Impacts of School Organizational Restructuring Into a Collaborative Setting on the Nature of Emerging Forms of Collegiality

This case study tells the story of an elementary school staff on the west coast of Canada that decided to address their perceived problem of teacher isolation by transforming the internal organization of their school into a collaborative environment designed to foster collegial practices among themselves. The main guiding question of this study was: can a collaborative organizational structure facilitate and sustain a level of collegiality in which people feel safe from attack, where difficult questions are addressed, and where the status quo can be safely challenged? In this study, the transformation of organizational structure of the school elicited and molded, to an extent, the professional behaviours of members of the staff into professional collegial patterns of interactions. However, we have found that educators seemed to have made individual choices to maintain a certain degree of isolation, of privacy, shielding themselves from reflective inquiry and criticism.