Usable Knowledge How Teacher Partnerships Work New evidence of the tangible benefits of peer-to-peer, school-based skill building Posted April 6, 2016 By Bari Walsh Learn by doing — it’s a well-worn mantra, and sometimes it works. But after you’ve learned to do something, how do you learn to do it better? For teachers, who still work mostly in isolation, the risk of hitting a plateau — of doing, but not growing, or of getting stuck in a bad habit of practice — is high.But “learning by doing” can work in a more focused way when the “doing” is guided by a successful peer and structured around a particular task. A new working paper just out from the National Bureau of Economic Research has demonstrated that for teachers (and perhaps workers in many other sectors), there is a tangible value in learning from colleagues.Researchers from Brown University and the Harvard Graduate School of Education found that pairing highly skilled teachers with lower-performing colleagues at the same school, then asking them to work together for a year on specific skills, produced meaningful and lasting improvements in teacher skills and student performance.Forming Peer PartnershipsThe study, carried out with the Tennessee Department of Education, encompassed 14 elementary and middle schools and 136 teachers in Tennessee. Using data captured by that state’s intensive teacher evaluation protocol, researchers identified teachers who were weak in one (or more) of a constellation of assessed characteristics, and then matched them with teachers who were strong in corresponding areas. School principals reviewed the matches, revising them if needed, and then approached each pair and asked them to work together on improving instructional skills in the areas the low-performers needed to bolster.Principals encouraged the pairs to look at each other’s evaluation results, observe each other’s teaching, talk about strategies for improvement, and follow up with one another throughout the school year.Substantial Gains for StudentsThe study found that the program — called the Instructional Partnership Initiative — has substantial effects. Researchers found that students of low-performing teachers who’d been randomly selected to join a partnership scored 12 points higher, on average, on standardized tests than students of low-performing teachers who didn’t join a partnership.That gain is roughly equivalent to the difference between being assigned to an average teacher and a low-performing one, the researchers say. It is also at least as large as the difference in performance between a novice teacher and a 5- to 10-year veteran. And the researchers found that these improvements in teacher performance lasted and perhaps grew over the year following the experiment.A New Approach to PD?It’s easy to draw inferences about the importance of coworkers in our development on the job, but until this study, there hadn’t been much quantitative evidence of the role they play in our learning, the researchers say. They cite one earlier study that found that teachers’ performances improved when higher-performing teachers joined the faculty in the same grade. This new study is more direct in its measurement of the effects of a focused partnership between colleagues.The findings — that teachers at all levels of experience can learn new skills from peers that translate into gains for students — might help fortify a new and less costly approach to professional development.“The peer partnerships we study — a kind of one-on-one, personalized approach to on-the-job training — are designed to focus on practical, day-to-day problems,” says Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Eric Taylor, who co-authored the study with John Papay, John Tyler, and Mary Laski from Brown. “They offer as a solution to those problems the experience and advice of someone you know, someone who works under the same challenges.”Three Ways Principals Can Encourage Teacher PartnershipsBased on evaluations and your observations, identify teachers who show promise but need improvement in a given instructional area. Pair those teachers with others who are strong in corresponding areas. Ask the pairs to work together — with the specific goal of improving skills in the areas low-performers need to bolster.Encourage teacher pairs to work closely with one another, and to meet regularly — discussing each other’s evaluations, observing each other teach, talking regularly about strategies for improvement.Create the time and space for this regular collaboration; show support for the partnerships and for the benefits of peer learning.Additional ResourcesRead more about the Instructional Partnership Initiative.Read the announcement of the federal grant that helped to funded the initiative.Learn about related research by Susan Moore Johnson about the power of teacher teams.***Get Usable Knowledge — DeliveredOur free monthly newsletter sends you tips, tools, and ideas from research and practice leaders at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Sign up now. 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