Thinking beyond-school improvement: Harnessing the potential of collaboration

It has become widely accepted that school improvement research, policy and practice is associated with making schools ‘better places’ for students, teachers and the wider community (Reynolds et al., 1996). More specifically, Hopkins and colleagues (1994) argued that school improvement is concerned with enhancing student outcomes by focusing on the teaching and learning process, and by nurturing the conditions necessary to promote positive school cultures. This involves building the capacity to manage change effectively by developing a critical perspective rather than “blindly accepting the edicts of centralized policies” (p. 3). In this sense the school improvement movement has tended to adopt a bottom up perspective to educational change, although during its evolution this has become less prevalent as it has moved from the margins to the mainstream, engaged more directly with policy and policy makers and attempted to scale up its efforts. Historically, with some notable exceptions most school improvement research has occurred in mature systems although the appetite for improvement in some new and emerging contexts is high. For a comprehensive review of the field see Hopkins et al. (2014). Effective school improvement is underpinned by a focus on evidence-based approaches to change and the generation of positive and sustainable relationships. Unsurprisingly, as the more recent improvement efforts have focused on moving to scale, the nature of the local and global relationships required to generate improvement has become even more demanding. This situation requires ever more sophisticated approaches to networking and collaboration and it is no coincidence that many of the East Asian systems placed near the top of international comparisons have a long tradition of collaborative approaches to teaching and continuing professional development (CPD) or McKinsey (2007) identified learning networks, collaborative planning and cross-school CPD as key features of the very best systems.