Collaborating Minds for Professional Development

Marcus Conyers wrote this 2017 article with a six-step plan for teachers to work together on what the authors call purposeful collaboration. The section below the original looks at what is known in 2026 about professional learning communities and how school leaders can set them up so they pay off.

We stand at an exceptional point in education. New findings from education, psychology, and brain research on how people learn as well as large-scale studies of the impact of effective teaching practices provide powerful insights for schooling. School systems have a tremendous opportunity to align instruction with current findings and, in so doing, to guide virtually all students to be college and career-ready. The traditional model of teachers working in isolation is unlikely to be very effective in these times when significant change in teaching practice is needed. What is needed today is for administrators to support teachers to work together in a process we call purposeful collaboration. Over the last 17 years, we have facilitated such an approach and share some ideas for implementation based on our work with thousands of educators.

Capitalizing on Educators’ Combined Sea of Strengths

We call the combined knowledge and experience educators bring together collectively a powerful sea of strengths. For example, when administrators support teachers by creating formal and informal opportunities for collaborative work, teachers can tap into their collective expertise in terms of their knowledge of students, content, and instructional strategies. Everyone has much to contribute based on their experiences — and much to gain in learning from the suggestions of others. Here are some practical strategies for purposeful collaboration so that students reach higher levels of achievement. 

Strategies for Purposeful Collaboration

• Step 1: Identify a common purpose. Establish your purpose for collaborating together. For example, teachers might benefit from working together to support each other to increase student achievement.

• Step 2: Set performance goals. Having set a common purpose for collaboration, it is important to set specific performance goals. In the above example, with the purpose for collaborating being to increase student achievement, a performance goal might be to create more effective lessons.

• Step 3: Bring together team members with complementary skills. It is important to bring together groups of individuals with a common purpose who have complementary skills. In our example, with the goal of creating more successful lessons, teachers might meet in job-alike groups such as grade-level or content-specific teams. Team membership could consist of individuals who have different strengths and weaknesses in terms of their lessons. For instance, if an individual has successfully taught a particular lesson and someone needs assistance with that lesson, the former teacher can share what has worked well with the teacher who needs support. Ideally, each person would have developed complementary skills that can support someone in the group who requests assistance in that area. Individual teachers can be the champions of a particular successful teaching strategy, mastering key content, or reaching and lifting a student who finds class particularly challenging. Purposeful collaboration means that every teacher can shine among their colleagues when they share successes and be supported by the group when they need it.

• Step 4: Work together in small groups. Working in small teams often helps to get the job done most efficiently. There are many ways to contribute in small groups such as sharing ideas for teaching a lesson based on a prior success, asking for suggestions if a particular lesson was not as successful as you wish, offering support, or just listening to a colleague. Look for ways to use your initiative to enhance teamwork.

• Step 5: Learn to listen and ask. As in all forms of community, empathy and compromise are valuable skills for educators to develop as they work together to optimize student learning. Continue to cultivate the delicate art of listening carefully to the frustrations and questions shared by colleagues.

• Step 6: Celebrate working together. Purposeful collaboration with the goal of generating measurable gains in student learning can lead to opportunities for celebrating small wins as student performance improves as a result of interventions. This can support a virtuous circle of ongoing improvement.  

As educators work together for positive change in their schools and districts, the challenge can bring out each person’s best and help to break down the walls of isolation while building important professional and social capital in their place. For more on the ideas described in this article, check out Smarter Teacher Leadership: Neuroscience and the Power of Purposeful Collaboration (Teachers College Press, 2016) 

Professional learning communities in 2026: what the evidence says and how leaders make them work

Professional learning communities are groups of teachers who meet on a regular schedule to look at their own teaching and their students’ work and to improve both. Marcus Conyers describes a version of the idea above, with six steps that run from a common purpose to celebrating small wins. Professional learning communities have had years of study since then, and the findings are more mixed than their popularity suggests.

What reviews of the research conclude

An evidence summary from England’s National Institute of Teaching rates professional learning communities as promising for pupils and mixed for teachers, with a moderate strength of evidence. It defines the approach as a structured and sustained form of collaborative learning in which teachers work together to refine practice. Reported benefits for teachers include better subject knowledge, more confidence and a stronger sense of belonging. For pupils, some reviews found small gains in maths and English where the group’s work was tightly tied to performance goals, and others found no measurable effect. The summary adds that many reviews measure teacher outcomes and infer pupil learning, and that much of the evidence is based on self-report and small studies.

A March 2026 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office reaches a similar position from a different angle. Drawing on a RAND survey for 2022-23, it reports that about 67 percent of teachers said collaborative learning with other teachers improved their teaching or their students’ learning to a moderate or large extent, compared with about 44 percent for coaching and 43 percent for workshops. When the GAO looked at meta-analyses of student test scores, two of three found a positive link for collaboration, and it cautions that these are associations, not proof of cause.

What separates groups that work from groups that do not

The National Institute of Teaching summary names several conditions. Groups that are teacher-led and built from the bottom up tend to produce deeper engagement than groups that feel imposed. Leaders who create time, build trust and take part as learners make a difference. The risks it lists are also worth reading closely: competitiveness inside the group, extra workload, and reduced autonomy, especially where participation is required and not linked to teachers’ own goals. High staff turnover weakens continuity.

These findings line up with Conyers’s steps. Conyers’s first two steps, a common purpose and performance goals, correspond to the summary’s point that a shared understanding of scope keeps the group from drifting. The third step, pairing teachers with complementary strengths, matches the idea that a group works when each member has something to give and something to ask for. The fifth step, listening, is the kind of dialogue the summary describes as constructive challenge combined with respect.

Planning a professional learning community in a real school

A principal or department lead can turn the evidence into a few decisions.

1. Protect the time. The summary treats dedicated time and cover as a signal that the work is valued. A meeting squeezed into a lunch break tells staff the opposite.
2. Start from a question teachers care about. A specific problem, such as how to teach one unit that students find hard, gives the group something to test. A general aim such as improving achievement is too broad to act on.
3. Use student work. Looking at actual assignments, test results and lesson plans keeps the conversation on teaching and learning and not on opinion.
4. Decide how you will know it helped. Because the research is mixed on pupil outcomes, a group should name in advance what change in student work or results would count as progress, and check it after a term.
5. Fit the structure to the school. The summary notes that primary groups tend to be smaller and cross-subject, while secondary groups are usually organized by subject and need more deliberate scheduling.

What a teacher or a parent can take from this

For teachers, the strongest message is that membership alone does not improve teaching; the habits inside the meeting do. Bringing a real lesson that did not go well, asking a colleague for the version that worked, and agreeing what each person will try before the next meeting are the actions the evidence supports. For parents and board members, a reasonable question to ask a school is what its teacher groups work on this year and how the school will tell whether the work changed anything for students.

For more, see edCircuit’s guide to professional development for teachers.

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