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Position Paper 2
March 3, 2015
ED CMYR 2400
Ashley Mathisen

It Takes a Village: Working Collaboratively to Reach Student Success

It would be easy to separate the stakeholders in education according to their function. Parents,
communities, teachers, administrators, support staff, and students are all part of the educational
picture, yet their roles are all too often compartmentalised, to the detriment of students, who
require a unified team, working together to achieve their success. If the prevailing model of
separate spheres for home and school, or even classroom and guidance office could be replaced
by an effective web of collaboration, the net result would be student confidence, and, ultimately,
student achievement. A well-known African proverb states that it takes a village to raise a child.
The same is certainly true of a student. Only through collaboration, and through open
communication between all stakeholders in education, can the potential of each student truly be
met.
During my time at Madonna Catholic Secondary School, I have had the privilege of seeing
this principle in action. At Madonna, each department works together through the Student Success
Initiative (SSI) to help each student reach her full potential. At the beginning of each term, teachers
conduct a diagnostic activity to assess the baseline of knowledge and skills for each student.
Based on this diagnostic, as well as data taken from previous tests, conversations with previous
teachers, reports, and student work, each teacher develops a differentiated plan for the students in
the class. This plan involves gifted students, as well as students with formal IEPs and students with
informal, school-developed IEPs. This organisational process allows teachers to isolate the group
of students most in need of attention and guidance. After the plan has been developed, the staff of
each department meet, along with child youth workers, administration, and guidance counsellors to
monitor how the students have progressed. I was fortunate in being able to attend this meeting
with my MT, and the experience was incredibly valuable in demonstrating to me the extent to which
collaboration is fundamentally necessary to encourage students to recognise and reach their full

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potential. As I sat in a room with Social Science and English teachers, the schools principal, a
resource worker from the school board, the schools guidance counsellors, and educational
assistants, I witnessed, first-hand, how this type of co-operative environment fosters student
success. Together, all of the staff members went through the list of students most in need and
talked through each individual case, devising a plan to help each student succeed during the term
and in the future. Teachers who had taught these students in past terms discussed their
experiences with teachers currently teaching the set of students under observation. Overall, the
tone of the meeting was incredibly positive, and every educator present made a conscious effort to
speak in terms of solutions rather than problems. As an observer of this process, I could
immediately see how this collaborative environment, even though partially hidden from students,
could signal to each student that she could look to an entire team of caring adults who were
working together to make sure that she could achieve her full potential.
All too often, students who are classified as problems are pushed out of the system, sent
out of the classroom to principals offices, to guidance counsellors, or even to other schools. This
unfortunate trend gives these students the impression that their success is an impossible
eventuality, and, conversely, that their failure is a forgone conclusion. In some cases, this
damaging sense of inevitable failure is even promoted by educators who fail to live up to their
vocational responsibilities to encourage and motivate each and every student, regardless of a
teachers perception of that students background, aptitude, or family life. Even more alarming is
the fact that this entire process thrives on a lack of creative collaboration, and could so easily be
reversed if a dynamic form of co-operation replaced a jaded, laissez-faire attitude. If students,
parents, teachers, administrators, and support workers worked together to place each individual
student at the centre of a web of care, encouragement, and guidance, students could take
ownership of their own learning in a safe environment, and could feel that success was well within
their grasp.
Yet this potential solution is not without its challenges. Hollyce C. Giles presents a
fascinating deconstruction of the point at which collaboration between parents and schools fails. If
schools and teachers promote the deficit narrative of parent involvement, the result is an

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unfortunate disconnection between the home and the school, as students and parents receive the
message that the school knows best, and that education belongs solely within the walls of the
school. In this model, educators have high expectations for students, but limited or low
expectations for their parents.1 This model was prevalent in the early twentieth century, and was
gradually replaced by the model of in loco parentis, which moves away from the total exclusion of
parents, but, in doing so, maintains the message that educators, as experts in their field, provide
knowledge and opportunity, while parents receive it, passively.2 In both models, the lack of
meaningful collaboration between schools and families gives students the damaging impression
that family life is separate from school life, and that parents have no place in shaping education. In
both models, therefore, the potential for collaboration, not only within the school, but between
home and school, is limited, as parents are sidelined in the development of plans for student
success.
Giles concludes by sketching the outlines of a far more positive model of parental
involvement in the educational lives of their children. This model, the relational narrative, is
founded on community-building and inclusivity. This model, rooted in collaborative relationships,
has become the hallmark of forward-thinking educational practice in the past several decades.
What remains for the future is to extend this approach beyond the walls of the individual classroom
to include other teachers, administrators, child youth workers, support staff, and parents. Schools
and parents are in obvious partnership in the development of children and young adults. Yet the
dominant model of parent-school relationships continues to ignore this link. Educators complain
that parents refuse to answer calls from the school, or that they refuse to monitor student
assignments. The parent-school relationship then becomes crippled by blame and avoidance. If
this model could be replaced by a relational model, the outcome could be the emergence of
positive collaboration between all stakeholders in education, and the eventual progress and
success of individual students.

Hollyce C. Giles, Three Narratives of Parent-Educator Relationships: Toward Counsellor Repertoires for
Bridging the Urban Parent-School Divide, Professional School Counselling 8.3 (2005), 231.
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Giles, Three Narratives, 231.

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During the course of my final practicum I have seen how teachers and administrators at
Madonna are making every effort to live the relational model, both within the school, and outside
the walls of the school, in the home and in the community. The SSI is only one programme the
school has developed to increase collaboration for the benefit of students. As a school that was
quite recently in danger of closing due to low enrolment, Madonna has, in recent years, struggled,
perhaps more than other schools whose futures were far more secure, to adopt a forward-thinking
model of education. The gratifying result has been an increase in student enrolment, and the
creation of an open, cooperative environment, led by a staff of teachers who tirelessly work
towards the success of each individual student with energy, focus, and drive. It is easy to see at
Madonna the blueprints for the successful school of the future; an environment founded on
participation, collaboration, and conversation. As Parker J. Palmer suggests,
The hallmark of the community of truth is not psychological intimacy or political civility or
pragmatic accountability, though it does not exclude these virtues. This model of community
reaches deeper, into ontology and epistemologyinto assumptions about the nature of
reality and how we know iton which all education is built. The hallmark of the community
of truth is in its claim that reality is a web of communal relationships, and we can know
reality only by being in community with it.3
As Palmer eloquently argues, the geometric shape that best fits education is the web, rather than
the triangle. Only within a school built on a web of collaboration can a community of truth be
created and realised in full. Finally, and most importantly, it is only through interaction with a
thriving, safe, and inclusive community can students see and own their own success.

Parker J. Palmer, Chapter IV: Knowing in Community Joined by the Grace of Things, in The Courage to
Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teachers Life, (10th edn., Kindle version (San Francisco: JosseyBass, 2007), p. 5 of 20.