Values for New Zealand School Leadership - Literature Review for the Te Ariki Trust.

Value #2: Collegial obligations Definition The trust’s definition of collegial obligations is stated as the belief that principals and teachers are professionals and schools function as teams. Tied in with this value is the notion that professionals need each other to develop their competence and personal job fulfilment. This sense of collegial obligation is characterised by the giving and receiving of support from colleagues. A shift towards more collaborative cultures in schools has drawn attention to the value of both large and smaller teams of teachers meeting to share issues of practice with one another. These teams have been given a variety of names in the literature: professional learning groups, professional learning communities and quality learning circles. New Zealand’s Investing in Educational Success (IES) Initiative has added further terms such as communities of learners to this list. Regardless of the terminology for these groups, the extent of relational trust determines the effectiveness of teachers working in learning teams. How to develop the trust necessary for groups to thrive is a central question in the minds of many leaders, who, while recognising the potential value of collaborative practice, are less sure of how to ensure trusting relationships underpin all collaborative practices in their schools. It is an ideal which is harder to realise in practice.

The articles chosen to support the Trust’s second value of collegial obligations provide insights as to what is needed to develop trust. The five different country settings featured across the five selected articles provide evidence that the development of trusting relationships is a worldwide concern affecting all levels and size of collaborative groupings of teachers, leaders and learners both within the same school or when schools form coalitions or clusters. Together these studies show that regardless of the type of collaborative grouping, a belief in the potential of collective expertise prevails, for all are concerned with how to help students succeed at school.

Article 1: Hallam, P., et al. (2015) Trust and collaboration in PLC teams: Teacher relationships, principal support, and collaborative benefits.

The first article in this select literature review begins with recognition that the quality of teachers’ work is enhanced when they work in collaboration with colleagues. Therefore understandings of how professional learning communities (PLC) can achieve this aim are central to knowing how to fulfil the Trust’s second value of collegial obligations extending knowledge gained from the Ariki Projects with quality learning circles. The article provides 20