Opening classroom doors to collaborative learning

Angela Brugioni

CO – Collaboration
CO - Collaboration Strategies

BROWN, D. (2014). Opening Classroom Doors to Collaborative Learning. Education Digest, 79(7), 19-22.

Brown begins by describing how most classroom teacher’s work from behind closed doors, shuttered windows, and isolated desks. And though there are scheduled observations and reviews by administrators, teachers regard these appointments with anxiety and dread because they are forced to open their doors and let someone else inside their classrooms. These behaviors need to change by opening the doors to collaboration between administrators and teachers, and also teachers with other teachers. The two best practices Brown recommends are learning walks and team teaching.

Learning walks should be planned in advance by administrators but performed unannounced to teachers. The point of the learning walk is to identify good teachers and to discover where learning and engagement are happening so they can be modeled in other classrooms. This is accomplished by first determining what constitutes good teaching. As we all have different opinions on what good teaching is (another bonus to collaboration), this needs to be discussed ahead of time and a rubric developed so that all learning environments are assessed equitably and fairly.

The other best practice for collaboration is team teaching. This idea moves beyond the practice of two teachers from different subject background combining their classes and teaching together (one perfectly nice form of team teaching), to just communicating and collaborating on lessons between science and math, or language arts and social studies so areas of study align. When this happens students begin to see the relevance of what they are learning.   


While I agree with the suggestions that Brown offers on best practices for collaboration, he also creates assumptions about why teachers are working from behind closed doors, dismissing their actions as ‘routine’ and suggesting they’ve developed a complacency and mistrust of others’ curriculum. While this is probably true for some teachers I cannot think it applies to all. I think that Brown is very passionate about this subject and is frustrated by the closed-door habits in education, as evidenced by his statement that “(i)n my experience, many teachers deem the mandatory evaluation process highly difficult to withstand because they are forced to open their doors as if those doors actually belonged to them” when in reality the classroom belong to leaners. And that’s ultimately what matters in all of this – how to collaborate so that learning is enhanced.