Collective Teacher Efficacy: From Teacher Teams to Co-Plan to Co-Serve to Co-Learn (C3) Teams
Introduction
When groups of educators believe they can impact student learning and make a difference in students’ lives… research shows they can.
This concept, called Collective Teacher Efficacy (CTE), stands as a transformative idea in education, illustrating the collective belief of educators in their ability to positively influence student outcomes. This article explores why Collective Teacher Efficacy is more relevant than ever in today’s diverse, challenging and dynamic educational environments.
We also provide a Teacher Team Reflection Tool to help educators assess the effectiveness of their current teacher teams in relation to the research on collective teacher efficacy.
What Is Collective Teacher Efficacy?
At the heart of Collective Teacher Efficacy lies Albert Bandura’s 1970s research on self-efficacy. This research posits that one’s belief in one’s ability to succeed influences one’s actions and outcomes. In other words, confidence impacts results.
Collective Teacher Efficacy adapts this individual confidence into a group setting, where the unified strength of a teaching team becomes the driving force behind student success. Teachers’ beliefs in their personal efficacy to motivate and promote learning affect the types of learning environments they create and the level of academic progress their students achieve.
In a 1993 study, Bandura demonstrated that teachers who work together to develop a strong sense of collective efficacy in their school community can significantly contribute to children’s academic success.
Other research confirms that teams are more effective when this group of individuals shares the belief that through their unified efforts, they can overcome challenges and produce the intended results.
Collective Teacher Efficacy has been shown to improve student achievement and close gaps in learning across student differences.
More Evidence for Collective Teacher Efficacy
Bandura’s findings set the stage for further research by Roger Goddard, Wayne Hoy, and Anita Wollfolk Hoy. Together, this research trio demonstrated how collective teacher efficacy is positively associated with differences between schools in student-level achievement in both reading and mathematics.
John Hattie, Emeritus Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne and author of Visible Learning, further defined the concept of CTE in his 2008 book “Visible Learning.”
“It’s not just a growth mindset. It’s not just ‘rah-rah’ thinking. It’s not just, ‘Oh, we can make a difference!’ But it is that combined belief that it is ‘us’ that causes learning,” he wrote.
In an interview, he described collective efficacy as “teachers working together to have appropriately high, challenging expectations of what a year’s growth for a year’s input looks like.”
Hattie developed a way of synthesizing findings from 1,400 meta-analyses of 80,000 studies involving 300 million students to find out what works best in education. He ranked each influence according to its effect size, from very positive effects to very negative effects. He started with 138 influences related to learning outcomes and later added to that number.
Hattie found that the average effect size of all the influences he studied was 0.40. Therefore, he determined that the effect size needed to be .40 or above to impact learning positively.
In a stunning result, Collective Teacher Efficacy was shown to be the most powerful factor influencing student achievement, topping the list with a whopping 1.57 effect size.
- View the full list of 252 influences and effect sizes of Hattie’s research.
- Download the PDF of the Hattie research
Hattie’s meta-analysis shows that schools with high CTE levels significantly enhance student performance, regardless of students’ backgrounds or initial levels of achievement.
The study found that strong CTE encourages participants to make more effective use of the skills they already possess and share that knowledge with colleagues. As a result, students are empowered to succeed and reach for higher goals in the process. They also learn more, causing investment in academic achievement to soar. The implementation of CTE is even known to outweigh impacts such as socioeconomic status, parental involvement, and home environment.
Typical Ways Schools Attempt to Build Collective Teacher Efficacy
Most school districts believe in the benefit of teacher collaboration and employ some aspect of teacher teams to accomplish this purpose. In doing so, they attempt to strategically manage several key components to foster this collaboration.
Effective Communication
Establishing clear, shared educational goals and an understanding of what collective efficacy means within the educational context is critical to success. Create opportunities for teachers and staff to discuss what evidence of learning is observed in individual classrooms.
The implementation of any new Collective Teacher Efficacy improvement plan should align with a district’s equity goals and equity non-negotiables, which in turn align with CTE research and evidence-based practices that benefit all students.
For example, a school may set a unified goal to improve literacy rates. Creating a strategy should involve leaders and teachers collectively planning through the lens of both the equity non-negotiables and Collective Teacher Efficacy. Doing so will ensure that CTE improves and that any new practices or curriculum will support the diverse needs of all learners.
Consistent Feedback and Professional Development
Developing CTE requires regular, structured opportunities for teacher learning and feedback. Effective models include peer observation and coaching, where teachers observe each other’s classes and provide constructive feedback based on agreed-upon criteria.
Encouraging ongoing professional development, both formal and informal, ensures that teachers remain at the forefront of educational research and best practices.
Cultivating a culture where teachers feel safe to take risks and express concerns without fear of negative repercussions encourages deeper investment in collective goals.
Celebrate Success
Teachers are often motivated by the successful outcomes of their students. A 2002 study by Hoy, Sweetland and Smith found that CTE encourages individual teachers and the school community at large to achieve the shared goal of student success. As a result, students are empowered to succeed and reach for higher goals in the process. Regularly and publicly recognizing student and teacher success keeps both groups motivated and collective efficacy high.
Our Take: To Improve Collective Teacher Efficacy, Schools Must Address Broken Systems
Often, districts create teacher teams but do so on top of a broken system. Thus, while Collective Teacher Efficacy can powerfully influence student achievement, implementing it is not as simple as creating teacher teams, providing a few extra professional development workshops, or bringing in a motivational speaker.
Before we can improve collective teacher efficacy, we must first address two primary barriers in the current educational setting: ability grouping and stereotype threat.
Ability Grouping Reduces Self-Efficacy for Students and Teachers
Oppression and marginalization in education for educators and students are historical, structural, cultural, and systemic. As a result of various civil rights legislation, the student populations have become more diverse. Yet, in spite of decades of educational reform and federal mandates, as schools have become more diverse, educators – with the intention of helping – have often responded by providing special programs, ability grouping, and tracking.
Examples of Special Programs, Ability Grouping, and Tracking in Schools
These special programs, ability grouping, and tracking have set in motion a deficit-based educational system, from higher education teacher education programs to K-12 schools, that perpetuate the opportunity gaps between students.
Students who are pulled out, ability grouped, or segregated from other students for instruction are taught that they do not belong and are thus more susceptible to stereotype threat and lower self-efficacy.
Jeannie Oakes, Former Presidential Professor Emerita in Educational Equity at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education & Information Studies and author of Keeping Track, explained the problem with ability grouping:
“When you look empirically at the characteristics of children in classrooms, children are extraordinarily diverse in all sorts of ways, and if you group them on one characteristic, you’re going to have a huge amount of diversity and variation on other characteristics. So, first of all, we fool ourselves into thinking that we’ve got homogeneous groups of students. Your outcomes are very much limited by that practice. So we have a practice that’s very popular — very common — that’s based on a flawed theory and for which there’s almost no evidence of effectiveness.”
Teachers reinforce the negative effects of ability grouping by being required to label students and identify them for various interventions, thereby implying that their own teaching skills are insufficient to educate or help these types of students.
As you can see, ability grouping reduces the self-efficacy and confidence of both students and teachers, which in turn reduces teacher collective efficacy.
Stereotype Threat Harms Teacher Collective Efficacy
Because of the aforementioned segregated practices, schools have inadvertently created a dichotomic culture of stereotype threat and stereotype lift, which is experienced by both teachers and students.
Stereotype threat is a psychological phenomenon that occurs when individuals are at risk of confirming negative stereotypes about their social group.
Social psychologists Claude Steele and Joshua Aronson first introduced the concept of stereotype threat in a 1995 study. Their groundbreaking study demonstrated how performance in academic contexts can be negatively affected by the awareness that one’s group is stereotypically expected to perform poorly (see also, Steele, 2010, Whistling Vilvadi)
Stereotype lift, which refers to the performance boost that occurs when negative stereotypes are activated about another group rather than one’s own, is a related concept. Further research, building on studies of stereotype threat, identified stereotype lift as an effect. The recognition of stereotype lift helped to broaden understanding of how stereotypes can impact performance not only negatively but also positively, depending on the social dynamics at play.
“Stereotype threat – when we are reminded of one of our identities that has a negative stereotype and that could be marginalized, we perform less well.
Stereotype lift – when we are reminded of someone else’s identity that could be marginalized or has a negative stereotype, and we are not of that identity, it makes us feel better about ourselves and increases our performance
Stereotype lift and threat occurs every day in every school perpetuating societal marginalization…”
(Steele & Aronson, 1994)
In the context of education, stereotype threat and lift can significantly impact students’ performance and their educational experiences. Based on Hattie’s research, stereotype threat has a significantly negative impact on student learning.
Below is an example of stereotype threat and lift from Steele’s research:
When college students who identify as female, had to mark their identity as female before taking a math assessment for which they were well prepared, they did not perform to their potential. They experienced stereotype threat and were subconsciously reminded of a stereotype that females perform less well in math.
On that same assessment, college students who identified as male and marked their identity as male before taking the assessment performed to their potential. They experienced a stereotype lift.
To reduce stereotype threat and improve collective efficacy among students and teachers, schools must redesign and restructure the broken systems that have been in place for decades that created these dynamics in the first place.
Developing Collective Teacher Efficacy via Co-Plan to Co-Serve to Co-Learn™ (C3) Teams
The most powerful lever for developing collective teacher efficacy requires the development of Co-Plan to Co-Serve to Co-Learn (C3) Teams.
Within these teams, staff share their expertise and resources, continually building each other’s capacity to teach a diverse range of students.
The C3 Teams represent multiple classrooms at the same grade level in elementary schools. At the secondary level, the C3 Teams represent multiple sections of a grade level and subject area.
These teams also include teachers of students receiving special education services, teachers of students receiving gifted services, teachers of students receiving multi-lingual services, interventionists, and other staff as needed (e.g., school counselors). To maximize collective teacher efficacy, these teachers must always be included on C3 Teams at all times.
For example, if an elementary school has three sections or classrooms at the third-grade level, the C3 Team will co-create lessons for all three classrooms of students. At the secondary level, if Algebra 1 includes four sections, then the C3 Team will plan for the four sections.
Of course, if support teachers are fully involved on C3 Teams (e.g., teachers of students receiving special education services, teachers of students receiving gifted services, teachers of students receiving multilingual services), then the school’s structure will need to be realigned to match teacher and staff expertise with student needs at each grade level.
This realignment will then allow these specialist teachers to serve on the C3 Teams and provide services in small heterogeneous groups in the classroom, rather than educating students in special programs, low-tracked classes, or pull-out rooms.
The majority of C3 Teams meet a minimum of two times per week, for 45 minutes to an hour. Each C3 Team member must prioritize the time allocated for meetings, and meetings must not be scheduled when some members are available but others are not.
C3 Teams’ work then centers on lesson design that lifts all learners academically, emotionally, and behaviorally with the following structure:
- Research-based instructional strategies
- Identity-relevant instructional practices
- Heterogeneous small-group instruction
- Universal design for learning and backward mapping
Purposely designed to develop educator capacity across areas of expertise, C3 Teams can foster a culture of collaboration and shared responsibility for student success and thus improve Collective Teacher Efficacy.
Assessing Your Teacher Teams with C3 Teams and Collective Teacher Efficacy
We provide the following table for you to reflect on to what extent your current teacher teams reflect C3 Teams, and in so doing, are maximizing their ability to develop collective teacher efficacy.
Typical Teacher Teams |
Co-Plan to Co-Serve to Co-Learn (C3) Teams to Develop Collective Teacher Efficacy |
| Team Membership | Team Membership |
| Typically grade level teachers. Support and special teachers attend only when they can. | Included in the entirety of all meetings are teachers of students receiving special education services, teachers of students receiving gifted services, teachers of students receiving multi-lingual services, interventionists, and additional staff as needed (e.g., school counselors). |
| Team Responsibility | Team Responsibility |
| Grade-level teachers are responsible for grade-level students. Support and special teachers are responsible for “their” students. | All team members responsible for all students |
| Team Purpose | Team Purpose |
| – Examine student data to figure out how to fix students typically via ability grouping, tracking, or special pullout programs. – Decide on student accommodations after lessons have been planned. |
-Design proactive, identity-affirmative, rigorous lessons for all students in small heterogeneous groups -Use data to ask “What is it about the system that contributed to these data in the first place?” “What is it about the system can we change to improve these data?” -Individual student needs are built into the lesson design to ensure students are provided opportunities to practice needed skills, in context, throughout the entire day. |
| Teacher Collective Efficacy | Teacher Collective Efficacy |
| – Blunted when not all staff serve on teacher teams and team purpose and function further separate teacher expertise | – A natural result of all teachers developing their shared expertise through lesson design for all students |
Conclusion
Collective Teacher Efficacy is a compelling concept that promises substantial improvements in educational outcomes. Educators can rethink collaborative teaching teams toward the work of Co-Plan to Co-Serve to Co-Learn (C3) teams. Educators can then design lessons that avoid ability grouping, tracking, and pullout programs and the associated stereotype threat that accompanies these practices. Instead, educators on C3 Teams can design rigorous, identity-affirmative lessons for small, heterogenous, group instruction. In so doing, these C3 Teams can maximize the principles of Collective Teacher Efficacy and create more supportive and effective teaching environments, ultimately leading to enhanced student learning and success.
