Working Collaboratively With Teams

One of the dimensions of a professional learning community is about working collaboratively on assigned specific tasks to be done by the workers in teams. A collaborative team as defined by Hunt (2006) is a group of people with a single common goal to achieve for which all the individuals have to work. There is a genuine possibility for the group to achieve the goal. The individuals and groups perform various functions at the workplace for meaningful learning where they need to exercise some form of overall coordination to maintain focus on the common goal.

A collaborative team meeting is more than getting the members of a group together to share collected data. Jessie (2007) claimed that in a collaborative team the individuals meet to achieve a common goal in which instead of sharing data about their practices they respond to data.  Responding to data requires a sense of mutual accountability and change in practices. Sergiovanni (1994) contented that members enjoy working together, being useful to each other as they engage in interdependent work, and sharing commitments to a common good.

Learning within professional learning communities is viewed as a process of supporting and developing the capacities of a team to ensure the attainment of results which the members truly desire. The people need to be able to act together for learning which builds on personal mastery and shared vision. When teams learn together there cannot be seen only good results for the group but also the members professionally grow more rapidly.  Team learning starts with a dialogue and with the capacity of members of a team to keep assumptions apart and they enter into genuine thinking together. Working collaboratively also helps the members to recognize the patterns of interactions in teams that lessen learning.