental models of collaboration depend on time and place and how they often remain tacit and undiscussed (Mevorach and Strauss 2012; Senge et al. 2012). 14 T. TOIKKA AND M. TARNANEN Regarding this study, for school-community, it was essential development to explore how in-service teachers make sense of the school community. Overall, reflecting on these issues is strongly related to this study’s design. Furthermore, it was important to understand the information obtained from the research for the ongoing project with the school and Creative Expertise – Bridging Pre-service and Inservice Teacher Education project. As learning community-related disciplines are strongly interrelated (Senge et al. 2012), exploring the teachers’ mental models helped us build the later steps in a project aimed at the comprehensive development of the learning community. Finally, schools are ever-changing systems that are constantly changing and driven by both environmental and internal changes. Our analysis suggests that when teachers must make a significant change in their teaching practices, adopt new skills and participate in a school’s community development, school reforms must be studied holistically in the context of developing both the in-service and the preservice phases of teacher education. We encourage similar research on in-service teachers’ mental models and collaboration, as our approach and research methods offer an opportunity to understand the functioning and change of a school as a learning community. By examining yet scarcely explored in-service teachers’ mental models, future research could address how to support teachers and school communities in advancing the principles and goals of the national core curriculum amid overlapping changes. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). Funding This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture under Grant The Ministry of Education and Culture OKM/41/523/2017. Notes on contributors Teppo Toikka is a doctoral researcher at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. His doctoral thesis explores supporting teachers’ collaboration in school communities. His research interests are teacher’s professional development and learning, school development, and promoting systems thinking in education. Mirja Tarnanen, PhD, is a professor at the Department of Teacher Education, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. ORCID Teppo Toikka http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5140-1398 Mirja Tarnanen http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4585-4822 EDUCATIONAL STUDIES 15 References Anne, G., and W. E. Cross. 2013. Mastering the Semi-Structured Interview and Beyond: From Research Design to Analysis and Publication. Qualitative Studies in Psychology. New York: New York University Press. Bernard, H. R., and W. R. Gery. 2009. 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